s has not dreamed of a miracle of
poetic prose, musical, without rhythm and without rhyme,
supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the
lyrical movements of the soul, to the undulations of reverie,
and to the assaults of conscience?"

Failing health induced Baudelaire to quit Paris and establish himself in
Brussels; but he received no benefit from the change of climate, and the
first symptoms of his terrible malady manifested themselves--a slowness
of speech, and hesitation over words. As a slow and sententious
enunciation was characteristic of him, the symptoms attracted no
attention, until he fell under a sudden and violent attack. He was
brought back to Paris and conveyed to a "maison de sante," where he
died, after lingering several months in a paralyzed condition,
motionless, speechless; nothing alive in him but thought, seeking to
express itself through his eyes.

The nature of Baudelaire's malady and death was, by the public at large,
accepted as confirmation of the suspicion that he was in the habit of
seeking his inspiration in the excitation of hashish and opium. His
friends, however, recall the fact of his incessant work, and intense
striving after his ideal in art; his fatigue of body and mind, and his
increasing weariness of spirit under the accumulating worries and griefs
of a life for which his very genius unfitted him. He was also known to
be sober in his tastes, as all great workers are. That he had lent
himself more than once to the physiological and psychological experiment
of hashish was admitted; but he was a rare visitor at the seances in the
saloon of the Hotel Pimodau, and came as a simple observer of others.
His masterly description of the hallucinations produced by hashish is
accompanied by analytical and moral commentaries which unmistakably
express repugnance to and condemnation of the drug:--

"Admitting for the moment," he writes, "the hypothesis of a
constitution tempered enough and strong enough to resist the
evil effects of the perfidious drug, another, a fatal and
terrible danger, must be thought of,--that of habit. He who
has recourse to a poison to enable him to think, will soon
not be able to think without the poison. Imagine the horrible
fate of a man whose paralyzed imagination is unable to work
without the aid of hashish or opium.... But man is not so
deprived of honest means of gaining heaven, that he i