Like a pike after minnows, I pursued the works of Les Jeune France along the quays and through every passage in Paris.  The money spent was considerable, the waste of time enormous.  One man’s solitary work (he died very young, but he is known to have excelled all in length of his hair and the redness of his waistcoats) resisted my efforts to capture it.  At last I caught sight of the precious volume in a shop on the Quai Voltaire.  Trembling I asked the price.  The man looked at me earnestly and answered, “A hundred and fifty francs.”  No doubt it was a great deal of money, but I paid it and rushed home to read.  Many that had gone before had proved disappointing, and I was obliged to admit had contributed little towards my intellectual advancement; but this—­this that I had heard about so long—­not a queer phrase, not an outrage of any sort of kind, not even a new blasphemy, nothing, that is to say, nothing but a hundred and fifty francs.  Having thus rudely, and very pikelike, knocked my nose against the bottom—­this book was, most assuredly, the bottom of the literature of 1830—­I came up to the surface and began to look around my contemporaries for something to read.

I have remarked before on the instinctiveness of my likes and dislikes, on my susceptibility to the sound of and even to the appearance of a name upon paper.  I was repelled by Leconte de Lisle from the first, and it was only by a very deliberate outrage to my feelings that I bought and read “Les Poemes Antiques,” and “Les Poemes Barbares;” I was deceived in nothing, all I had anticipated I found—­long, desolate boredom.  Leconte de Lisle produces on me the effect of a walk through the new Law Courts, with a steady but not violent draught sweeping from end to end.  Oh, the vile old professor of rhetoric! and when I saw him the last time I was in Paris, his head—­a declaration of righteousness, a cross between a Caesar by Gerome, and an archbishop of a provincial town, set all my natural antipathy instantly on edge.  Hugo is often pompous, shallow, empty, unreal, but he is at least an artist, and when he thinks of the artist and forgets the prophet, as in “Les Chansons des Rues et des Bois,” his juggling with the verse is magnificent, superb.

    “Comme un geai sur l’arbre
      Le roi se tient fier;
    Son coeur est de marbre,
      Son ventre est de chair.

    “On a pour sa nuque
      Et son front vermeil
    Fait une perruque
      Avec le soleil.

    “Il regne, il vegete
      Effroyable zero;
    Sur lui se projette
      L’ombre du bourreau.

    “Son trone est une tombe,
      Et sur le pave
    Quelque chose en tombe
      Qu’on n’a point lave.”