le towards my
intellectual advancement; but this--this that I had heard about so
long--not a queer phrase, not an outrage of any sort of kind, not even a
new blasphemy, nothing, that is to say, nothing but a hundred and fifty
francs. Having thus rudely, and very pikelike, knocked my nose against the
bottom--this book was, most assuredly, the bottom of the literature of
1830--I came up to the surface and began to look around my contemporaries
for something to read.

I have remarked before on the instinctiveness of my likes and dislikes, on
my susceptibility to the sound of and even to the appearance of a name upon
paper. I was repelled by Leconte de Lisle from the first, and it was only
by a very deliberate outrage to my feelings that I bought and read "Les
Poemes Antiques," and "Les Poemes Barbares;" I was deceived in nothing, all
I had anticipated I found--long, desolate boredom. Leconte de Lisle
produces on me the effect of a walk through the new Law Courts, with a
steady but not violent draught sweeping from end to end. Oh, the vile old
professor of rhetoric! and when I saw him the last time I was in Paris, his
head--a declaration of righteousness, a cross between a Caesar by Gerome,
and an archbishop of a provincial town, set all my natural antipathy
instantly on edge. Hugo is often pompous, shallow, empty, unreal, but he is
at least an artist, and when he thinks of the artist and forgets the
prophet, as in "Les Chansons des Rues et des Bois," his juggling with the
verse is magnificent, superb.

"Comme un geai sur l'arbre
Le roi se tient fier;
Son coeur est de marbre,
Son ventre est de chair.

"On a pour sa nuque
Et son front vermeil
Fait une perruque
Avec le soleil.

"Il regne, il vegete
Effroyable zero;
Sur lui se projette
L'ombre du bourreau.

"Son trone est une tombe,
Et sur le pave
Quelque chose en tombe
Qu'on n'a point lave."

But how to get the first line of the last stanza into five syllables I
cannot think. If ever I meet with the volume again I will look it out and
see how that _rude dompteur de syllables_ managed it. But stay, _son
trone est la tombe_; that makes the verse, and the generalisation would
be in the "line" of Hugo. Hugo--how impossible it is to speak of French
literature without referring to him. Let these, however, be the concluding
words: he thought that by saying everything, and saying everything