Charles Baudelaire

1821-1867
 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

The crucial figure at the beginning of modem art, the first

and perhaps the greatest of modem poets, as considerable
a critic-o£ art as well as letters-as he was a poet, Baude-
laire in an unparalleled fashion resumes the tendencies of
the past and introduces those which were to be the modem.
At times at least for the Romantic it is the passing of
beauty which is a source of anguish, and the poet recalls
youth and joy with nostalgia. Baudelaire, on the contrary,
tends to see experience as sordid, nature as inherently evil,
and it is in man's occasional transformations of experience
into art-or civilization-that he finds beauty. At the same
time Baudelaire is acutely conscious of the damage we con-
tinually do our better, our potential, selves. Man is a di-
vided being, drawn always toward both God and Satan.
The ideal and the sensual being equally potent for Baude-
laire, much of his poetry investigates the one or the other,
or attempts reconciliation of the two. Clear as the polarity
is, reconciliation becomes possible, and is a function of art,
because Baudelaire also believed in the unity of all exist-
ence' in the correspondence of all phenomena. Even oppo-
sites are functions, analogues, somehow, of each other, and
Baudelaire's vision of the world represents a contribution
to the understanding of its complexities which, given the
intensity of his creation of a view of modem man, has had
an incalculable effect, not only upon the arts, in the modem
world.
 TO THE READER
Au LecteUf

Ignorance, error, cupidity, and sin

Possess our souls and exercise our flesh;
Habitually we cultivate remorse
As beggars entertain and nurse their lice.

Our sins are stubborn. Cowards when contrite

We overpay confession with our pains,
And when we're back again in human mire
Vile tears, we think, will wash away our stains.

Thrice-potent Satan in our cursed bed

Lulls us to sleep, our spiIit overkissed,
Until the precious metal of our will
Is vaporized-that cunning alchemist!

Who but the Devil pulls our waking-stringsl

Abominations lure us to their side;
Each day we take another step to hell,
Descending through the stench, unhorrified.

Like an exhausted rake who mouths and chews

The martyrized breast of an old withered whore
We steal, in passing, whatever joys we can,
Squeezing the driest orange all the more.

Packed in our brains incestuous as worms

Our demons celebrate in drunken gangs,
And when we breathe, that hollow rasp is Death
Sliding invisibly down into our lungs.

If the dull canvas of our wretched life

Is unembellished with such pretty ware
As knives or pOison, pyromania, rape,
It is because our soul's too weak to darel
18 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

But in this den of jackals, monkeys, curs,

Scorpions, buzzards, snakes. • . this paradise
Of ruthy beasts that screech, howl, grovel, grunt-
In this menagerie of mankind's vice

There's one supremely hideous and impure I

Soft-spoken, not the type to cause a scene,
He'd willingly make rubble of the earth
And swallow up creation in a yawn.

I mean Ennui! who in his hookah-dreams

Produces hangmen and real tears together.
How well you know this fastidious monster, reader,
-Hypocrite reader, youl-my doublel my brother!

STANLEY KUNITZ

BENEDICTION
Berwdiction

When, by pronouncement of almighty powers,

The Poet appears among us in tbis tired world,
His outraged mother, racked by blasphemies,
Clenches her fists to God, who pities her:

-«Ah. I should have borne a string of vipers

Rather than suckle this foul mockery!
Damn that night of itching, short-lived pleasure
When my gaping womb conceived this miseryl

Since, of all women, you have chosen me

To be my suffering husband's black disgust,
And since I cannot fling into the fire
This stunted monster, llke a letter's lust,
 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 19

I shall make your heavy hate rebound

Upon the damned instrument of your spite,
And I shall twist this miserable tree:
It will not bud forth, stinking, a green blightl"

She swallows, thus, the froth of her bilious hate,

And, unaware of what the sky designs,
Herself prepares in the lowest pit of hell
The fires reserved for cold, maternal crimes.

However, under unseen Angel care,

The poor Child raptures in a glorious sun,
And in all he drinks and eats he finds again
His horne's red nectar and ambrosia.

He plays with the wind, converses with a cloud,

And joys in singing of the Cross and the road;
The Spirit that guards him on his pilgrimage
Weeps to see him gay, a bird in the wood.

Those he wants to love observe him through their fear

Or, emboldened by his rare tranquillity,
Goad him into wretched wails, complaints,
And use him as a test of their ferocity.

In the bread and wine intended for his mouth

They mix foul spittle, cinder, bitter ash;
Pretending fear of dirt, they throwaway
The things he uses and avoid his path.

His wife goes shouting through the public squares:

"Since he :finds beauty in me to adore,
I shall assume the pose of ancient idols
And, like them, ask to be redone in gold;

And I shall glut myself with nard, incense, and myrrh,

With genuflections, meat, and spicy wine,
To see if, even as I laugh at him,
I can usurp the homage of the divine!
20 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

And, when I tire of these impious farces,

I shall seize him in my delicate, strong hands;
And my nails, the nails of harpies, will then start
To dig a bloody pathway to his heart.

Like a young bird, trembling, fluttering in the hand,

I shall tear out that red heart from his breast,
And throw it with disdain upon the ground
To fill the belly of my favorite hound!"

Skyward, where he sees a splendid throne,

The Poet serenely lifts his pious arms,
And the vast illuminations of his lucid soul
Conceal men's pushing fury and alarms.

"Be praised, my God, who gives us suffering

Like a sovereign remedy for our impurities,
Which like the best and purest essence makes
Strong men fit for holy ecstasies!

I know that, for the Poet, you must keep

A joyous place among the holy Hosts,
And will invite him to the eternal feast
Of Virtues, Dominations, glorious Thrones.

I know that sorrow is nobility

vVhich neitber earth nor hell can ever corrode,
And that the plaiting of my mystic crown
Enlists all space and all time's pain-filled roads.

Neither the lost jewels of old Palmyra,

Nor unknown metals, nor the pearls of the sea,
As mounted by your hand, could ever compare
With this bright diadem, so beautiful and clear;

For it will be composed of purest light,

Drawn from the holy spring of primal fire,
Compared to which the splendors of our mortal eyes,
At best, are but a tarnished mirror's liel"

STEPHEN STEPANCHEV
 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 21

THE ALBATROSS
L'Albatros

Ofttimes, for diversion, seafaring men

Capture albatross, those vast birds of the seas
That accompany, at languorous pace,
Boats plying their way through bitter straits.

