lle.

The Minnesingers have found heirs and continuators in the modern writers
of Germany. Side by side with the increasing tendency to unity in all
national literature is working the force of races confounded under one
political banner, to assert their existence as such. Congresses have
shaped new kingdoms; but they have not reached or removed the limits
of nationalities that have each their expression in song, whether in
Moldavia or among the Czechs of Bohemia. The regeneration of local
idioms, which is fast working its way from the Bosphorus to the
Atlantic, was first undertaken in Provence, at the instigation of
Roumanille. The son of a gardener of St. Remy, he was first struck with
the insufficiency of French literature for his immediate countrymen,
when, on his return from college, seeking to recite some of his earlier
poems in the language of Racine to his aged mother, she failed to
understand them. For her he translated, and found that his own Provencal
was richer, more copious and melodious than the French itself, and, if
less finical and restrained by grammatical forms, more pliant for the
poet, and better answering the exigencies of primitive, spontaneous
expression of feeling. From that moment his efforts were unceasingly
directed towards the reintegration of his mother-tongue, which had so
long played but the part of a Cinderella among the Romanic nations.

His poems, collected in 1847, under the title of "Margarideto,"
(Daisies,) were hailed by his countrymen with their habitual national
enthusiasm. Nor did he remain inactive during the Revolution of 1848,
addressing the people in home-phrase in several small volumes of prose.
In 1852, he sent forth a call to his brother-writers, the _felibre_, who
had joined with him in his efforts. The result was the publication of
"Li Prouvencalo," a charming selection from those modern Troubadours
who in all ranks of society sing, because sing they must, in bright and
sunny Provence, and who in very deed find poetry

"In the forge's dust and ashes, in the tissues
of the loom."

The call of Roumanille was the signal for a revival. Since that time, he
himself, now a publisher in Avignon, has steadily watched and
fostered the movement. The new literature has rapidly gone beyond its
home-limits. Within the present year, Paris has republished several of
the most noted works.

The volume which has called forth these remarks, "Lis Oubreto,"
comprises the poems of M.