assis et De
Broise, Paris, 1861), may be read with pleasure even by jealous admirers
of Gautier's success as a chronicler of the impressions made by southern
scenery.

To De Banville (he does not conceal it) a journey to a place so far from
Paris as the Riviera was no slight labour. Even from the roses, the
palms, the siren sea, the wells of water under the fronds of maiden-hair
fern, his mind travels back wistfully to the city of his love.

"I am, I have always been, one of those devotees of Paris who visit
Greece only when they gaze on the face, so fair and so terrible, of the
twice-victorious Venus of the Louvre. One of those obstinate adorers of
my town am I, who will never see Italy, save in the glass that reflects
the tawny hair of Titian's Violante, or in that dread isle of Alcinous
where Lionardo shows you the mountain peaks that waver in the blue behind
the mysterious Monna Lisa. But the Faculty of Physicians, which has, I
own, the right to be sceptical, does not believe that neuralgia can be
healed by the high sun which Titian and Veronese have fixed on the
canvas. To me the Faculty prescribes the real sun of nature and of life;
and here am I, condemned to learn in suffering all that passes in the
mind of a poet of Paris exiled from that blessed place where he finds the
Cyclades and the islands blossoming, the vale of Avalon, and all the
heavenly homes of the fairies of experience and desire."

Nice is Tomi to this Ovid, but he makes the best of it, and sends to the
editor of the _Moniteur_ letters much more diverting than the "Tristia."
To tell the truth, he never overcomes his amazement at being out of Paris
streets, and in a glade of the lower Alps he loves to be reminded of his
dear city of pleasure. Only under the olives of Monaco, those solemn and
ancient trees, he feels what surely all men feel who walk at sunset
through their shadow--the memory of a mysterious twilight of agony in an
olive garden.

"Et ceux-ci, les pales oliviers, n'est-ce pas de ces heures desolees ou,
comme torture supreme, le Sauveur acceptait en son ame l'irreparable
misere du doute, n'est-ce pas alors qu'il ont appris de lui a courber le
front sous le poids imperieux des souvenirs?"

The pages which M. De Banville consecrates to the Villa Sardou, where
Rachel died, may disenchant, perhaps, some readers of Mr. Matthew
Arnold's sonnet. The scene of Rachel's death has been spoiled by
"improvements" in too theatrical taste.