Having scarce been taken aboard

These kings of the blue, awkward and shy,
Piteously their great white wings
Let droop like oars at their sides.

This winged voyager, how clumsy he is and weakl

He just now so lovely, how comic and ugly!
One with a stubby pipe teases his beak,
Another mimics, limping, the cripple who could fly!

The Poet resembles this prince of the clouds,

Who laughs at hunters and haunts the storms;
Exiled to the ground amid the jeering pack,
His giant wings will not let him walk.

KATE FLORES

CORRESPONDENCES
C01'respondances

Nature is a temple from whose living columns

Commingling voices emerge at times;
Here man wanders through forests of symbols
Which seem to observe him with familiar eyes.
zz CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

Like long-drawn echoes afar converging

In harmonies darksome and profound,
Vast as the night and vast as light,
Colors, scents and sounds correspond.

There are fragrances fresh as the flesh of children,

Sweet as the oboe, green as the prairie,
-And others overpowering, rich and corrupt,

Possessing the pervasiveness of everlasting things,

Like benjamin, frankincense, amber, myrrh,
Which the raptures of the senses and the spirit sing.

KATE FLORES

THE ENEMY
L'Ennemi

My youth was no more than a dark, looming storm

Made bright here and there by transitory suns;
Thunder and rain have made such havoc of its form
That my garden scarcely shows what red fruits it had once.

So at last I have come to the Autumn of ideas,

And I must make use of the spade and the rakes
To restore the flooded ground till its form reappears
Where hollows great as tombs the delving water makes.

And who knows if the new flowers that dreaming I see

Will discover in this soil washed like sand on a bay
The mystic nutriment that would set their force free?

-0 sorrowl 0 sorrowl Time eats life away

And the Enemy in hiding who gnaws at our side
On the blood we are losing grows and is fortified.

VERNON WATKINS
 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

THE FORMER LIFE

La Vie anterieure

Long years I lived under vast porticoes

That thousand fires of ocean suns stained bright.
Their huge, straight, stately columns, at twilight,
As if in grottoes of basalt uprose.

The coursing waves, where rolled the imaged skies,

Mingled in their mysterious, solemn modes
Reverberant music, surging strophic odes,
With sunset colors Hashing on my eyes.

There dwelt I in the long voluptuous cahns

Amid those splendors, azure skies, the waves,
And bodies heavy with perfumes, nude slaves

Who fanned my forehead with great leaves of palms

And knew one care alone: that secret anguish
To fathom that made all my being languish.

DWIGHT DURLING

BEAUTY
La Beaute

Beautiful am I, oh, mortals, like a dream of stone!

And my breast, where each in his tum has been broken,
Is made to inspire a love in the poet
Eternal and mute as matter is lasting and still.

In the azure enthroned, an inscrutable sphinx,

I join a heart of snow and the whiteness of swans;
Movement I hate when it tampers with line,
And never do I weep and never do I laugh.
 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

The poets, before my insolent poses,

Borrowed it seems from the proudest of statues,
Will consume all their days in rigorous trials;

For I, to fascinate these docile lovers-

Pure mirrors in which all things shine-
Have my eyes, my wide eyes, transparent forever.

BERT M-P. LEEFMANS

POSTHUMOUS REMORSE
Remords posthume

When you shall sleep, my faithless one, under

A monument built all of gloomy marble,
And when for room and mansion you shall have
Only a false hollow, a rainy cave;

When the stone your timid chest oppressing,

And your flanks that nonchalance makes supple,
Shall keep your heart from beating and wishing,
Your feet from running their adventurous course,

The tomb, confidant of my infinite dream

(The tomb that always understands the poet),
Through the long nights when sleep is banished,

Will say to you: "Of what use, courtesan,

Not to have known what the dead were weeping?"
-And the worm will gnaw your flesh like a remorse.

BARBARA GIBBS
 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

I OFFER YOU THIS VERSE

Je te donne ces vers . ..

I offer you this verse so that if once my name

Beaches with good fortune on epochs far away
And makes the minds of men dream at the close of day,
Vessel to whose assistance a great tempest came,

The memory of you, like fables indistinct,

May weary the reader like a tympanum's refrain,
And by a fraternal and most mystical chain
Still seem as though hanging, to my lofty rhymes linked;

Accurst being to whom, from the depth of the abyss

To the height of the sky, nothing but me responds I
-0 you who like a shade whose trace none may retard,

Trample with a light foot and serene regard

The mortal dolts who judged you bringer of bitterness,
Statue with eyes of jet, great angel browed with bronze I

VERNON WATKINS

THE VIAL
Le Flacon

There are potent perfumes to which nothing

Is impervious. They penetrate glass, it is said.
Opening a little coffer come from the East,
Its lock creaking and groaning reluctant,

Or some dark dusty cupboard in a derelict house

Suffused with the acrid aroma of time,
Sometimes one finds an old reminiscent vial
From which surges vibrant a spirit returned.
z6 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

Darkling chrysalids, a thousand thoughts slumbered,

Soft in the dismal shadows throbbing,
Which loosen their wings now soaring aloft,
Azure-tinged, glazen rose, dappled with gold.

Intoxicating remembrances flutter

In that disquieted air; the eyes close; vertigo
Seizes the soul overcome and thrusts it with two hands
Toward a chasm dim with human miasma,

Pitching it to the brink of a centenary pit,

Where, scented Lazarus breaking through its shroud,
There stirs in its waking the spectral cadaver
Of an old moldering love, enticing and entombed.

Thus when I am lost to the memory of men,

When to the comer of some grim cupboard
I am tossed, old devastated vial,
Decrepit, dirty, dusty, abject, viscous, cracked,

I shall be your coffin, amiable pestilence!

Witness of your virulence and power,
Dear poison by the angels compounded, potion
Gnawing me away, 0 Ufe and death of my heart\

KATE FLORES

INVITATION TO THE VOYAGE

L'Invitation au voyage

My child, my sister, dream

How sweet all things would seem
Were we in that kind land to live together
And there love slow and long,
There love and die among
Those scenes that image you, that sumptuous weather.
Drowned suns that glimmer there
Through cloud-disheveled air
 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

Move me with such a mystery as appears

Within those other skies
Of your treacherous eyes
When I behold them shining through their tears.
There, there is nothing else but grace and measure,
Richness, quietness, and pleasure.

