It fixed special forms--he the French sonnet. It felt the lives of all
things running through it as a young man feels them in the spring
woods--he gathered in the cup of his verse, and retains for us, the
nerve of all that life which is still exultant in the forest beyond his
river. His breeding, his high name, his leisured poverty, his passionate
friendship, his looking forward always to a new thing, a creation--all
this, was the Renaissance in person.

Moreover, the Renaissance had in France its seat where, between rolling
lands whose woods are the walls of gardens, the broad and shallow inland
Loire runs from Orleans, past Blois and Tours and Saumur, and Ancenis,
until near Nantes at last it feels the tide: salt and adventures and the
barbaric sea. This varied sheltered land of aged vineyards and great
wealth has, for the French Renaissance, the one special quality of
beginnings and Edens, namely, that it preserves on to a later time the
outward evidences of an original perfection. This place, the nest or
seed-plot of the new civilisation, still shows its castles--Blois,
Amboise, Chambord. Here Leonardo died, Rabelais, Ronsard himself was
born. Here the kings of the Change built in their fantastic pride, and
founded a France that still endures. It is as truly the soil of the
modern thing as are the provinces north of it (the Isle de France,
Normandy, Picardy and Champagne), the soil of the earlier mediaeval
flower, and of the Gothic which they preserve unique to our own time.

Now, of this district, Du Bellay was more than a native; he was part of
it; he pined away from it; he regretted, as no other man of the time
regretted, his father's land: Anjou and the fields of home. He may be
said, with some exaggeration, to have died in the misfortune of his
separation from the security and sober tradition of his own walls. That
great early experience of his, which I have already written down--his
meeting with Ronsard--had come to him not far from his own hill, south
of the great river. His name, unlike Ronsard's, recalled the gentry of
that countryside up to and beyond the beginning of its history; alone of
the Pleiade he translated the valley of the Loire, its depth, its
delicacy, its rich and subtle loneliness.

Again, the Renaissance lived in France an inspired and an exalted life,
so that there necessarily ran through it a fore-knowledge of sudden
ending. This tragedy repeated itself in the career of Du Bellay.

His