dragora of healing music.

I can remember drifting once, in one of those misty spring twilights,
when even the streets of Paris leave one restless, dissatisfied and
feverishly unquiet, into the gardens of the Luxembourg. There is a
statue there of Verlaine accentuating all the extravagance of that
extraordinary visage--the visage of a satyr-saint, a "ragamuffin
angel," a tatterdemalion scholar, an inspired derelict, a scaramouch
god,--and I recollect how, in its marble whiteness, the thing leered
and peered at me with a look that seemed to have about it all the
fragrance of all the lilac-blossoms in the world, mixed with all the
piety of all our race's children and the wantonness of all old heathen
dreams. It is like Socrates, that head; and like a gargoyle on the
tower of Notre Dame.

He ought to have been one of those slaves of Joseph of Arimathea,
who carried the body of Our Lord from the cross to the rich man's
tomb--a slave with the physiognomy of the god Pan--shedding tears,
like a broken-hearted child, over the wounded flesh of the Saviour.

There is an immense gulf--one feels it at once--between Paul
Verlaine and all other modern French writers. What with them is an
intellectual attitude, a deliberate aesthetic cult, is with him an
absolutely spontaneous emotion.

His vibrating nerves respond, in a magnetic answer and with equal
intensity, to the two great passions of the human race: its passion for
beauty and its passion for God.

His association with the much more hard and self-possessed and
sinister figure of Rimbaud was a mere incident in his life.

Rimbaud succeeded in breaking up the idyllic harmony of his
half-domestic, half-arcadian menage, and dragging him out into the
world. But the influence over him of that formidable inhuman boy
was not a deep, organic, predestined thing touching the roots of his
being; it was an episode; an episode tragically grotesque indeed and
full of a curious interest, but leaving the main current of his genius
untouched and unchanged.

Paul Verlaine's response to the beauty of women is a thing worthy of
the most patient analysis. Probably there has never lived any human
person who has been more thrilled by the slightest caress. One is
conscious of this in every page of his work. There is a vibrant
spirituality, a nervous abandonment, about his poetry of passion,
which separates it completely from the confessions of the great
sensualists.

There was nothing heavy or