Furniture that wears

The luster of the years
Softly would glow within our glowing chamber,
Flowers of rarest bloom
Proffering their perfume
Mixed with the vague fragrances of amber;
Gold ceilings would there be,
Mirrors deep as the sea,
The walls all in an Eastern splendor hung-
Nothing but should address
The soul's loneliness,
Speaking her sweet and secret native tongue.

There, there is nothing else but grace and measure,

Richness, quietness, and pleasure.

See, sheltered from the swells

There in the still canals
Those drowsy ships that dream of sailing forth;
It is to satisfy
Your least desire, they ply
Hither through all the waters of the earth.
The sun at close of day
Clothes the fields of hay,
Then the canals, at last the town entire
In hyacinth and gold:
Slowly the land is rolled
Sleepward under a sea of gentle fire.

There, there is nothing else but grace and measure,

Richness, quietness, and pleasure.

RICHARD WILBUR
28 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

MUSIC
La Musique

On music drawn away, a sea-borne mariner

Star over bowsprit pale,
Beneath a roof of mist or depths of lucid air
I put out under sail;

Breastbone my steady bow and lungs full, running free

Before a following gale,
I ride the rolling back and mass of every sea
By Night wrapt in her veil;

All passions and all joys that vessels undergo

Tremble alike in me;
Fair wind or waves in havoc when the tempests blow

On the enormous sea

Rock me, and level calms come silvering sea and air,
A glass for my despair.

ROBERT FITZGERALD

THE CRACKED BELL

La Cloche fewe

It is bitter and sweet, during the Winter nights,

To listen, by the quivering and smoking hearth-log,
To the memories withdrawn that ascend in slow flights
On the carillons whose music sings out through the fog.

Thrice fortunate the bell with a vigorous throat

That, in spite of old age, alert and still robust,
Flings faithfully the challenge of its religious note,
Like a veteran campaigner keeping watch at his post.
 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

As for me, my soul's cracked, and when in gloom it longs

To people the chill air of the night with its songs,
It often befalls me that its enfeebled call

Seems a wounded man's rattle, forgotten by all

By a lake of blood under a vast heap of dead,
And who dies, without moving, in immense throes of dread!

VERNON WATKINS

SPLEEN
Spleen

When the oppressive sky weighs like a cover

On the sick spirit, in the toils of ennui,
And embracing the horizon's curve
Pours on us, sadder than nights, a dark day;
When earth becomes a humid dungeon
Where Hope like a bat strikes her timid
Wing against the walls and beats on
The decaying eeiling with her head;
\Vhen the rain spreading its immense trails
Imitates a vast prison of bars,
And a mute crowd of infamous spiders
Comes to hang its threads at the back of our brains,
Bells suddenly leap furiously,
Launching a dreadful clamor to heaven,
Like wandering spirits without a country
Who start to complain stubbornly,
-And long hearses without drums or music drag
In slow file through my soul; Hope vanquished
Weeps, and atrocious, despotic Anguish
Plants on my bowed head her black flag.

BARBAl{A GmBS
 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

HEAUTONTIMOROUMENOS
L'11 eautontimoroumenos

I shall strike you without anger

And without hate, as a butcher strikes,
As Moses struck the rock!
And from your opened eye,
To water my Sahara,
Shall How the waters of our suffering.
My desire, swelled with hopefulness,
Upon your salt tears shall swim
Like a vessel which moves to sea,
And in my heart drugged by them
Your dear sobs will sound
Like a drum beating the advance!
Am I not a dissonance
In the divine symphony
Thanks to the hungry Irony
Which shakes me and which tears me?
It is in my voice, screeching!
It is my very blood, black poison!
I am the hateful mirror
Where the Fury scans herself!
I am the wound and the knife!
I am the blow and the cheek!
I am the limbs and the wheel,
And condemned and executioner!
I am the vampire of my heart:
One of the lost forever,
Condemned to etemallaughter
And who can never smile again.

BERT M-P. LEEFMANS

 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 31

LANDSCAPE
Paysage

I want, the more chastely to compose my verse,

To sleep close to the sky, like the astrologers,
And, neighbor of steeples, as I dream, to attend
To their grave anthems carried away by the wind.
Chin in hands, from the height of my garret 111 discern
The workshop that sings and that gossips in turn,
The pipe-stacks, the steeples, those masts of the city,
And the great skies that foster dreams of eternity.

It is sweet, through the mists, to see begin to glow

The star in azure dark, the lamp at the window,
The rivers of coal-smoke ascending to the height
And the moon with enchantment spending her pale light.
I shall witness the Springs, the Summers, the Falls;
And when Winter comes with monotonous snowfalls
1 shall close all around me shutters and lattices
To build into the night my fairy palaces.

Then I'll dream of horizons the blue of heaven controls,

Of gardens, fountains weeping in alabaster bowls,
Of kisses, of birds singing morning and eve,
And of all that's most childlike the Idyll has to give.
The tumult at my window vainly raging grotesque
Shall not cause me to lift my forehead from my desk;
For 1 shall be absorbed in that exquisitely still
Delight of evoking the Spring with my will,
Of wresting a sun from my own heart and in calm
Drawing from my burning thoughts an atmosphere of balm.

VERNON WATKINS
 CBARL'ES BAUDELAIRE

THE SWAN
Le Cygne
To Victor Hugo
I

Andromache, I think of you! -This little stream,

Poor wretched mirror resplendent once
With all the grandeur of your widows grief,
This deceptive SimO!S,. heightened with your tears,

Has suddenly, as I wandered through the new Carrousel,

Restored a fertile memory of mine.
-Old Paris is no more (the contours of a city
Change, alas I more quickly than a mortal heart);

Only in spirit do I see that regiment of booths.

That array of makeshift capitals and posts,
The turf, the rough stones greened by the puddle waters,
And, gleaming in the cases, the jumbled bric-a-brac.

