This body of verse, to which was presently added fresh collections--_Les
Epreuves_ (1886), _Les Vaines Tendresses_ (1875), _Le Prisme_
(1886),--was welcomed by the elder Sanhedrim, and still more
vociferously and unanimously by the younger priesthood of criticism. It
pleased the superfine amateurs of poetry, it was accepted with
enthusiasm by the thousands who enjoy without analysing their enjoyment.
In 1880, to have questioned that Sully-Prudhomme was a very noble poet
would have been like challenging Tennyson in 1870, or Cowley in 1660.
Jules Lemaître claimed that he was the greatest artist in symbols that
France had ever produced. Brunetière, so seldom moved by modern
literature, celebrated with ardour the author of _Les Vaines Tendresses_
as having succeeded better than any other writer who had ever lived in
translating into perfect language the dawn and the twilight of emotion.
That Gaston Paris and M. Anatole France competed in lofty praise of the
lyrics of Sully-Prudhomme, is perhaps less remarkable than that Paul
Verlaine, whom all the younger schools still look upon as their apostle
and guide, declared, in reviewing _Les Ecuries d'Augias_, that the force
of style of Sully-Prudhomme was excelled only by the beauty of his
detail. It is needless to multiply examples of the unanimous praise
given by the divers schools of criticism to Sully-Prudhomme up to about
1890. His was, perhaps, the least contested literary glory of France.

His death startlingly reminded us that this state of things had to be
entirely reversed. It is true that the peculiar talent of
Sully-Prudhomme, being almost exclusively lyrical, scarcely survived his
youth, and that he cumbered his moon of sands with two huge and clumsy
wrecks, _La Justice_ (1878) and _Le Bonheur_ (1898), round which the
feet of the fairies could hardly be expected to trip. One must be an
academician and hopelessly famous before one dares to inflict two