world.

So they made their way, under the rows of miraculous white thorn-
blossom, and through the green billows, at peace just then, though
the war still blazed or smouldered along the southern banks of the
Loire and far beyond, and it was with a delightful sense of peril, of
prowess attested in the facing of it, that they passed from time to
time half-ruined or deserted farm-buildings where the remnants of the
armies might yet be lingering. It was Jasmin, poetic Jasmin, who, in
giving Gaston the book he now carried ever ready to hand, had done
him perhaps the best of services, for it had proved the key to a new
world of seemingly boundless intellectual resources, and yet with a
special closeness to visible or sensuous things;--the scent and
colour of the field-flowers, the amorous business of the birds, the
flush and re-fledging of the black earth itself in that fervent
springtide, which was therefore unique in Gaston's memory. It was
his intellectual springtide; as people look back to [51] a physical
spring, which for once in ten or fifteen years, for once in a
lifetime, was all that spring could be.

The book was none other than Pierre de Ronsard's "Odes," with
"Mignonne! allons voir si la Rose," and "The Skylark" and the lines
to April--itself verily like nothing so much as a jonquil, in its
golden-green binding and yellow edges and perfume of the place where
it had lain--sweet, but with something of the sickliness of all
spring flowers since the days of Proserpine. Just eighteen years
old, and the work of the poet's own youth, it took possession of
Gaston with the ready intimacy of one's equal in age, fresh at every
point; and he experienced what it is the function of contemporary
poetry to effect anew for sensitive youth in each succeeding