There at one time a menagerie stood;

There I saw one morning, at the hour when, under cold
clear skies,
The working world awakes, and the cleaners of the streets
Hurl into the quiet air a dismal hurricane,

A swan who had escaped his cage,

And, padding the dry pavement with his webbed feet,
Trailed his snowy plumage along the scraggly ground.
Beside a waterless gutter the creature opened his beak

And tremulously bathing his wings in the dust, cried,

His heart fnll of the lovely lake of his birth:
"Water, when the deluge? Tempests, when do you
thunder?"
I can see that hapless one, strange and fatal myth,
 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 33
Toward the heavens, sometimes, like Ovid's man,
Toward the heavens ironical and cruelly blue,
Bend his thirsting head upon his convulsive neck,
As though addressing reproaches unto God!

n
Paris changes! but my melancholy alters not a whit!
New palaces, scaffoldings, stocks,
Old neighborhoods to me are all allegory now,
And now my cherished remembrances are heavier than
rocks!

Thus before this Louvre an image dejects me:

I think of my glorious swan, with his mad gestures,
Like the exiled, ridiculous and sublime,
And wrung by a truceless yearning! and then of you,

Andromache, fallen from a mighty husband's arms,

A lowly creature, beneath the hand of supernal Pyrrhus,
Bending down distraught beside an empty tomb;
Widow of Hector, alas! and wife to Helenus!

I think upon the Negress, tubercular and wasted,

Groveling in the mud, and seeking, with haggard eye,
Beyond the massive wall of mist,
Magnificent Mrica's absent coconut palms;

Of all who have lost what cannot ever be regained,

Not everl of those who drink their fill of tears
And suckle of Sorrow like a good she-wolfl
Of scrawny orphans desiccating like Howers!

Thus in the forest of my spirit's exile

An old Remembrance echoes full blast like a hom!
I think upon sailors forgotten on isles,
Of the captured, the defeated I . . . and of so many morel

KATE FLORES
34 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

THE SEVEN OLD MEN

Les Sept vieillards

To Victor Hugo

Teeming city, full of dreams, where in broad

Daylight the specter grips the passer-by I
Mystery Haws everywhere llke sap
In the ducts of the mighty colossus.

One morning when mist in the gloomy street

Made the houses seem taller, like the two
Quays of a swollen river; when-decor
In harmony with the state of my soul-

A foul, yellow fog inundated space,

I went, steeling my nerves llke a hero,
Disputing with my Soul, already weary,
Along the faubourg jarred by heavy carts.

Suddenly I saw an old man, in rags

Of the same yellow as the rainy sky,
Whose aspect would have made alms rain down
Except for the wicked gleam in rus eye.

You might have thought the pupils of his eyes

Were soaked in bile; his gaze sharpened the sleet,
And his beard of long hairs, stiff as a sword,
Jutted forward like the beard of Judas.

He was not bowed, but broken, for rus spine

Made a perfect right angle with rus leg,
So that his staff, completing his presence,
Gave rum the bearing and the clumsy gait

Of a crippled dog or three-legged Jew.

He stumbled over the snow and mud as though
He were grinding the dead under his shoes,
Hostile to life, more than indifferent.
 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 35
His like followed him: beard, eye, back, staff, rags,
Nothing distinguished, come from the same hell,
This centenarian twin, and these specters
Walked with the same step towards an unknown goal.

Of what infamous scheme was I the butt

Or what ill chance humiliated me?
Full seven times, from minute to minute,
I saw this old man multiply himself!

Let him who laughs at my disquietude

And is not seized by a fraternal chill
Ponder that, for all their decrepitude,
These seven monsters appeared eternal!

Would I, and lived, have beheld the eighth

Counterpart, ironical and fatal,
Vile Phoenix, father and son of himself?
-1 turned my back on the procession.

Enraged as a drunk man who sees double,

I went inside and closed my door, frightened,
Sick and chilled, my mind feverish and turbid,
Offended by the senseless mystery!

In vain my reason tried to take the helm;

The tempest rollicking led it astray,
And my soul danced, danced, like an old lighter
Without masts, on a monstrous, shoreless sea!

BARBARA GIBBS
 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

THE LITTLE OLD WOMEN

Les Petites vieilles
To Victor Hugo
I

In the winding folds of old capitals,

Where horror itself turns to enchantment,
Following my fatal moods, I spy on
Certain beings, decrepit and charming,

Misshapen creatures, these were once women,

Eponine or Laisl Broken or humped,
Or twisted, let us love theml they are souls.
Whipped by iniquitous north-winds they creep

In their tattered skirts and chilly fabrics,

Shaken by the din of omnibuses,
Clasping to their sides like relics tiny
Bags embroidered with flowers or rebuses;

They toddle like little marionettes,

Or drag their bodies like hurt animals,
Or dance without wishing to dance, poor bells
Swung by a pitiless demon! Broken

As they are, they have eyes that pierce like drills

And glimmer like the holes where water sleeps
At night; the divine eyes of little girls,
Who laugh with amazement at shiny things.

Have you noticed how the coffins of old

Women are often as small as a child's?
Canny Death in these like biers evinces
A bizarre and captivating taste,

And whenever I see one of these ghosts

Threading the teeming tableau of Paris,
It seems to me that the fragile creature
Is going softly towards a new cradle;
 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 37
Unless, meditating on geometry,
I conjecture from the discordant limbs
How many times the workman must vary
The shape of the box that will hold these forms.

-Their cyes are ponds made of a million tears,

Cruciblcs spangled with a cooled metal.
Mysterious eyes, invincibly charming
To one suckled by austere misfortune!

II

Enamored vestal of the old Frascati;

Priestess of Thalia, alas! whose name
The dead prompter knows; famed butterfly
Whom Tivoli once sheltered in her prime,

All intoxicate me! but of these frail

Creatures some, making a honey of grief,
Have cried to the Devotion that lent them wings:
Great Hippogriff, carry me to heaven!

One educated to adversity,

One loaded with sorrow by her husband,
One a Madonna, transpierced for her child,
All might have made a river with their tears I

III

Ah how many of them I have followed!

And one, at the hour when the sinking sun
Bloodies the sky with vermillion wounds,
Sat thoughtfully by herself on a bench

To hear one of those concerts rich with brass

With which the soldiers sometimes £lood our parks,
Pouring on golden evenings a kind of
Heroism in the hearts of burgesses.
 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

She, still straight, proud, and feeling the rhythm,

Drank in avidly the bright, warlike song,
Her eye opening like an old eagle's,
And her brow as if made for the laurel!

