His elaborate poems are defective.

One or two Spanish ballads of his seem to me perfect, really.

He has great power in the introduction of familiar and conventional images without disturbing the ideal--a good power for these days.

The worst is that the moral atmosphere is _bad_, and that, though I am not, as you know, the very least bit of a prude (not enough perhaps), some of his poems must be admitted to be most offensive.

Get St.Beuve's poems, they have much beauty in them you will grant at once.
Then there is a Breton[17] poet whose name Robert and I have both of us been ungrateful enough to forget--we have turned our brains over and over and can't find the name anyhow--and who, indeed, deserves to be remembered, who writes some fresh and charmingly simple idyllic poems, one called, I think, 'Primel et Nola.' By that clue you may hunt him out perhaps in the 'Revue des Deux Mondes.' There's no strong imagination, understand--nothing of that sort! but you have a sweet, fresh, cool sylvan feeling with him, rare among Frenchmen of his class.