Octave Feuillet satisfied my taste for elegance. Some of his people were
not above reproach--notice the lady in "Redemption," who becomes
suddenly converted to a belief in God because her twenty-fifth lover is
suddenly restored to her. I thought that, though he was somewhat
corrupted by the influence of the Tuileries, he was socially so
admirably correct.

Everybody at this time talked of Renan. This went by me as an idle
dream, for I could never understand why anybody should take a man
seriously who was palpably wrong. To-day, when Renan's "Life of Jesus"
seems almost forgotten, it is strange to recall the fury of interest it
excited in the seventies. Louis Veuillot interested me much more than
Renan, whom I avoided deliberately because I understood that he had
attacked the Christian religion. Now, Louis Veuillot, in "Les Odeurs de
Paris" and "Les Parfums de Rome" delighted me almost beyond bounds. I
did often wonder how such a good man as Louis Veuillot could have
acquired such un-Christian use of language. When he announced that if
his wife wrote such novels as George Sand, he would hesitate to
recognize her children, it seemed to me that he had gone too far--still
it was a pleasant thing to shock the chaste Philadelphians by quoting
these trenchant words when the novels of the lady in question were
mentioned with rapt admiration.

But to come to the poets!

It was, I think, through the reading of the "Lundis" of Sainte-Beuve
that I discovered Maurice de Gu['e]rin. He almost drove my beloved Keats
from my mind. Somebody warned me against Maurice de Gu['e]rin on the ground
of his pantheism. I had been warned against the poems of Emerson on
account of their paganism; but as I had been brought up on Virgil, I
looked on pantheism and paganism as rather orthodox compared to Renan's
negation and the horrors of Calvinism. And, after all, the Catholic
Church had retained so much that was Jewish and pagan that I was sure to
find myself almost as much at home among the pagans as I was in the Old
Testament at times.

Keats and Maurice de Gu['e]rin will be always associated in my mind. I
discovered them about the same time. I had been solemnly told by an
eminent Philadelphian that Wordsworth was the only poet worth
considering, after Shakespeare, and that Keats had no intellectual value
whatever. But I was not looking for intellectual value. I mixed up the
intellect with a kind of scientific jargon about protoplasm and nat