nk it would be scandal to consider all
infractions of moral beauty as a species of sin against
rhythm and universal prosody.

"It is this admirable, this immortal instinct of the
Beautiful which makes us consider the earth and its spectacle
as a sketch, as a correspondent of Heaven. The insatiable
thirst for all that is beyond that which life veils is the
most living proof of our immortality. It is at once by poetry
and across it, across and through music, that the soul gets a
glimpse of the splendors that lie beyond the tomb. And when
an exquisite poem causes tears to rise in the eye, these
tears are not the proof of excessive enjoyment, but rather
the testimony of a moved melancholy, of a postulation of the
nerves, of a nature exiled in the imperfect, which wishes to
take immediate possession, even on earth, of a
revealed paradise.

"Thus the principle of poetry is strictly and simply human
aspiration toward superior beauty; and the manifestation of
this principle is enthusiasm and uplifting of the
soul,--enthusiasm entirely independent of passion,--which is
the intoxication of heart, and of truth which is the food of
reason. For passion is a natural thing, even too natural not
to introduce a wounding, discordant tone into the domain of
pure beauty; too familiar, too violent, not to shock the pure
Desires, the gracious Melancholies, and the noble Despairs
which inhabit the supernatural regions of poetry."

Baudelaire saw himself as the poet of a decadent epoch, an epoch in
which art had arrived at the over-ripened maturity of an aging
civilization; a glowing, savorous, fragrant over-ripeness, that is
already softening into decomposition. And to be the fitting poet of such
an epoch, he modeled his style on that of the poets of the Latin
decadence; for, as he expressed it for himself and for the modern school
of "decadents" in French poetry founded upon his name:--

"Does it not seem to the reader, as to me, that the language
of the last Latin decadence--that supreme sigh of a robust
person already transformed and prepared for spiritual
life--is singularly fitted to express passion as it is
understood and felt by the modern world? Mysticism is the
other end of the magnet of which Catullus and his band,
brutal and purely epidermic poets, knew only the sensua