poverty of Dorothea. The case is merely inverted. Both poems imitate the
Homeric style, Goethe's more palpably than Mistral's, since the German
poet has adopted the Homeric verse. He affects, also, certain recurring
terms of expression, "Also sprach sie" and the like, and there is a
rather artificial seeking after simplicity of expression. Goethe's poem
is more interesting because of the greater solidity of the characters,
and because of the more closely knitted plot. The curiosity of the
reader is kept roused as in a well-constructed romance. Mistral's poem
has, after all, scarcely any more real local color; the rustic life of
the two poems is similar, allowing for geographical differences, and we
carry away quite as real a picture of Hermann's home and the fields
about it as of the Mas of Mèste Ramoun. Mistral's idyll terminates
tragically in that Mirèio dies of sunstroke, leaving her lover to mourn,
but the tenor of the German poem is more serious and moves us more
deeply; the background of war contributes to this, but the source of
our emotion is in the deep seriousness of the characters themselves.

Vincèn and Mirèio are charming in their naïveté, they are unspoiled and
unreflecting. They are children, and lacking in well-defined
personality. They have no knowledge of anything beyond the customs and
superstitions of the simple folk about them. Their religion, which is so
continually before us, furnishing the very mainspring of the fatal
dénouement, is of the most superficial sort, if it can be called
religion at all. Whether you are bitten by a dog, a wolf, or a snake, or
lose your eyesight, or are in danger of losing your lover, you run to
the shrine of some saint for help. The religious feeling really runs no
deeper. In his outburst of grief upon seeing Mirèio prone upon the floor
of the chapel, the unhappy boy asks what he has done to merit such a
blow. "Has he lit his pipe in a church at the lamp? or dragged the
crucifix among thistles, like the Jews?" Of the deeper, nobler