"Mais seulement il se transpose
Et passant de la forme au son,
Trouvant dans la métamorphose
La jeune fille et le garçon."

_Transpose_,--a word never before used except in musical application,
and now for the first time applied to material form, and with a
beauty-giving touch that Phidias might be proud of. I know not how I quote;
such is my best memory of the stanza, and here, that is more important than
the stanza itself. And that other stanza, "The Châtelaine and the Page;"
and that other, "The Doves;" and that other, "Romeo and Juliet," and the
exquisite cadence of the line ending "_balcon_." Novelists have often
shown how a love passion brings misery, despair, death, and ruin upon a
life, but I know of no story of the good or evil influence awakened by the
chance reading of a book, the chain of consequences so far-reaching, so
intensely dramatic. Never shall I open these books again, but were I to
live for a thousand years, their power in my soul would remain unshaken. I
am what they made me. Belief in humanity, pity for the poor, hatred of
injustice, all that Shelley gave may never have been very deep or earnest;
but I did love, I did believe. Gautier destroyed these illusions. He taught
me that our boasted progress is but a pitfall into which the race is
falling, and I learned that the correction of form is the highest ideal,
and I accepted the plain, simple conscience of the pagan world as the
perfect solution of the problem that had vexed me so long; I cried, "ave"
to it all: lust, cruelty, slavery, and I would have held down my thumbs in
the Colosseum that a hundred gladiators might die and wash me free of my
Christian soul with their blood.

The study of Baudelaire aggravated the course of the disease. No longer is
it the grand barbaric face of Gautier; now it is the clean shaven face of