IV

You go your way, stoic and uncomplaining,

Threading the chaos of living cities,
Mothers of the bleeding heart, courtesans
Or saints, whose names were once on every tongue.

You who were all of grace or all of glory,

None recognizes you! A rude drunkard
Mocks you in passing with a show of love;
A wretched child runs skipping at your heels.

Ashamed to be alive, shrunken shadows,

Fearful, with bent backs you hug the walls;
And no one speaks to you, strangely destined!
Human debris ripe for eternity!

But I, who watch tenderly, anxiously

At a distance your uncertain footsteps,
As if I were your father, what marvell
Without your knowledge, taste clandestine pleasures:

I watch your novice passions unfolding;

Dark or bright, I summon up your lost days;
My heart, multiplied, revels in your vices!
My soul grows resplendent with your virtues!

o ruins! congeneric brainsI each night I

Take solemn adieu of youl Where will you be
Tomorrow, octogenarian Eves,
On whom the dreadful claw of God lies heavy?

BARBARA GIDBS
 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 39

THE LOVE OF DECEIT

L'Amour du mensonge

Whenever I see you pass, dear indolent one,

Amidst the surge of music in breaking waves,
Dangling your somnolent and slow allure,
Flaunting the ennui of your moody gaze,

When under the yellow gaslights I observe

Your pale forehead in a delicate artifice
Of torches that kindle an illusive dawn,
And your eyes like a portrait's cryptic glance entice,

I muse: How lovely she is, how fresh, bizarre I

The massive tower of memory looms above
And regally crowns her. Bmised as a fallen peach,
Her heart is ripe as her body for subtlest love.

I think of mellowed savors of autumn fruit,

A burial urn no rite of tears yet showers,
Scents that evoke the distant oases of dreams,
Caressing pillows, harvests of gathered flowers.

I know there are eyes like wells of melancholy

That hold no secrets rich as our surmise,
Jewelless coffers, locket-reliquaries,
Deeper and emptier than yourselves, 0 SkiesI

Shall not the semblance alone suffice for me,

To rejoice my heart, since Verity I forswore?
What matters stupidity or indifference?
Hail, mask, dear counterfeitl I bow, adore!

DWIGHT DURLING
 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

I HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN

Ie n'ai pas oublie . ..

I have not forgotten, neighboring the town,

Our white house, diminutive, yet where peace brims,
Its plaster Pomona and its Venus age-worn
In a mean, wasted shrubbery hiding their naked limbs,
And at evening the sun, pouring light in disdain,
Which, behind the rich window that broke up its grain,
. Seemed, great prying eye in the sky's curious urn,
To watch our slow dinners, prolonged and taciturn,
Displaying its fair, waxen rays to the verge
Of the set, frugal cloth and the curtains of serge.

VERNON WATKINS

MORNING TWILIGHT
Le Crepuscule du matin

Reveille rang out in the barracks-courts,

And the morning wind blew on the street lamps.

It was the hour when injurious dreams

Twist the brown adolescents on their pillows;
When, like a bleeding, palpitating eye,
The lamp makes a red spot against the day;
When the soul, weighted down with the dull body,
Imitates the struggle of lamp and day.
Like a tear-drenched face dried by the breezes,
The air fills with the shiver of flying things;
Man tires of writing, woman of making love.
 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 41
Here and there the houses begin to smoke.
Women of pleasure, their eyelids livid,
Slept with open mouths their stupefied sleep;
The beggar girls, dragging their thin, cold breasts,
Blow on their brands and blow on their fingers.
At that hour, with cold and frugality,
The pains of women in labor grow worse;
Like a sob sliced in two by foamy blood
A rooster's far-off cry rends the misty air;
Buildings are bathed in a sea of fog,
And deep in the poorhouses the dying
Give out their last rattle in broken hiccups.
The debauchees come home, spent with their toil.

Dawn, shivering in pink and green garments,

Comes slowly over the deserted Seine,
And, rubbing its eyes, a somber Paris
Takes up its tools like an old laborer.

BARBARA GlliBS

BEATRICE
La Beatrice

In a hard, burned land of ash, stripped of leaves,

As I groaned one day to acres of charred trees,
Wandering aimlessly, broken by my thoughts,
Which slowly sharpened daggers at my heart,
I saw descending over me, at noon,
A black cloud, storm-wide, carrying a troop
Of vicious demons, stunted like old dwarves,
Who, cruelly curious, pried into my wounds.
Proudly and coldly they examined me,
And, like pedestrians staring at a madman,
I heard them laugh and whisper savagely.
They made lewd signs and winked disdainfully:
 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

"Let us study well this caricature of man,

This shadow Hamlet, posturing as he moans,
Looking so undecided, letting the wind shake
His locks. Isn't it funny to see this rake,
This tramp, this clown, this laid-off mountebank,
Pretend, because he plays his role with wit,
To interest eagles, Howers, brooks, and crickets
In his stale recitals of imagined pain
And tries beguiling even us with shows,
Tricks that we invented long ago?"

I would have turned my sovereign head aside

(My pride could dominate, as from a mountaintop,
That cloud of demons and their disturbing cries)
Had I not seen among that obscene troop-
Ab, crime that strangely did not stagger the sunl-
The empress of my hearl, with crystal eyes,
Who, laughing with them, mocked my black distress
And pitched them, now and then, a lewd caress.

STEPHEN STEPANCHEV

A VOYAGE TO CYTHERA
Un Voyage aCythere
My heart, like a bird, ahover joyously,
circled the rigging, soaring light and free;
beneath a cloudless sky the ship rolled on
like an angel drunk with blazing rays of sun.

What is that black, sad island? -We are told

it is Cythera, famed in songs of old,
trite EI Dorado of worn-out roues.
Look, after all, it's but a paltry place.
 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 43
-Isle of sweet mysteries and festal loves,
above your waters antique Venus moves;
like an aroma, her imperious shade
burdens the soul with love and lassitude.

Green-myrtled island, fair with flowers in bloom,

revered by every nation for all time,
where sighing hearts send up their fervent praises
afloat like incense over beds of roses

or like a ringdove's endless cooing calli

-Cythera now was but a meager soil,
a flinty desert moiled with bitter cries.
And yet, half-glimpsed, a strange shape met my eyes.

