and projecting it into a visionary distance, shed upon the body of
the flower the soul of its beauty. Things were become at once more
deeply sensuous and more deeply ideal. As at the touch of a wizard,
something more came into the rose than its own natural blush.
Occupied so closely with the visible, this new poetry had so profound
an intuition of what can only be felt, and maintained that mood in
speaking of such objects as wine, fruit, the plume in the cap, the
ring on the finger. And still that was no dubious or generalised
form it gave to flower or bird, but the exact pressure of the Jay at
the window; you could count the petals,--of the exact natural number;
no expression could be too faithful to the precise texture of things;
words, too, must embroider, be twisted and spun, like silk or golden
hair. Here were real people, in their real, delightful attire, and
you understood how they moved; the visible was more visible than ever
before, just because soul had come to its surface. The juice in the
flowers, when Ronsard named them, was like wine or blood. It was
such a coloured thing; though the grey things also, the cool things,
all the fresher for the contrast--with a freshness, again, that
seemed to touch and cool the soul--found their account [55] there;
the clangorous passage of the birds at night foretokening rain, the
moan of the wind at the door, the wind's self made visible over the
yielding corn.

It was thus Gaston understood the poetry of Ronsard, generously
expanding it to the full measure of its intention. That poetry, too,
lost its thaumaturgic power in turn, and became mere literature in
exchange for life, partly in the natural revolution of poetic taste,
partly for its faults. Faults and all, however, Gaston loyally
accepted it; those faults--the lapse of grace into affectation, of
learning into pedantry, of exotic fineness into a trick--counting