The perfect art-form of Baudelaire’s poems makes translation of them indeed a literal impossibility.  The ‘Little Old Women,’ ‘The Voyage,’ ‘The Voyage to Cytherea,’ ‘A Red-haired Beggar-girl,’ ’The Seven Old Men,’ and sonnet after sonnet in ‘Spleen and Ideal,’ seem to rise only more and more ineffable from every attempt to filter them through another language, or through another mind than that of their original, and, it would seem, one possible creator.

[Illustration:  Manuscript signature here:  Grace King]

     MEDITATION

     Be pitiful, my sorrow—­be thou still: 
     For night thy thirst was—­lo, it falleth down,
       Slowly darkening it veils the town,
     Bringing its peace to some, to some its ill.

       While the dull herd in its mad career
     Under the pitiless scourge, the lash of unclean desire,
     Goes culling remorse with fingers that never tire:—­
       My sorrow,—­thy hand!  Come, sit thou by me here.

     Here, far from them all.  From heaven’s high balconies
     See! in their threadbare robes the dead years cast their eyes: 
       And from the depths below regret’s wan smiles appear.

The sun, about to set, under the arch sinks low,
Trailing its weltering pall far through the East aglow. 
Hark, dear one, hark!  Sweet night’s approach is near.

Translated for the ‘Library of the World’s Best Literature.’

THE DEATH OF THE POOR

This is death the consoler—­death that bids live again;
Here life its aim:  here is our hope to be found,
Making, like magic elixir, our poor weak heads to swim round,
And giving us heart for the struggle till night makes end of the pain.

Athwart the hurricane—­athwart the snow and the sleet,
Afar there twinkles over the black earth’s waste,
The light of the Scriptural inn where the weary and the faint may
taste
The sweets of welcome, the plenteous feast and the secure retreat.

It is an angel, in whose soothing palms
Are held the boon of sleep and dreamy balms,
Who makes a bed for poor unclothed men;
It is the pride of the gods—­the all-mysterious room,
The pauper’s purse—­this fatherland of gloom,
The open gate to heaven, and heavens beyond our ken.

Translated for the ‘Library of the World’s Best Literature.’

[Illustration:  Copyright 1895, by the Photographische Gesellschaft] MUSIC.  Photogravure from a Painting by J.M.  Strudwick.

MUSIC

Sweet music sweeps me like the sea
Toward my pale star,
Whether the clouds be there or all the air be free
I sail afar. 
With front outspread and swelling breasts,
On swifter sail
I bound through the steep waves’ foamy