Poetry was not therefore, as one is tempted to think sometimes, for
Ronsard a game. There was plenty of game in it; _l'art de bien
pétrarquiser_ was all he claimed for himself. But the game would have
wearied any one who was not aware that he could be completely satisfied
and expressed by it. Ronsard was never weary. However much one may tire
of him, the fatigue never is infected by the nausea which is produced by
some of the mechanical sonnet sequences of his contemporaries. No one
reading Ronsard ever felt the tedium of mere nullity. It would be hard
to find in the whole of M. van Bever's exhaustive edition of 'Les
Amours'[9] a single piece which has not its sufficient charge of gusto.
When you are tired, it is because you have had enough of that particular
kind of man and mind; you know him too well, and can reckon too closely
the chances of a shock of surprise.

[Footnote 9: _Les Amours_. Par Pierre de Ronsard. Texte établi par
Ad. van Bever. Two volumes. (Paris: Crès.)]

With the more obvious, and in their way delightful, surprises Ronsard
is generous. He can hold the attention longer than any poet of an equal
tenuity of matter. Chiefly for two reasons, of which one is hardly
capable of further analysis. It is the obvious reality of his own
delight in 'Petrarchising.' He is perpetually in love with making; he
disports himself with a childlike enthusiasm in his art. There are
moments when he seems hardly to have passed beyond the stage of naive
wonder that words exist and are manipulable.

'Dous fut le trait, qu'Amour hors de sa trousse
Pour me tuer, me tira doucement,
Quand je fus pris au dous commencement
D'une douceur si doucettement douce....'