f my own favourite poems of Verlaine is one whose weird and
strange beauty will appeal, I fear, to few readers of these sketches;
but if I could put into words the indescribable power which it
exercises over my own mood I should be doing something to
mitigate its remoteness from normal feelings. It is a wild mad thing,
this poem--a fantasia upon a melancholy and terrible truth--but it has
the power of launching one's mind down long and perilous tides of
speculation.

It is like a "nocturne" written by a musician who has wandered
through all the cities of Europe with a company of beggar-players,
playing masques of death to the occupants of all the cemeteries. He
names the poem Grotesques; and it comes among the verses called
Eaux-Fortes, dedicated to Francois Coppee.

C'est que, sur leurs aigres guitares
Crispant la main des libertes
Ils nasillent des chants bizarres,
Nostalgiques et revoltes;

C'est enfin que dans leurs prunelles
Rit et pleure--fastidieux--
L'amour des choses eternelles,
Des vieux morts et des anciens dieux!

. . . .

Les juins brulent et les decembres
Gelent votre chair jusqu'aux os,
Et la fievre envahit vos membres
Qui se dechirent aux roseaux.

Tout vous repousse et tout vous navre
Et quand la mort viendra pour vous
Maigre et froide, votre cadavre
Sera dedaigne par les loups!

I cannot resist the feeling that where the inmost essential genius of
Verlaine is to be found is neither in his religious poems nor his
love-poems; no, nor even in his singular fantasies.

I find it in certain little evasive verses, the fleeting magic of which
evaporates, under any attempt to capture or define it, like the
perfume from that broken alabaster box from which the woman
anointed the feet of the Saviour. Such a poem is that strangely
imaginative one, with a lovely silveriness of tone in its moth-like
movements, and full of a mystery, soft, soothing and gentle, like the
whisper of a child murmuring its happiness in its sleep, which is
called Impression Fausse for some delicate reason that I, alas! lack
the wit to fathom.

Dame souris trotte
Noire dans le gris du soir
Dame souris trotte
Grise dans le noir.

On sonne la cloche,
Dormez, les bons prisonniers,
On sonne la cloche:
Faut que vous dormiez,

. . . . .

Dame souris trotte,