colours to each other respond.

And scents there are, like infant's flesh as chaste,
As sweet as oboes, and as meadows fair,
And others, proud, corrupted, rich and vast,

Which have the expansion of infinity,
Like amber, musk and frankincense and myrrh,
That sing the soul's and senses' ecstasy.

The Sick Muse

Alas—my poor Muse—what aileth thee now?
Thine eyes are bedimmed with the visions of Night,
And silent and cold—I perceive on thy brow
In their turns—Despair and Madness alight.

A succubus green, or a hobgoblin red,
Has it poured o'er thee Horror and Love from its urn?
Or the Nightmare with masterful bearing hath led
Thee to drown in the depths of some magic Minturne?

I wish, as the health-giving fragrance I cull,
That thy breast with strong thoughts could for ever be full,
And that rhymthmic'ly flowing—thy Christian blood

Could resemble the olden-time metrical-flood,
Where each in his turn reigned the father of Rhymes
Phoebus—and Pan, lord of Harvest-times.

The Venal Muse

Oh Muse of my heart—so fond of palaces old,
Wilt have—when New Year speeds its wintry blast,
Amid those tedious nights, with snow o'ercast,
A log to warm thy feet, benumbed with cold?

Wilt thou thy marbled shoulders then revive
With nightly rays that through thy shutters peep?
And—void thy purse and void thy palace—reap
A golden hoard within some azure hive?

Thou must, to earn thy daily bread, each night,
Suspend the censer like an acolyte,
Te-Deums sing, with sanctimonious ease,

Or as a famished mountebank, with jokes obscene
Essay to lull the vulgar rabble's spleen;
Thy laughter soaked in tears which no one sees.

The Evil Monk

The cloisters old, expounded on their walls
With paintings, the Beatic Verity,
The which—adorning their religious halls,
Enriched the frigidness of their Austerity.

In days when Christian seeds bloomed o'er the land,
Full many a noble monk unknown to-day,
Upon the field of tombs would take his stand,
Exalting Death in rude and simple way.

My soul is a tomb where—bad monk that I be—
I dwell and search its depths from all eternity,
And nought bedecks the walls of the odious spot.

Oh sluggard monk! when shall I glean aright
From the living spectacle of my bitter lot,
To mold my handywork and mine eyes' Delight?

The Enemy

My childhood was nought but a ravaging storm,
Enlivened at times by a brilliant sun;
The rain and the winds wrought such havoc and harm
That of buds on my plot there remains hardly one.

Behold now the Fall of ideas I have reached,
And the shovel and rake one must therefore resume,
In collecting the turf, inundated and breached,
Where the waters dug trenches as deep as a tomb.

And yet these new blossoms, for which I craved,
Will they find in this earth—like a shore that is laved—
The mystical fuel which vigour imparts?

Oh misery!—Time devours our lives,
And the enemy black, which consumeth our hearts
On the blood of our bodies, increases and thrives!

Ill Luck

This heavy burden to uplift,
O Sysiphus, thy pluck is required!
And even though the heart aspired,
Art is long and Time is swift.

Afar from sepulchres renowned,
To a graveyard, quite apart,
Like a broken drum, my heart,
Beats the funeral marches' sound.

Many a buried jewel sleeps
In the long-forgotten deeps,
Far from mattock and from sound;

Many a flower wafts aloft
Its perfumes, like a secret soft,
Within the solitudes, profound.

Interior Life

A long while I dwelt beneath vast porticoes,
While the ocean-suns bathed with a thousand fires,
And which with their great and majestic spires,
At eventide looked like basaltic grottoes.

The billows, in rolling depictured the skies,
And mingled, in solemn and mystical strain,
The all-mighteous chords of their luscious refrain
With the sun-set's colours reflexed in mine eyes.

It is there that I lived in exalted calm,
In the midst of the azure, the splendour, the waves,
While pregnant with perfumes, naked slaves

Refreshed my forehead with branches of palm,
Whose gentle and only care was to know
The secret that caused me to languish so.

Man and the Sea

Free man! the sea is to thee ever dear!
The sea is thy mirror, thou regardest thy soul
In its mighteous waves that unendingly roll,
And thy spirit is yet not a chasm less drear.

Thou delight'st to plunge deep in thine image down;
Thou tak'st it with eyes and with arms in embrace,
And at times thine own inward voice would'st efface
With the sound of its savage ungovernable moan.

You are both of you, sombre, secretive and deep:
Oh mortal, thy depths are foraye unexplored,
Oh sea—no one knoweth thy dazzling hoard,
You both are so jealous your secrets to keep!

And endless ages have wandered by,
Yet still without pity or mercy you fight,
So mighty in plunder and death your delight:
Oh wrestlers! so constant in enmity!

Beauty

I am lovely, O mortals, like a dream of stone,
And my bosom, where each one gets bruised in turn,
To inspire the love of a poet is prone,
Like matter eternally silent and stern.

As an unfathomed sphinx, enthroned by the Nile,
My heart a swan's whiteness with granite combines,
And I hate every movement, displacing the lines,
And never I weep and never I smile.

The poets in front of mine attitudes fine
(Which the proudest of monuments seem to implant),
To studies profound all their moments assign,

For I have all these docile swains to enchant—
Two mirrors, which Beauty in all things ignite:
Mine eyes, my large eyes, of eternal Light!

The Ideal

It could ne'er be those beauties of ivory vignettes;
The varied display of a worthless age,
Nor puppet-like figures with castonets,
That ever an heart like mine could engage.

I leave to Gavarni, that poet of chlorosis,
His hospital-beauties in troups that whirl,
For I cannot discover amid his pale roses
A flower to resemble my scarlet ideal.

Since, what for this fathomless heart I require
Is—Lady Macbeth you! in crime so dire;
—An Æschylus dream transposed from the South—

Or thee, oh great "Night" of Michael-Angelo born,
Who so calmly thy limbs in strange posture hath drawn,
Whose allurements are framed for a Titan's mouth.

The Giantess

I should have loved—erewhile when Heaven conceived
Each day, some child abnormal and obscene,
Beside a maiden giantess to have lived,
Like a luxurious cat at the feet of a queen;

To see her body flowering with her soul,
And grow, unchained, in awe-inspiring art,
Within the mists across her eyes that