Like a pike after minnows I pursued the works of Les Jeune France along
the quays and through every _passage_ in Paris. The money spent was
considerable, the waste of time vexatious. One man's solitary work (he
died very young, but he is known to have excelled all in length of his
hair and the redness of his waistcoats) resisted my efforts to capture
it. At last I caught sight of the precious volume in a shop on the Quai
Voltaire. Trembling I asked the price. The man looked at me earnestly
and answered, "A hundred and fifty francs." No doubt it was a great deal
of money, but I paid it and rushed home to read. Many that had gone
before had proved disappointing, and I was obliged to admit had
contributed little towards my intellectual advancement; but this--this
that I had heard about so long--not a queer phrase, not an outrage of
any sort of kind, not even a new blasphemy, it meant nothing to me, that
is to say, nothing but a hundred and fifty francs. Having thus rudely,
and very pikelike, knocked my nose against the bottom--this book was,
most certainly, the bottom of the literature of 1830--I came up to the
surface and began to look around my contemporaries for something to
read.

I have remarked before on the instinctiveness of my likes and dislikes,
on my susceptibility to the sound of and even to the appearance of a
name upon paper. I was repelled by Leconte de Lisle from the first, and
it was only by a very deliberate outrage to my feelings that I bought
and read "Les Poèmes Antiques," and "Les Poèmes Barbares"; I was
deceived in nothing, all I had anticipated I found--long, desolate
boredom. Leconte de Lisle produces on me the effect of a walk through
the new Law Courts, with a steady but not violent draught sweeping from
end to end. Oh, the vile old professor of rhetoric! and when I saw him
the last time I was in Paris, his head--a declaration of righteousness,