Page:French Poets and Novelists.djvu/69

56 from Gautier's hand is pleasanter; and the silvery strain of his beautiful rhetoric, after so long a season of thunderous bulletins and proclamations, suggests the high, clear note of some venerable nightingale after a summer storm. Deprived of his customary occupation he became a forced observer of certain vulgarly obvious things, and discovered that they, too, had their poetry, and that, if you only look at it closely, everything is remunerative. He found poetry in the poor rawboned lions and tigers of the Jardin des Plantes; in the hungry dogs in the street, hungrily eyed; in a trip on a circular railway and on the penny steamers on the Seine; in that delicacy of vanished seasons, a pat of fresh butter in Chevet's window. Beneath his touch these phenomena acquire the finely detailed relief of the accessories and distances in a print of Albert Dürer's; we remember no better example of the magic of style. But the happiest performance in the book is a series of chapters on Versailles, when the whirligig of time had again made its splendid vacancy an active spot in the world's consciousness. No one should go there now without Gautier's volume in his pocket. It was his good fortune that his autumn was as sound as his summer and his last writing second to none before it. The current of diction in this