It was no temple couched in shady groves

where the young priestess, lover of flowers, moves,
her body fevered by obscure desires,
her robe half opened to the fleeting airs;

but as we passed, skirting the coast so near

that our white canvas set the birds astir,
we saw it was a three-branched gibbet, high
and black-etched, like a cypress, on the sky.

Perched on their prey, ferocious birds were mangling

with frenzied thrusts a hanged man, ripe and dangling,
each driving like a tool his filthy beak
all through that rot, in every bleeding crack;

the eyes were holes, and from the ruined gut

across the thighs the heavy bowels poured out,
and crammed with hideous pleasures, peck by pcck,
his butchers had quite stripped him of his sex.

Beneath his feet, a pack of four-legged brutes

circled and prowled, with upraised avid snouts;
a larger beast was ramping in the midst
like a hangman flanked by his apprentices.
44 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

Child of Cythera, born of so fair a sky,

you suffered these defilements silently:
atonement for your impure rituals
and sins that have forbid you burial.

Ridiculous corpse, I know your pains full well.

At sight of your loose-hanging limbs I felt
the bitter-Howing bile of ancient grief
rise up, like a long puke, against my teeth;

poor wretch, so dear-remembered, in your presence

I felt each beak-thrust of those stabbing ravens,
and the black panthers' jaws-each rip and gash-
that once took such delight to grind my Hesh.

The sky was suave, and level was the sea,

yet all was blood and blackness then to me,
alasl and my heart in this parable,
as in a heavy shroud, found burial.

On your isle, Venus, I saw but one thing standing,

gallows-emblem from which my shape was hanging
God! give me strength and will to contemplate
heart, body-without loathing, without hate.

FREDERICK MORGAN
 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 45

THE VOYAGE
Le Voyage

To Maxime du Camp

To the child, in love with maps and pictures,

The universe is vast as his appetite.
Ah how immense the world is by lamplightl
How small the world is in recollection I

One morning we set out, our brains full of fire,

Our hearts swollen with rancor and harsh longing,
And we go, following the wave's rhythm,
Cradling our infinite on the seas' finite:

Some are glad to leave a squalid birthplace,

Or their abhorred cradles; some, astrologers
Drowned in a woman's eyes, their tyrannical
Circe of the dangerous perfumes.

Not to be turned to beasts, they make themselves

Drunk on space and light and the flaming skies;
The frost that bites them, the suns that tan them,
Slowly wear away the marks of kisses.

But the true travelers are those who leave

For leaving's sake; light hearts like balloons,
They never swerve from their fatality,
And say, without knowing why: "Let us go onl"

Those whose desires have the shape of clouds,

Who dream, like a recruit of the cannon,
Of boundless, changing, unknown pleasures
Whose name the human mind has never known I
 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

We imitate-horror!-the top and ball,

Waltzing and skipping; even in our sleep
Curiosity torments and rolls us
Like a merciless Angel whipping suns.

Strange lot, in which the goal displaces itself,

And being nowhere may be anywhere!
In which Man, whose hope never Hags, goes always
Running like a madman in search of rest!

Our soul's a ship seeking its Icaria;

A voice shouts from the bridge: "Open your eyes!"
From the top, ardent and mad, another cries:
"Love • . • glory . • . happiness!" Hell is a sandbarl

Each island Signaled by the man on watch

Is an Eldorado promised by Fate;
Imagination, preparing her feast,
Sees only a reef in the dawning light.

Poor lover of chimerical countries I

Must we toss him in chains, or in the sea, this
Inventor of Americas, this drunken
Sailor whose vision poisons the abyss?

Such is the old vagrant who paws the mud

And dreams, nose in air, of dazzling Edens;
His bewitched eye beholds a Capua
All around, where the candle lights a hovel.

ill

Marvelous travelers! What noble tales

We read in your eyes profound as oceans I
Show us your chests of splendid memories,
Astounding jewels, made of wind and stars.
 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 47
We will sail without steam or canvas!
Enliven the boredom of our prisons;
Pass across our spirits, stretched like canvases,
Your memories in their frames of horizons.

Tell us, what have you seen?

IV

"We have seen stars

And billows; and we have also seen sands;
And, despite shocks and unforeseen disasters,
We were often bored, as you were here.

The sun's splendor above violet seas,

The splendor of cities in the setting sun,
Made our hearts burn with restless ardor
To plunge into a sky of seductive light.

The richest cities, the noblest landscapes,

Never possess the mysterious
Attraction of those chance makes out of clouds.
And desire kept us forever anxious.

-Enjoyment augments the strength of desire.

Desire. ancient tree that thrives on pleasure,
All the while your bark thickens and hardens,
Your branches would look more closely on the sun!

When will you stop growing, great tree, longer

Lived than the cypressP -Yet we were careful
To cull a few sketches for your album,
Brothers who think all that's exotic fair!

We bowed before idols with trunks, and

Thrones constellated with shining jewels,
And carven palaces whose fairy pomp
Would make your bankers ruinous dreams.
 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

Costumes like a drunkenness for the eyes

We say; women with painted teeth and nails,
And skilled fakirs whom the snake caresses."

And then, after that what?

VI

"0 childish brainsl

Lest we forget the most important thing,

Everywhere, without wishing to, we viewed,
From top to bottom of the fatal ladder,
The dull pageant of everlasting sin:

Woman, conceited slave, neither amused

Nor disgusted by her self-worship;
Man, hot, gluttonous tyrant, hard and grasping,
Slave of a slave, gutter in the sewer;

The hangman enjoying, the martyr sobbing,

The fete that spices and perfumes the blood;
The despot unnerved by power's poison,
The mob in love with the brutalizing whip;

A great many religions like our own,

All scaling heaven; Holiness seeking
Its pleasure in nails and haircloth, as a
Delicate wallows in a feather bed;

Babbling Mankind, drunk with its own genius,

And mad as it ever was, crying out
To God, in its furious agony:
'0 my fellow, my master, I curse theel'
 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 49
And the less stupid, bold lovers of Madness,
Fleeing the herd fenced in by Destiny,
To take refuge in a vast opiuml
-Thus the everlasting news of the whole globe."

