gratified to gain
That positive eternity of pain
Instead of this insufferable inane.
[268] R. Canat has taken this phrase as the title of his treatment of the subject: La Solitude morale dans le mouvement romantique.
[269] Decadent Rome had the equivalent of Des Esseintes. Seneca (To Lucilius, CXXII) speaks of those who seek to affirm their originality and attract attention to themselves by doing everything differently from other people and, “ut ita dicam, retro vivunt.”
[270] Tennyson has traced this change of the æsthetic dream into a nightmare in his Palace of Art.
[271] Contemporains, I, 332.
[272] Génie du Christianisme, Pt. II, Livre III, ch. IX.
L’orage est dans ma voix, l’éclair est sur ma bouche;