author excuses her inclusion of this poet on the ground of his great influence upon the generation of writers that has followed his. Gourmont's poetical output is small as compared with his work in other fields but it is full of sweet sound and fresh with color. Les Feuilles Mortes is hauntingly beautiful.
Henri de Régnier is a symboliste poet, an Immortal and an acknowledged master of French prose, "receiving the mantle slowly dropping from the shoulders of Anatole France." His younger poems, though powerful, are more or less the happy expression of unhappy moods. Oh, but the haunting lines, the dripping words!—Un à zen et on encor— adorable! Of his masterpiece, Le Vase, the first poem in the division of Lee Roseaux de la Flûte, Miss Lowell says: "It is the most perfect presentation of the creative faculty at work that I know of in any literature." I wish I might give here all its wonder and warmth:
Je sentais sur mes mains amoureux ou farouches
Des sooffles de naseaux ou des baisers de bouche.
From Les Médailles d'Argile I take this fragment, which makes one ache for the whole:
J'ai dit encor: Écoute.
Écoute,
Il y a quelqu'un derrière l'écho,
Debout parmi la vie universelle.
Et qui porte l'arc double tile double flambeau,
Et qui eat nous
Divinement
In La Sandale Ailée, one of his later books which contains little else to impress the reader, Septembre, in vers libre,
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