ing to eat beans at Toulon, poor fellows!
All sorts of men are there,--churchmen, rascals, nobles, notaries, even
some who are innocent!"

And the poet concludes, "Thus the world, thus the agitation, the stir of
life, good, evil, pleasure, pain, pass along swiftly, confusedly,
between day and night, on the river of time, rolling along and fleeing."

The enthusiasm of the poet leads him into exaggeration whenever he comes
to a wonder of Provence. Things are relative in this world, and the same
words carry different meanings. Avignon is scarcely a colossal pile of
towers, and would not remind many of Venice, even at sunset, and we must
make a discount when we hear that the boats are _engulfed_ in the
_fierce_ (_sic_) arch of the _colossal_ bridge of stone that Benezet,
the shepherd, erected seven hundred years ago. A moment later he refers
daintily and accurately to the chapel of Saint Nicholas "riding on the
bridge, slender and pretty." The epithets sound larger, too, in
Provencal; the view of Avignon is "espetaclouso," the walls of the
castle are "gigantesco."

Especially admirable in its sober, energetic expression is the account
of the _Remonte_, in the eleventh canto, wherein we see the eighty
horses, grouped in fours, tug slowly up the river.

"The long file on the rough-paved path, dragging the weighty train of
boats, in spite of the impetuous waters, trudges steadily along. And
beneath the lofty branches of the great white poplars, in the stillness
of the Rhone valley, in the splendor of the rising sun, walking beside
the straining horses that drive a mist from their nostrils, the first
driver says the prayer."

With each succeeding poem the vocabulary of Mistral seems to grow, along
with the boldness of expression. All his poems he has himself translated
into French, and these translations are remarkable in more than one
respect. That of the _Poem of the Rhone_ is especially full of rare
French words, and it cannot be imputed to the leader of the Provencal
poets that he is not past master of the French vocabulary. Often his
French expression is as strange as the original. Not many French
writers would express themselves as he does in the following:--

"Et il tressaille de jumeler le nonchaloir de sa jeunesse au renouveau
de la belle ingenue."

In this translation, also, more than in the preceding, there is
occasionally an affectation of archaism, which rather adds to than
detracts from the poetic effect o