e. Of his father he says
that he towered above them all, in stature, in wisdom, and in nobleness
of bearing. He was a handsome old man, dignified in language, firm in
command, kind to the poor about him, austere with himself alone. The
same may be said of the poet to-day. He is a strikingly handsome man,
vigorous and active, exceedingly gracious and simple in manner. His
utter lack of affectation is the more remarkable, in view of the fact
that he has been for years an object of adulation, and lives in constant
and close contact with a population of peasants.

His schooling began at the age of nine, but the boy played truant so
frequently that he was sent to boarding-school in Avignon. Here he had a
sad time of it, and seems especially to have felt the difference of
language. Teachers and pupils alike made fun of his patois, for which he
had a strong attachment, because of the charm of the songs his mother
sung to him. Later he studied well, however, and became filled with a
love of Virgil and Homer. In them he found pictures of life that
recalled vividly the labors, the ways, and the ideas of the Maillanais.
At this time, too, he attempted a translation, in Provencal, of the
first eclogue of Virgil, and confided his efforts to a school-mate,
Anselme Mathieu, who became his life-long friend and one of the most
active among the Felibres.

It was at this school, in 1845, that he formed his friendship with
Roumanille, who had come there as a teacher. It is not too much to say
that the revival of the Provencal language grew out of this meeting.
Roumanille had already written his poems, _Li Margarideto_ (The
Daisies). "Scarcely had he shown me," says Mistral, "in their
spring-time freshness, these lovely field-flowers, when a thrill ran
through my being and I exclaimed, 'This is the dawn my soul awaited to
awaken to the light!'" Mistral had read some Provencal, but at that time
the dialect was employed merely in derision; the writers used the speech
itself as the chief comic element in their productions. The poems of
Jasmin were as yet unknown to him. Roumanille was the first in the Rhone
country to sing the poetry of the heart. Master and pupil became firm
friends and worked together for years to raise the home-speech to the
dignity of a literary language.

At seventeen Mistral returned home, and began a poem in four cantos,
that he has never published; though portions of it are among the poems
of _Lis Isclo d'Or_ and in