hum of the black penitent's prayers, as they accompanied a criminal to execution.

'Lastly, so did the dream end, and so do I tell it,-a monk expiring on a bed of ashes used for the dying, a maiden hanged from the branches of an oak, and who struggled, and I dishevelled, whom the executioner bound on to the spokes of a wheel.'

The fifteenth drawing in Bertrand's book represents the forest of the first paragraph-a very black drawing (Ecole Flamande)-Départ pour le Sabbat.

'A dozen of them were there taking their soupe à la bière, and each had for spoon a skeleton forearm.

'The hearth was red with glowing cinders, the candles guttered in the smoke, and from the plates rose an odour of graves at springtime.

'And when Maribas laughed or wept it was like a bow groaning upon the three strings of a dislocated violin.

"But the trooper opened out upon the table by the candle light a book of magic whereon a singed fly made antics.

This fly was still buzzing when a spider with great hairy belly climbed over the edge of the magic volume.

'But already wizards and witches had flown up the chimney all riding astride, some on the broom, some on the tongs, and Maribas on the frying-pan handle.'

So much then for the macabre. There is yet another side to Bertrand's talent-that of painting Nature. In the Introduction he says:

'That part of art which is feeling was my painful conquest but that part of art which is idea still lured my curiosity. I thought I should find the complement of art in nature. Therefore I studied nature.'

Not only he studied Nature-he loved her, and his love shows itself from time to time in his work with charming effect, Who does not love?'

'Qui n'aime?' he asks at the opening of his Marquis d'Avoca.

'Qui n'aime, aux jours de la canicule, dans les bois, lorsque les gens criards se disputent la ramée et l'ombre, un lit de mousse et la feuille à l'envers du chêne?'

Chèvremorte too is full of his feeling for Nature :

'No balm at morn after the rain, nor at eve at dew time, nothing to charm the ear but the cry of a little bird in search of a blade of grass.

'Desert that no longer hears the voice of John the Baptist! Desert where no longer dwell the hermit and the dove.

'Even so is my soul a waste, where on the brink of the abyss, one hand stretched out towards life, and the other towards death, I utter a despairing sob. The poet is like the wallflower which takes root in the granite, and asks not so much for soil as for sun. But, alas, there is no more sun for me since the closing of those sweet eyes that fed my genius.'

This is Romantic too-just as is the voluntary melancholy of Encore un printemps.

'Another spring, another drop of dew cradled for a moment in this bitter calyx, to escape from it like a tear.

'O my youth! thy joys were frozen by the kisses of Time, but thy sorrows have out-lived Time whom they smothered in their bosom.

'And you who wove the silken skein of my life, O women! if in my romance some one acted as deceiver it was not I-if there have been some deceived, it was not you.

'O Spring, thou little bird of passage, singing sadly in the poet's heart and the oak's foliage.

'Another spring-another ray of May sunshine, in the world on the poet's brow, in the woods on the old oak.'

Another vivid picture is that of the storm in La Ronde sous la Cloche.

'Suddenly the thunder growled on the top of Saint John's. The enchanters vanished, struck to death, and from afar I saw their books of magic burning like a torch in the black belfry.

"This terrible light painted the walls of the Gothic church with the

red flames of purgatory and hell, and threw along the neighbouring houses the shadow of the gigantic statue of Saint John.

'The weathercocks grew rust-laden; the moon melted the pearl grey clouds, the rain only fell drop by drop from the roof-edges, and the breeze, throwing open my insecurely fastened window, flung over my pillow the jasmine flowers shaken down by the storm.'

Sainte-Beuve in his criticism of Bertrand quotes an unpublished fragment which is a very lively picture of the life in a farm near Dijon, where Bertrand took refuge from a storm one night.