VII

A bitter knowledge we gain by traveling!

The world, monotonous and small, today,
Yesterday, tomorrow, reflects our image:
Dreadful oasis in a waste of boredom I

Shall we depart or stay? Stay if you can;

Depart if you must. Some run, others crouch
To deceive the watchful, deadly foe, Time!
There are those, alas! who run without rest,

Like the wandering Jew and the apostles,

Whom nothing suffices, carriage or ship,
To flee that base retiary; others
Wear him out without leaving their cradles.

When at last he has his foot on our backs,

Then we'll be able to hope and cry: onl
Just as we used to set out for China,
Eyes fixed on the horizon and hair streaming,

We will embark on the sea of Darkness

With the joyous hearts of young passengers;
Listen to those charming, mournful voices
Singing: "Come this way, who desire to eat

The perfumed Lotusl Here are gathered the

Miraculous fruits your hearts hunger for;
Come and grow drunk on the strange mildness
Of this afternoon without an ending."
50 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

We know the ghost by its familiar speech;

Our Pylades stretch out their arms to us.
"To renew your heart, swim towards your Electral"
Cries she whose knees we kissed in former days.

VIll

Death, old captain, it's time to weigh anchor!

This country bores us, 0 Death! Let us set sail!
H the sea and sky are as black as ink,
Our hearts, you know well, are bursting with raysl

Pour your poison on US; let it comfort

Us! We long, so does this fire bum our brains,
To dive into the gulf, Hell or Heaven,
What matter? Into the Unknown in search of the new!

BARBARA GffiBS
 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

LESBOS
Lesbo8

Mother of the Roman games and Greek pleasures,

Lesbos, where the kisses, gay or languishing,
Burning as suns or cool as watermelons,
Are ornaments for the nights and splendid days;
Mother of the Roman games and Greek pleasures;

Lesbos, where the kisses are like fresh torrents

That cast themselves down bottomless abysses,
And run on, sobbing and cackling fitfully,
Stormy and secretive, turbulent and deep;
Lesbos, where the kisses are like fresh torrents I

Lesbos, where the Plrrynes lure one another,

Where no sigh ever went without an echo,
The stars admire you as they do Paphos,
And Venus may well be jealous of Sapphol
Lesbos, where the Phrynes lure one another,

Lesbos, island of those hot, languorous nights

That make, before their mirrors, hollow-eyed girls,
Enamored of their bodies-sterile pleasurel-
Caress the ripe fruits of their nubility;
Lesbos, island of those hot, languorous nights,

Let Plato cast up a disapproving eye;

You win pardon by the excess of your kisses,
Queen of the soft empire, friendly, noble land,
And by your ever-flowering refinements.
Let Plato cast up a disapproving eye;

You win pardon through the eternal martyrdom,

Relentless punisher of ambitious hearts,
That never lets us see the radiant smile
We have glimpsed on the shores of other skiesl
You win pardon through eternal martyrdoml
 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

Who among the Gods, Lesbos, will dare judge you,

And condemn the pale forehead of your travail,
If his gold balances have not weighed the torrent
Of tears your rivers emptied into the sea?
Who among the Gods, Lesbos, will dare judge you?

What have laws of right and wrong to do with us?

Noble virgins, pride of the archipelago,
Your religion is august as another,
And love will make mockery of Heaven and Hell!
What have laws of rig~ and wrong to do with us?

For Lesbos has chosen me, of all on earth,

To sing the secret of her virgins in Bower,
And from childhood fve known the black mystery
Of frantic laughter mingled with somber tears;
For Lesbos has chosen me, of all on earth.

Since then fve watched from the summit of Leucate,

Like a sentinel with a sure, piercing eye,
Who night and day looks out for tartan or brig,
Whose fonns tremble in the blue at a distance;
Since then fve watched from the summit of Leucate,

To learn if the sea is indulgent and good,

And if, while the rocks reverberate with sobs,
One evening there will return to pardoning Lesbos
The adored body of Sappho, who set out
To learn if the sea is indulgent and good!

Of the male Sappho, the lover and poet,

Fairer, with her mournful pallors, than Venus!
The blue eye yields the palm to the black, tarnished
By the dark circle traced by the sorrows
Of the male Sappho, the lover and poet!

Fairer than Venus standing above the world,

Pouring the treasures of her serenity
And all the radiance of her golden youth
On old Ocean, delighted with his daughter;
Fairer than Venus standing above the world!
 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 53
-Of Sappho who died the day of her blasphemy,
When, insulting the rite and the devised cult,
She let her lovely body be the pasture
Of a brute whose pride punished the impiety
Of her who died the day of her blasphemy,

And it is from that time that Lesbos has mourned,

And despite the admiration of the world
Intoxicates herself each night with the cry
Of torment that escapes from her empty shores I
And it is from that time that Lesbos has mournedl

BARBARA GffiBS

LETHE
Le Lt3tM

Come to my heart, cruel, sullen soul,

Adored tiger, indolent monster;
I would bury my trembling fingers
In the thiclmess of your heavy mane;

In your skirts laden with your perfume

I would wrap up my aching head,
And inhale the sweet, musty odor,
Like a faded flower, of my dead love.

I long to sleepl sleep sooner than live!

In sleep sweet as death I will layout
My kisses without remorse upon
Your lovely body, smooth as copper.

Naught so well as the abyss of your couch

Can swallow up my abating sobs;
Oblivion inhabits your mouth,
And Lethe oozes from your kisses.
54 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

My destiny, henceforth my delight,

I will obey like one predestined;
Docile martyr, condemned innocent,
Whose fervor excites the tormentor.

I will suck, to deaden my rancor,

Nepenthe and complaisant hemlock
At the tips of that pointed bosom,
Which has never imprisoned a heart.

BAlIBABA GmBS

EPIGRAPH FOR A CONDEMNED BOOK

1!:pfgraphe pour un livre condamne

Reader placid and bucolic,

Sober, guileless man of the good,
Fling away this saturnine book,
Orgiastic and melancholic.

Unless with Satan, wily master.

You have studied your rhetoric.
Fling it away! You will understand none of it,
Or think me hysteric.

But if you are able, unenticed,

To plunge your eye in the depths,
Read me, that you learn to love me;

Inquiring soul who suffers

And goes seeking your paradise,
Pity mel • • • If not, be damned!

