(3) Finally, the Parnassian poetry, like most contemporary science, was
in varying degrees detached from and hostile to religion, and found some
of its most vibrating notes in contemplating its empty universe. Leconte
de Lisle offers the Stoic the last mournful joy of 'a heart seven-times
steeped in the divine nothingness',[9] or calls him to 'that city of
silence, the sepulchre of the vanished gods, the human heart, seat of
dreams, where eternally ferments and perishes the illusory
universe'.[10] Here, too, Leopardi had anticipated him.

In the ebullient genius of Carducci and Swinburne this lofty disdain for
theological illusions passes into the fierce derision of the Ode to
Satan and the militant paganism of the Sonnet to Luther, and the _Hymn
to Man_. In Matthew Arnold it became a half-wistful resignation, the
pensive retrospect of the Greek 'thinking of his own gods beside a
fallen runic stone', or listening to the 'melancholy long withdrawing
roar' of the tide of faith 'down the vast edges drear and naked shingles
of the world'; while in James Thomson resignation passed into the
unrelieved pessimism of the _City of Dreadful Night_. In all these
poets, what was of moment for poetry was not, of course, the
anti-theological or anti-clerical sentiment which marks them all, but
the notes of sombre and terrible beauty which the contemplation of the
passing of the gods, and of man's faith in them, elicits from their art.

Yet the supreme figure, not only among those who share in the
anti-Romantic reaction but among all the European poets of his time, was
one who had in the heyday of youth led the Romantic vanguard--Victor
Hugo. Leconte de Lisle never ceased to own him his master, and Hugo's
genius had since his exile, in 1851, entered upon a phase in which a
poetry such as the Parnassian sought--objective, reticent, impersonal,