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Such was Verlaine at the climax of his fame, when he had won a sure immortality; simple and childlike, and with a child’s unshamed acceptance of any money one might leave behind on the mantelpiece. He seems to have made very little by his verses. He spoke English quite well, having probably acquired it when teaching French; and he was perhaps more proud of it than of his poems. Mr. Moore says he wished to translate Tennyson. He read aloud a poem he had just written in celebration of his own fiftieth birthday. There was an allusion to a “crystal goblet.” “Ce verre-la!” he interpolated, with a humorous smile, pointing to a cheap glass with the dregs of absinthe that stood on the table. There was also an allusion to a “blue-bird,” a sort of symbol of the magic of spring, I fancy, that flutters through many of his poems. (The “plumage bleute de l’orgueil” figures in one of his very last verses.) When he arrived at this “blue-bird” he pointed to the cage with the same droll twinkle: “Cet oiseau-ci.” When I left him he stood at the head of the gloomy stone stairs to light me down, and the image of him in his red cotton nightcap is still vivid. And now he is only an immortal name. Ah, well! after the English school-rooms, the French prisons, the Parisian garrets and hospitals, the tomb is not so bad. Rien faire est doux.

In giving him place with the immortals I feel no hesitation. An English clergyman found immortality by writing one poem,–“The Burial of Sir John Moore,”–and, however posterity may appraise Verlaine’s work as a whole, he has left three or four lyrics which can die only if the French language dies, or if mankind in its latter end undergoes a paralysis of the poetic sense such as Darwin suffered from in his old age. Much of his verse–especially his later verse–is to me, at least, as obscure as Mallarme. But

Il pleut dans mon coeur
Comme il pleut dans la rue

can never be surpassed for the fidelity with which it renders the endless drip, drip of melancholia, unless it is by that other magical lyric:

Les sanglots longs
Des violons
De l’automne
Blessent mon coeur
D’une langueur
Monotone.

He is the poet of rhythm, of the nuance, of personal emotion. French poetry has always leant to the frigid, the academic, the rhetorical–in a word, to the prosaic. The spirit of Boileau has ruled it from his cold marble urn. It has always lacked “soul,” the haunting, elusive magic of wistful words set to the music of their own rhythm, the “finer light in light,” that are of the essence of poetry. This subtle and delicate echo of far-off celestial music, together with some of the most spiritual poems that Catholicism has ever inspired, have been added to French literature by the gross-souled, gross-bodied vagrant of the prisons and the hospitals! Which is a mystery to the Philistine. But did not our own artistic prisoner once sing:

Surely there was a time I might have trod
The sunlit heights, and from life’s dissonance
Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God?

Was ever more devout Catholic than Benvenuto Cellini, who murdered his enemies and counted his beads equal gusto?