KATE FLORES
 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 55

MEDITATION
Recueillement

Be wise, my Sorrow; oh, more tranquil bel

You yeamed for day's decline; it comes, is here:
Steeping the town, the darkening atmosphere
Brings peace to some, to some despondency.

While now base human multitudes obey

The torturer's lash of Pleasure, never released,
Go gathering new remorse in the slavish feast,
My Sorrow, give me your hand and come this way~

Come far from them. Now lean the departed years

In outworn robes from the balconies of sky;
Smiling Regret looks out from the waters' deeps;

The dying light under an archway sleeps;

And from the East, the long shroud trailing by-
Listen, my dear-with soft step the night nears.

DWIGHT DURLING

THE GULF
Le GoufJre

Pascal had his gulf, wandering with him.

-Alas I 'Tis all abyss-action, dream, desire,
Word I And oftentimes I sense across my hair,
Arisen all on end, the breath of Fear.

Above, below, on every side: the fathomless, the verge,

Silence, enthralling insidious space. . .
In the pith of my nights God with His knowing finger
Truceless a manifold nightmare shapes.
56 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

Sleep gapes appalling as a cave no one knows,

Suffused with impalpable horror, leading endlessly;
Through all the windows I see merely infinity,

And my being, reeling vertiginous ever,

Covets insensible nullity.
-Ahl to leave Numbers and Entities never!

KATE FLORES

AT ONE O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING

A Une Heure du matin

At last! Alone! There is no longer anything to be heard

but the rattling of a few belated and exhausted cabs. For
a few hours we shall possess silence, if not repose. At last!
The tyranny of the human face has disappeared, and I
shall suffer no longer except by myself.
At last! So it is permitted that I rest in a bath of dark-
ness! First, to double-lock the door. It seems to me that
this turn of the key will increase my solitude and strengthen
the barricades which separate me now from the world.
Horrible lifel Horrible life! Let us sum up the day: to
have seen several men of letters, one of whom asked
whether it were possible to go to Russia by land (doubt-
less he was taking Russia for an island); to have argued
amiably with the director of a review, who to each objec-
tion answered, "'We are on the side of the decent people,"
which implies that all other journals are edited by rascals;
to have raised my hat to some twenty people, of whom fif-
teen are unknown to me; to have shaken hands in the same
proportion, and this without having taken the precaution
of buying gloves; to have paid a visit, to kill time, to a little
dancer who begged me to design a Venus costume for her;
to have paid court to a theatrical director, who said upon
 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 51
dismissing me, "You might do well to speak to Z-; he is
the dullest, the stupidest, and the most famous of all my
authors; with him you might end up by getting some-
where. Talk to him and then we will see"; to have boasted
(why?) about several sordid acts I have never committed,
and to have denied like a coward a few other misdeeds
committed with joy: the offense of bragging, the crime of
respect for men; to have refused a friend an easy service
and given a written recommendation to a consummate
knave; ahl is it really well over with?
Discontented with everyone and discontented with my-
seH, I should like to redeem myseH and rebuild my pride
a little in the silence and solitude of the night. Souls of
those I have loved, souls of those I have sung, strengthen
me, support me, remove from me falsehood and the cor-
ruptive mists of the world; and you, oh, Lord my God, ac-
cord me the grace to produce a few lovely verses which
will prove to me that I am not the last of men, that I am
not inferior to those I scorn.

BERT M-P. LEEFMANS

BE DRUNK
Enivrez-vous

Be drunk, always. Nothing else matters; this is our sale

concern. To ease the pain as Time's dread burden weighs
down upon your shoulders and crushes you to earth, you
must be drunk without respite.
Drunk with what? With wine, with poetry, or with vir-
tue, as you please. But be drunk.
And if sometimes, on the steps of palaces, on the green
grass in a ditch, in the dreary solitude of your room, you
should wake and :find your drunkenness haH over or fully
gone, ask of wind or wave, of star or bird or clock, ask of
all that Hies, of all that sighs, moves, sings, or speaks, ask
them what time it is; and wind, wave, star, bird, or clock
 CRARLES BAUDELAIRE

will answer: "It is time to be drunk! To throw off the chains

and martyrdom of Time, be drunk; be drunk eternally!
With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you please."

WILLIAM M. DAVIS

ANYWHERE OUT OF THE WORLD

Anywhere Out of the World

This life is a hospital where every patient longs desper-

ately to change his bed. This one would like to suffer op-
posite the stove, and that one is sure he would get well if
placed by the window.
Somehow I get the feeling that I should be better else-
where than where I am, and this question of moving is one
which I am always discussing with my soul.
"Tell me, poor chilled soul, how would you like to live
in Lisbon? It must be warm there, and you could bask in
the sun as blissfully as a lizard. The city is on the coast.
They say it is built of marble, and that its people have such
a horror of vegetation that they uproot all the trees. Here
is a landscape just suited to your taste: a landscape made
of light and minerals, with water to reflect them."
My soul makes no reply.
"Since you love tranquillity, and the sight of moving
things, do you wish to live in Holland, that heavenly land?
Perhaps you will be happy in that land whose image you
have so often admired in museums. What do you say to
Rotterdam, you who love forests of masts, and ships that
are moored at the doors of the houses?"
My soul remains silent.
"Perhaps you would prefer Batavia? There, moreover, we
would find the wit of Europe wedded to the beauty of the
tropics. Not a word. Can my soul be dead?
"Have you sunk into so deep a stupor that you find satis-
faction only in your unhappiness? If such is the case, let
us Hee to those lands in the likeness of Death. I know just
 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 59
the place, poor soull We shall pack our bags for Tomeo.
Let us go even farther, to the utmost limits of the Baltic;
farther still, from life, if possible; let us set up housekeeping
at the Pole. There the sun all but grazes the earth obliquely,
and the slow alternations of light and night make variety
impossible and increase that monotony which is the other
half of nothingness. There we can bathe deep in darkness,
while sometimes, for our diversion. the Aurora Borealis will
send up its rosy sheafs, like reflection of the fireworks of
Hem"
Finally, my soul explodes. crying: ..Anywherel Any-
where! As long as it be out of this worldl"

WILLIAM M. DAVIS