undiscovered beauty, and to a peculiar grandeur not to be attained by the egoist.  Leconte’s temperament leads him to subjects which are already instinct with tragedy and thus in his hands assume this grandeur without effort.  The power of sheer style to ennoble is better seen in Sully Prudhomme’s tours de force of philosophic poetry—­when he unfolds his ideas upon ‘Justice’ or ‘Happiness’, for instance, under the form of a debate where masterly resources of phrase and image are compelled to the service of a rigorous logic; or in the brief cameo-like pieces on ‘Memory’, ‘Habit’, ‘Forms’, and similar unpromising abstractions, most nearly paralleled in English by the quatrains of Mr. William Watson.  But the cameo comparison is still more aptly applied to the marvellously-chiselled sonnets of Heredia—­monuments of a moment, as sculpture habitually is, but reaching out, as the finest sculpture does, to invisible horizons, and to the before and after—­the old wooden guardian-god recalling his former career as a scarlet figure-head laughing at the laughter or fury of the waves; Antony seeing the flying ships of Actium mirrored in the traitorous azure of Cleopatra’s eyes.

In Italy the ideal of an austere simplicity and reserve, resting as it did on the immense prestige of Leopardi, asserted itself even in the naturally exuberant and impetuous genius of Carducci.  Without it we should not have had those reticences of an abounding nature, those economies of a spendthrift, which make him one of the first poets of the sonnet in the land of its origin, and one of the greatest writers of Odes among the ‘barbarians’.  With reason he declared in 1891, when most of his poetry had been written, that ’all the apparent contradictions in my work are resolved by the triple formula:  in politics Italy before all, in aesthetics classical poetry before all, in practice, frankness and force before all’.  His two chief disciples, D’Annunzio and Pascoli, antithetical in almost all points, may be said to have divided his inheritance in this; Pascoli’s Vergilian economy contrasting with the exuberance of D’Annunzio somewhat as with us the classicism of the present poet-laureate with that of Swinburne.  In Germany the Parnassian reserve, concentration, and aristocratic exclusiveness was to reappear in the lyrical group of Stefan Georg.

(3) Finally, the Parnassian poetry, like most contemporary science, was in varying degrees detached from and hostile to religion, and found some of its most vibrating notes in contemplating its empty universe.  Leconte de Lisle offers the Stoic the last mournful joy of ’a heart seven-times steeped in the divine nothingness’,[9] or calls him to ’that city of silence, the sepulchre of the vanished gods, the human heart, seat of dreams, where eternally ferments and perishes the illusory universe’.[10] Here, too, Leopardi had anticipated him.