himself or to us is a new ornament for us to admire, not a new method
for him to express a new thing; and the suggestion of new rhythms that
might thus be attained is never fully worked out.

'Mais tu ne seras plus? Et puis?... quand la paleur
Qui blemist nôtre corps sans chaleur ne lumière
Nous perd le sentiment?...

The ampleness of that reverberance is almost isolated.

Ronsard's resources are indeed few. But he needed few. His simple mind
was at ease in machinery of commonplaces, and he makes the pleasant
impression of one to whom commonplaces are real. He felt them all over
again. One imagines him reading the classics--the Iliad in three days,
or his beloved companion 'sous le bois amoureux,' Tibullus--with an
unfailing delight in all the concatenations of phrase which are foisted
on to unripe youth nowadays in the pages of a Gradus. One might almost
say that he saw his loves at second-hand, through alien eyes, were it
not that he faced them with some directness as physical beings, and that
the artificiality implied in the criticism is incongruous with the
honesty of such a natural man. But apart from a few particulars that
would find a place in a census paper one would be hard put to it to
distinguish Cassandre from Hélène. What charming things Ronsard has to
say of either might be said of any charming woman--'le mignard
embonpoint de ce sein,'--

'Petit nombril, que mon penser adore,
Non pas mon oeil, qui n'eut oncques ce bien ...'

And though he assures Hélène that she has turned him from his grave