the neck, if the waist is higher and the skirt fuller, be
sure that his eagle eye will see it at an enormous distance. A regiment
passes, going perhaps to the end of the earth, throwing into the air of
the boulevards the flourish of trumpets compelling and light as hope;
the eye of Mr. G---- has already seen, studied, analyzed the arms, the
gait, the physiognomy of the troop. Trappings, scintillations, music,
firm looks, heavy and serious mustaches, all enters pell-mell into him,
and in a few moments the resulting poem will be virtually composed. His
soul is alive with the soul of this regiment which is marching like a
single animal, the proud image of joy in obedience!

But evening has come. It is the strange, uncertain hour at which the
curtains of the sky are drawn and the cities are lighted. The gas throws
spots on the purple of the sunset. Honest or dishonest, sane or mad, men
say to themselves, "At last the day is at an end!" The wise and the
good-for-nothing think of pleasure, and each hurries to the place of his
choice to drink the cup of pleasure. Mr. G---- will be the last to leave
any place where the light may blaze, where poetry may throb, where life
may tingle, where music may vibrate, where a passion may strike an
attitude for his eye, where the man of nature and the man of convention
show themselves in a strange light, where the sun lights up the rapid
joys of fallen creatures! "A day well spent," says a kind of reader whom
we all know, "any one of us has genius enough to spend a day that way."
No! Few men are gifted with the power to see; still fewer have the power
of expression. Now, at the hour when others are asleep, this man is bent
over his table, darting on his paper the same look which a short time
ago he was casting on the world, battling with his pencil, his pen, his
brush, throwing the water out of his glass against the ceiling, wiping
his pen on his shirt,--driven, violent, active, as if he fears that his
images will escape him, a quarreler although alone,--a cudgeler of
himself. And the things he has seen are born again upon the paper,
natural and more than natural, beautiful and more than beautiful,
singular and endowed with an enthusiastic life like the soul of the
author. The phantasmagoria have been distilled from nature. All the
materials with which his memory is crowded become classified, orderly,
harmonious, and undergo that compulsory idealization which is the result
of a childlike per