Translation of Miss Katharine Hillard.

     DEATH

     Ho, Death, Boatman Death, it is time we set sail;
       Up anchor, away from this region of blight: 
     Though ocean and sky are like ink for the gale,
       Thou knowest our hearts are consoled with the light.

     Thy poison pour out—­it will comfort us well;
       Yea—­for the fire that burns in our brain
     We would plunge through the depth, be it heaven or hell,
       Through the fathomless gulf—­the new vision to gain.

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

THE PAINTER OF MODERN LIFE

From ‘L’Art Romantique’

The crowd is his domain, as the air is that of the bird and the water that of the fish.  His passion and his profession is “to wed the crowd.”  For the perfect flaneur, for the passionate observer, it is an immense pleasure to choose his home in number, change, motion, in the fleeting and the infinite.  To be away from one’s home and yet to be always at home; to be in the midst of the world, to see it, and yet to be hidden from it; such are some of the least pleasures of these independent, passionate, impartial minds which language can but awkwardly define.  The observer is a prince who everywhere enjoys his incognito.  The amateur of life makes the world his family, as the lover of the fair sex makes his family of all beauties, discovered, discoverable, and indiscoverable, as the lover of painting lives in an enchanted dreamland painted on canvas.  Thus the man who is in love with all life goes into a crowd as into an immense electric battery.  One might also compare him to a mirror as immense as the crowd; to a conscious kaleidoscope which in each movement represents the multiform life and the moving grace of all life’s elements.  He is an ego insatiably hungry for the non-ego, every moment rendering it and expressing it in images more vital than life itself, which is always unstable and fugitive.  “Any man,” said Mr. G——­ one day, in one of those conversations which he lights up with intense look and vivid gesture, “any man, not overcome by a sorrow so heavy that it absorbs all the faculties, who is bored in the midst of a crowd is a fool, a fool, and I despise him.”

When Mr. G——­ awakens and sees the blustering sun attacking the window-panes, he says with remorse, with regret:—­“What imperial order!  What a trumpet flourish of light!  For hours already there has been light everywhere, light lost by my sleep!  How many lighted objects I might have seen and have not seen!” And then he starts off, he watches in its flow the river of vitality, so majestic and so brilliant.  He admires the eternal beauty and the astonishing harmony of life in great cities, a harmony maintained in so providential a way in the tumult of human liberty.  He contemplates the landscapes of the great city, landscapes of stone