'Quelles honnêtes figures dans ces rayons de toile couleur de terre. Ah! la paix et le bonheur ne sont qu'aux champs!' he exclaims. Sainte-Beuve compares this fragment to Burns's 'Cottar's Saturday Night,' and this leads us to an interesting point. We are accustomed to go to poets like Burns, or Cowper, or Gilpin when we are a little tired of the demands made on our imagination by the more exciting romantic poets, and turn for relief to simple yet lively quiet, peaceful pictures. But to find the two opposed tempers in one and the same poet, and that a poet of the French Romantic era, is indeed a striking thing. Bertrand half apologises for his sketch by comparing it with a Rembrandt picture; but the quiet temper is there, explain it away as he will.

In spite of the originality of this side of his work, it is probably by the other, the macabre and picturesque side, that Bertrand will be remembered, if remembered he is. Fame did not come to him in his lifetime, and so far he has escaped his share of posthumous glory. There is a good deal of Hoffmann in Bertrand. It lay outside the scope of this study to consider the debt of Poe to Hoffmann. Barbey d'Aurevilly said well of them, that they were 'les deux Chinois du même opium,' and there is much Poe in Baudelaire. So would we justify Bertrand's place in the category of Baudelairians.

IV

PETRUS BOREL

PETRUS BOREL is one of Baudelaire's predecessors who deserves to be very much better known than he is; he is more forgotten than Bertrand, for hitherto his work has not been reprinted and reissued in accessible form.

The first and perhaps greatest of the race of eccentrics who appear with the Romantic School was born at Lyons in 1809-one of an extremely poor family of fourteen children. He was brought up to be an architect and came to Paris to complete his studies, but he soon tired of architecture, and after trying his hand at painting in the studio of Eugène Devéria, turned to literature. He was the star of the 'Petit Cénacle' which Théophile Gautier has portrayed so well for us in his Histoire du Romantisme, a cénacle which included Théophile Gautier himself, Gérard de Nerval, Augustus MacKeat,1 Philothée O'Neddy, Jules Vabre. An important factor in Borel's ascendancy here seems to have been his startlingly picturesque appearance. Gautier called him 'the most perfect specimen of the romantic ideal.'

M. Claretie (who is the authority on Borel) has described his appearance for us. He wore

'a waistcoat à la Robespierre, on his head the conventional pointed hat with its large buckle, his hair short à la Titus, a long untouched beard-and that at a moment when no one wore it sosuperb eyes, magnificent teeth, as handsome as Alphonse Rabbé, that other révolté who was called the Antinous of Aix.'

1i.e. Maquet.

2 Théophile Dondey.

It was this appearance, so the story goes, which frightened the inhabitants of Ecouny when Borel and a friend, got up in the same manner, passed through. They were followed, arrested, and imprisoned for a few days while the necessary inquiries were made. In 1832 Borel was again arrested by the police.

'What do you want with me?' he asked. 'What have I done to be arrested?'

'Sir,' was the reply, 'pretence is useless-vous avez la démarche républicaine!'

As a matter of fact, Borel called himself a republican— but a 'lycanthrope' republican-that is his originality.

'Yes, I am a republican, but it was not the July sun that brought forth this lofty thought in me. I was a republican from my childhood, but not republican in the sense in which the lynx would understand it; my republicanism is lycanthropy. . . . If I talk of Republic it is because this word represents for me the greatest independence civilisation and association can allow us.'

Here is the Baudelairian enemy of progress.

Borel's first writings were some poems which, considering the period in which he was writing, are, of course, deeply pessimistic; but here again he is original, the despondent note rings true, he was at all events sincere.

'Comme une louve ayant fait chasse vaine,
Grinçant les dents, s'en va par le chemin,
Je vais, hagard tout chargé de ma peine,
Seul avec moi, nulle main dans ma main,
Pas une voix qui me dise—A demain ! . . .

Ma jeunesse me pèse et devient importune.

Ah! que n'ai-je du moins le calme du vieillard?

Qu'ai-je à faire ici bas? traîner dans l'infortune!
Lâche, rompons nos fers! . . . ou plus tôt ou plus tard.
Mes pistolets sont là-déjouons le hasard.

Or the rebellious pessimism of 'Doléance' :