that.—Oh! I should like to be with you in the evening, while they were playing music, each of us leaning back against the same cushion, under the purple awning of a golden galley, in the midst of the infinite sweetnesses of the sea. Insult me. Beat me. Pay me. Treat me like a street-walker. I adore you."
The naturalism of all that is absolute; you hear the words pant and ring. Some might doubt whether her wild citations of old stories that matched her case, her sudden fantastic allusions to these at the very height of her frenzy, were as natural: I think they are. The great poet had a right if it pleased him to give his modern Mænad the thought and the tongue of a Sappho with the place and the caprice of a Cleopatra. Such a pantheress might be such a poetess; then between fancy and fury we should have our Bassarid complete, only with silk for fox-skin. And this might be; for the type of spirit can hardly be rare in any luxurious age. Perversity is the fruit of weariness as weariness is the fruit of pleasure. Charles Baudelaire has often set that theme to mystic music, but in a minor key: his sweet and subtle lyrics were the prelude to this grand chorus of the master's,
We have seen the soft fierce play of the incessant summer lightnings, between the deep sky full of passing lights and dreams, and the deep sea full of the salt seed of life; and among them Venus arising, the final and fatal flower of the mystic heaven and the ravenous sea. Looking now from west to east, we may see the moon rise, a tender tear-blinded moon, worn thin and pure, ardent and transparent.
A great poet can perfect his picture with strangely few
