of the Rhone valley, in the splendor of the rising sun, walking beside
the straining horses that drive a mist from their nostrils, the first
driver says the prayer."

With each succeeding poem the vocabulary of Mistral seems to grow, along
with the boldness of expression. All his poems he has himself translated
into French, and these translations are remarkable in more than one
respect. That of the _Poem of the Rhone_ is especially full of rare
French words, and it cannot be imputed to the leader of the Provençal
poets that he is not past master of the French vocabulary. Often his
French expression is as strange as the original. Not many French
writers would express themselves as he does in the following:--

"Et il tressaille de jumeler le nonchaloir de sa jeunesse au renouveau
de la belle ingénue."

In this translation, also, more than in the preceding, there is
occasionally an affectation of archaism, which rather adds to than
detracts from the poetic effect of his prose, and the number of lines in
the prose translation that are really ten-syllable verses is quite
remarkable. On one page (page 183 of the third edition, Lemerre) more
than half the lines are verses.

Is the _Poem of the Rhone_ a great poem? Whether it is or not, it
accomplishes admirably the purpose of its author, to fix in beautiful
verse the former life of the Rhone. That much of it is prosaic was
inevitable; the nature of the subject rendered it so. It is full of
beauties, and the poet who wrote _Mirèio_ and completed it before his
thirtieth year, has shown that in the last decade of his threescore
years and ten he could produce a work as full of fire, energy, life, and