hanted me; and then the indescribably beautiful
description of the performance of _As you like it_, and the supreme
relief and perfect assuagement it brings to Rodolph, who then sees Mdlle.
de Maupin for the first time in woman's attire. If she were dangerously
beautiful as a man, that beauty is forgotten in the rapture and praise of
her unmatchable woman's loveliness.

But if Mdlle. de Maupin was the highest peak, it was not the entire
mountain. The range was long, and each summit offered to the eye a new and
delightful prospect. There were the numerous tales,--tales as perfect as
the world has ever seen; "La Morte Amoureuse," "Jettatura," "Une Nuit de
Cleopatre," etc., and then the very diamonds of the crown, "Les Emaux et
Camees," "La Symphonie en Blanc Majeure," in which the adjective
_blanc_ and _blanche_ is repeated with miraculous felicity in
each stanza. And then Contralto,--

"Mais seulement il se transpose
Et passant de la forme au son,
Trouvant dans la metamorphose
La jeune fille et le garcon."

_Transpose_,--a word never before used except in musical application,
and now for the first time applied to material form, and with a
beauty-giving touch that Phidias might be proud of. I know not how I quote;
such is my best memory of the stanza, and here, that is more important than
the stanza itself. And that other stanza, "The Chatelaine and the Page;"
and that other, "The Doves;" and that other, "Romeo and Juliet," and the
exquisite cadence of the line ending "_balcon_." Novelists have often
shown how a love passion brings misery, despair, death, and ruin upon a
life, but I know of no story of the good or evil influence awakened by the
chance reading of a book, the chain of consequences so far-reaching, so
intensely dramatic. Never shall I open these books again, but were I to
live for a thousand years, their power in my soul would remain unshaken. I
am what they made me. Belief in humanity, pity for the poor, hatred of
injustice, all that Shelley gave may never have been very deep or earnest;
but I did love, I did believe. Gautier destroyed these illusions. He taught
me that our boasted progress is but a pitfall into which the race is
falling, and I learned that the correction of form is the highest ideal,
and I accepted the plain, simple conscience of the pagan world as the
perfect solution of the problem that had vexed me so long; I cried, "ave"
to it all: lust, cruelty, slavery, and I w