yet rankly vigorous charms; and he showed himself as sensitively responsive to these as he had been to the exotic charms of the East.  The influence upon his intellectual development was decisive and final.  His indebtedness to Poe, or it might better be said, his identification with Poe, is visible not only in his paradoxical manias, but in his poetry, and in his theories of art and poetry set forth in his various essays and fugitive prose expressions, and notably in his introduction to his translations of the American author’s works.

In 1857 appeared the “Fleurs du Mal” (Flowers of Evil), the volume of poems upon which Baudelaire’s fame as a poet is founded.  It was the result of his thirty years’ devotion to the study of his art and meditation upon it.  Six of the poems were suppressed by the censor of the Second Empire.  This action called out, in form of protest, that fine appreciation and defense of Baudelaire’s genius and best defense of his methods, by four of the foremost critics and keenest artists in poetry of Paris, which form, with the letters from Sainte-Beuve, de Custine, and Deschamps, a precious appendix to the third edition of the poems.

The name ‘Flowers of Evil’ is a sufficient indication of the intentions and aim of the author.  Their companions in the volume are:  ’Spleen and Ideal,’ ‘Parisian Pictures,’ ‘Wine,’ ‘Revolt,’ ‘Death.’  The simplest description of them is that they are indescribable.  They must not only be read, they must be studied repeatedly to be understood as they deserve.  The paradox of their most exquisite art, and their at times most revolting revelations of the degradations and perversities of humanity, can be accepted with full appreciation of the author’s meaning only by granting the same paradox to his genuine nature; by crediting him with being not only an ardent idealist of art for art’s sake, but an idealist of humanity for humanity’s sake; one to whom humanity, even in its lowest degradations and vilest perversions, is sublimely sacred;—­one to whom life offered but one tragedy, that of human souls flying like Cain from a guilt-stricken paradise, but pursued by the remorse of innocence, and scourged by the consciousness of their own infinitude.

But the poet’s own words are the best explanation of his aim and intention:—­

“Poetry, though one delve ever so little into his own self, interrogate his own soul, recall his memories of enthusiasms, has no other end than itself; it cannot have any other aim, and no poem will be so great, so noble, so truly worthy of the name of poem, as that which shall have been written solely for the pleasure of writing a poem.  I do not wish to say that poetry should not ennoble manners—­that its final result should not be to raise man above vulgar interests.  That would be an evident absurdity.  I say that if the poet has pursued a moral end, he has diminished his poetic force, and it would not be imprudent to wager that his work would