The _Ugolino_, a cast, of which Rodin exhibited the first sketch in 1882, is the first sign of that preoccupation with Dante, which was to be shown in all his later work. He has read comparatively few things, and that designedly; he attaches himself strongly to a few great and profound works, and meditates upon them indefatigably. His whole symbolic imagination has been fed by Dante and his whole sensuous imagination by Baudelaire. These two gloomy poets have impressed him, and it may be said that he has absorbed them. Almost all Rodin's great symbolic figures refer to the _Inferno_, and all his little groups of lovers have the neurotic subtlety, the refined, homesick melancholy of the _Fleurs du Mal._ He has a constant need to evolve from realism to general ideas, from thought to delight or sorrow, and the ideal of Dante or of Baudelaire is strangely mingled in him with love of the antique and worship of mythology. It is, indeed, this quite individual fusion that forms the basis of his personality. The _Ugolino_, which was exhibited, first alone and then with his dying children, over whom he is crouching, haggard and already almost like a wild beast, is a tragic and powerful work. The same year Rodin produced the bust of Alphonse Legros, which has taken so high a place in England in the opinion of the best judges, and in that of the lamented W. E. Henley, whose penetrating criticism paid homage from the first to our sculptor's art. [Illustration: BELLONA _Page_ 17] [Illustration: BELLONA]