s
obliged to invoke the aid of pharmacy or witchcraft; he need
not sell his soul in order to pay for the intoxicating
caresses and the love of houris. What is a paradise that one
purchases at the expense of one's own soul?... Unfortunate
wretches who have neither fasted nor prayed, and who have
refused the redemption of labor, ask from black magic the
means to elevate themselves at a single stroke to a
supernatural existence. Magic dupes them, and lights for them
a false happiness and a false light; while we, poets and
philosophers, who have regenerated our souls by incessant
work and contemplation, by the assiduous exercise of the will
and permanent nobility of intention, we have created for our
use a garden of true beauty. Confiding in the words that
'faith will remove mountains,' we have accomplished the one
miracle for which God has given us license."

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 o