captainless national and mercenary soldiers were become in large
number thieves or beggars, and the peasant's hand sank back to the
tame labour of the plough reluctantly. Relieved a little by the
sentimental humour of the hour, lending, as Ronsard prompted, a
poetic and always amorous interest to everything around him, poor
Gaston's very human soul was vexed nevertheless at the spectacle of
the increased hardness of human life, with certain misgivings from
time to time at the contrast of his own luxurious tranquillity. The
homeless woman suckling her babe at the roadside, the grey-beard
hasting before the storm, the tattered fortune-teller who, when he
shook his head at her proposal to "read his hand," assured him
(perhaps with some insight into his character) "You do that"--you
shake your head, negatively--"too much!" these, and the like, [60]
might count as fitting human accidents in an impassioned landscape
picture. And his new imaginative culture had taught him to value
"surprises" in nature itself; the quaint, exciting charm of the
mistletoe in the wood, of the blossom before the leaf, the cry of
passing birds at night. Nay! the most familiar details of nature,
its daily routine of light and darkness, beset him now with a kind of
troubled and troubling eloquence. The rain, the first streak of
dawn, the very sullenness of the sky, had a power, only to be
described by saying that they seemed to be moral facts.

On his way at last to gaze on the abode of the new hero or demi-god
of poetry, Gaston perceives increasingly, as another excellence of
his verse, how truthful, how close it is to the minute fact of the
scene around; as there are pleasant wines which, expressing the
peculiar quality of their native soil, lose their special
pleasantness away from home. The physiognomy of the scene was
changed; the plain of La Beauce had ruffled itself into low green