Produced by Andrea Ball & Marc D'Hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org (From images generously made available by the Internet Archive.
The Dance of Death The Beacons The Sadness of the Moon Exotic Perfume Beauty The Balcony The Sick Muse The Venal Muse The Evil Monk The Temptation The Irreparable A Former Life Don Juan in Hades The Living Flame Correspondences The Flask Reversibility The Eyes of Beauty Sonnet of Autumn The Remorse of the Dead The Ghost To a Madonna The Sky Spleen The Owls Bien Loin d'Ici Music Contemplation To a Brown Beggar-maid The Swan The Seven Old Men The Little Old Women A Madrigal of Sorrow The Ideal Mist and Rain Sunset The Corpse An Allegory The Accursed La Beatrice The Soul of Wine The Wine of Lovers The Death of Lovers The Death of the Poor The Benediction Gypsies Travelling Francisco Meæ Laudes Robed in a Silken Robe A Landscape The Voyage
The Stranger Every Man his Chimæra Venus and the Fool Intoxication The Gifts of the Moon The Invitation to the Voyage What is Truth? Already! The Double Chamber At One o'Clock in the Morning The Confiteor of the Artist The Thyrsus The Marksman The Shooting-range and the Cemetery The Desire to Paint The Glass-vendor The Widows The Temptations; or, Eros, Plutus, and Glory
For the sentimental no greater foe exists than the iconoclast who dissipates literary legends. And he is abroad nowadays. Those golden times when they gossiped of De Quincey's enormous opium consumption, of the gin absorbed by gentle Charles Lamb, of Coleridge's dark ways, Byron's escapades, and Shelley's atheism--alas! into what faded limbo have they vanished. Poe, too, whom we saw in fancy reeling from Richmond to Baltimore, Baltimore to Philadelphia, Philadelphia to New York. Those familiar fascinating anecdotes have gone the way of all such jerry-built spooks. We now know Poe to have been a man suffering at the time of his death from cerebral lesion, a man who drank at intervals and little. Dr. Guerrier of Paris has exploded a darling superstition about De Quincey's opium-eating. He has demonstrated that no man could have lived so long--De Quincey was nearly seventy-five at his death--and worked so hard, if he had consumed twelve thousand drops of laudanum as often as he said he did. Furthermore, the English essayist's description of the drug's effects is inexact. He was seldom sleepy--a sure sign, asserts Dr. Guerrier, that he was not altogether enslaved by the drug habit. Sprightly in old age, his powers of labour were prolonged until past three-score and ten. His imagination needed little opium to produce the famous Confessions. Even Gautier's revolutionary red waistcoat worn at the première of Hernani was, according to Gautier, a pink doublet. And Rousseau has been whitewashed. So they are disappearing, those literary legends, until, disheartened, we cry out: Spare us our dear, old-fashioned, disreputable men of genius!