I will not turn to the book to find the exact words of this sublime vindication, for ten years I have not read the Word that has become so inexpressibly a part of me; and shall I not refrain as Mdlle. de Maupin refrained, knowing well that the face of love may not be twice seen?  Great was my conversion.  None more than I had cherished mystery and dream:  my life until now had been but a mist which revealed as each cloud wreathed and went out, the red of some strange flower or some tall peak, blue and snowy and fairylike in lonely moonlight; and now so great was my conversion that the more brutal the outrage offered to my ancient ideal, the rarer and keener was my delight.  I read almost without fear:  “My dreams were of naked youths riding white horses through mountain passes, there were no clouds in my dreams, or if there were any, they were clouds that had been cut out as if in cardboard with a pair of scissors.”

I had shaken off all belief in Christianity early in life, and had suffered much.  Shelley had replaced faith by reason, but I still suffered:  but here was a new creed which proclaimed the divinity of the body, and for a long time the reconstruction of all my theories of life on a purely pagan basis occupied my whole attention.  The exquisite outlines of the marvellous castle, the romantic woods, the horses moving, the lovers leaning to each other’s faces enchanted me; and then the indescribably beautiful description of the performance of As you like it, and the supreme relief and perfect assuagement it brings to Rodolph, who then sees Mdlle. de Maupin for the first time in woman’s attire.  If she were dangerously beautiful as a man, that beauty is forgotten in the rapture and praise of her unmatchable woman’s loveliness.

But if Mdlle. de Maupin was the highest peak, it was not the entire mountain.  The range was long, and each summit offered to the eye a new and delightful prospect.  There were the numerous tales,—­tales as perfect as the world has ever seen; “La Morte Amoureuse,” “Jettatura,” “Une Nuit de Cleopatre,” etc., and then the very diamonds of the crown, “Les Emaux et Camees,” “La Symphonie en Blanc Majeure,” in which the adjective blanc and blanche is repeated with miraculous felicity in each stanza.  And then Contralto,—­

    “Mais seulement il se transpose
      Et passant de la forme au son,
    Trouvant dans la metamorphose
      La jeune fille et le garcon.”

Transpose,—­a word never before used except in musical application, and now for the first time applied to material form, and with a beauty-giving touch that Phidias might be proud of.  I know not how I quote; such is my best memory of the stanza, and here, that is more important than the stanza itself.  And that other stanza, “The Chatelaine and the Page;” and that other, “The Doves;” and that other, “Romeo and Juliet,” and the exquisite cadence of the line ending “balcon.”