Emersonian Baudelaire

It is that admirable and immortal instinct for the beautiful which makes us consider the earth and its spectacles as a revelation, as something in correspondence with Heaven. The insatiable thirst for everything that lies beyond, and that life reveals, is the most living proof of our immortality.

--Charles Baudelaire, "New Notes On Edgar Poe," Baudelaire As A Literary Critic, ed. and tr. Hyslop and Hyslop, Jr., Penn State Press (1964), 132.

Baudelaire was quite taken with E. A. Poe, and found in Emerson "a certain flavor of Seneca" (from "The Painter of Modern Life," an 1863 essay on Delacroix). Here he provides, in Emersonian fashion, the aesthetic basis of religious yearning.