melody of Mr.
Tennyson's lines, the cloudy palaces of his imagination, rose

"As Ilion, like a mist rose into towers,"

when Apollo sang. The architecture was floating at first, and confused;
while the little theatre of M. De Banville's poetry, where he sat piping
to a dance of nixies, was brilliantly lit and elegant with fresh paint
and gilding. "The Cariatides" support the pediment and roof of a theatre
or temple in the Graeco-French style. The poet proposed to himself

"A cote de Venus et du fils de Latone
Peindre la fee et la peri."

The longest poem in the book, and the most serious, "La Voie Lactee,"
reminds one of the "Palace of Art," written before the after-thought,
before the "white-eyed corpses" were found lurking in corners. Beginning
with Homer, "the Ionian father of the rest,"--

"Ce dieu, pere des dieux qu'adore Ionie,"--

the poet glorifies all the chief names of song. There is a long
procession of illustrious shadows before Shakespeare comes--Shakespeare,
whose genius includes them all.

"Toute creation a laquelle on aspire,
Tout reve, toute chose, emanent de Shakespeare."

His mind has lent colour to the flowers and the sky, to

"La fleur qui brode un point sur les manteau des plaines,
Les nenuphars penches, et les pales roseaux
Qui disent leur chant sombre au murmure des eaux."

One recognises more sincerity in this hymn to all poets, from Orpheus to
Heine, than in "Les Baisers de Pierre"--a clever imitation of De Musset's
stories in verse. Love of art and of the masters of art, a passion for
the figures of old mythology, which had returned again after their exile
in 1830, gaiety, and a revival of the dexterity of Villon and
Marot,--these things are the characteristics of M. De Banville's genius,
and all these were displayed in "Les Cariatides." Already, too, his
preoccupation with the lighter and more fantastic sort of theatrical
amusements shows itself in lines like these:

"De son lit a baldaquin
Le soleil de son beau globe
Avait l'air d'un arlequin
Etalant sa garde-robe;

"Et sa soeur au front changeant
Mademoiselle la Lune
Avec ses grands yeux d'argent
Regardait la terre brune."

The verse about "the sun in bed," unconsciously Miltonic, is in a vein of
bad taste which has always had seductions for M. De Banville. He mars a
fine later poem on Roncevaux and Roland by a similar absurdity. The
angel Michael i