ambitious of literary distinction, did not lose his true self
in a noisy fame. His was the delicate nature of an artist; his deafness
perhaps added to his timidity and his love of retirement; we think
of him in his garden, cultivating his roses as "the priest of Flora."

His work as a poet falls into four periods. From 1550 to 1554 he was
a humanist without discretion or reserve. In the first three books
of the _Odes_ he attempted to rival Pindar; in the _Amours de
Cassandre_ he emulates the glory of Petrarch. From 1554 to 1560,
abandoning his Pindarism, he was in discipleship to Anacreon[1] and
Horace. It is the period of the less ambitious odes found in the fourth
and fifth books, the period of the _Amours de Marie_ and the _Hymnes_.
From 1560 to 1574 he was a poet of the court and of courtly occasions,
an eloquent declaimer on public events in the _Discours des Miseres
de ce Temps_, and the unfortunate epic poet of his unfinished
_Franciade_. During the last ten years of his life he gave freer
expression to his personal feelings, his sadness, his gladness; and
to these years belong the admirable sonnets to Helene de Surgeres,
his autumnal love.

[Footnote 1: _i.e._ the Anacreontic poems, found, and published in
1554, by Henri Estienne.]

Ronsard's genius was lyrical and elegiac, but the tendencies of a
time when the great affair was the organisation of social life, and
as a consequence the limitation of individual and personal passions,
were not favourable to the development of lyrical poetry. In his
imitations of Pindar a narrative element checks the flight of song,
and there is a certain unreality in the premeditated attempt to
reproduce the passionate fluctuations and supposed disorder of his
model. The study of Pindar, however, trained Ronsard in the handling
of sustained periods of verse, and interested him in complex lyrical
combinations. His Anacreontic and Horatian odes are far happier;
among these some of his most delightful work is found. If he was
deficient in great ideas, he had delicacy of sentiment and an
exquisite sense of metrical harmony. The power which he possessed
as a narrative poet appears best in episodes or epic fragments. His
ambitious attempt to trace the origin of the French monarchy from
the imaginary Trojan Francus was unfortunate in its subject, and
equally unfortunate in its form--the rhyming decasyllabic verse.

In pieces which may be called hortatory, the pulpit eloquence, as
it