Sainte-Beuve said. The mastery of musical speech and of various
forms of song was already to be recognised as the basis and the note
of the talent of De Banville. He had style, without which a man may
write very nice verses about heaven and hell and other matters, and
may please thousands of excellent people, but will write poetry--
never. Comparing De Banville's boy's work with the boy's work of
Mr. Tennyson, one observes in each--"Les Cariatides" as in "The
Hesperides"--the timbre of a new voice. Poetry so fresh seems to
make us aware of some want which we had hardly recognised, but now
are sensible of, at the moment we find it satisfied.

It is hardly necessary to say that this gratifying and welcome
strangeness, this lyric originality, is nearly all that M. De
Banville has in common with the English poet whose two priceless
volumes were published in the same year as "Les Cariatides?" The
melody of Mr. Tennyson's lines, the cloudy palaces of his
imagination, rose


"As Ilion, like a mist rose into towers,"


when Apollo sang. The architecture was floating at first, and
confused; while the little theatre of M. De Banville's poetry, where
he sat piping to a dance of nixies, was brilliantly lit and elegant
with fresh paint and gilding. "The Cariatides" support the pediment
and roof of a theatre or temple in the Graeco-French style. The
poet proposed to himself