ey are delightful in themselves, but because
they serve as a contrast to throw into relief the peculiarities of their
model. When de Banville revives a forgotten form of verse--and he has
already had the honour of reviving the ballade--he does it in the spirit
of a workman choosing a good tool wherever he can find one, and not at
all in that of the dilettante, who seeks to renew bygone forms of
thought and make historic forgeries. With the ballade this seemed
natural enough; for in connection with ballades the mind recurs to
Villon, and Villon was almost more of a modern than de Banville himself.
But in the case of the rondel, a comparison is challenged with Charles
of Orleans, and the difference between two ages and two literatures is
illustrated in a few poems of thirteen lines. Something, certainly, has
been retained of the old movement; the refrain falls in time like a
well-played bass; and the very brevity of the thing, by hampering and
restraining the greater fecundity of the modern mind, assists the
imitation. But de Banville's poems are full of form and colour; they
smack racily of modern life, and own small kindred with the verse of
other days, when it seems as if men walked by twilight, seeing little,
and that with distracted eyes, and instead of blood, some thin and
spectral fluid circulated in their veins. They might gird themselves for
battle, make love, eat and drink, and acquit themselves manfully in all
the external parts of life; but of the life that is within, and those
processes by which we render ourselves an intelligent account of what we
feel and do, and so represent experience that we for the first time make
it ours, they had only a loose and troubled possession. They beheld or
took part in great events, but there was no answerable commotion in
their reflective being; and they passed throughout turbulent epochs in a
sort of ghostly quiet and abstraction. Feeling seems to have been
strangely disproportioned to the occasion, and words were laughably
trivial and scanty to set forth the feeling even such as it was. Juvenal
des Ursins chronicles calamity after calamity, with but one comment for
them all: that "it was great pity." Perhaps, after too much of our
florid literature, we find an adventitious charm in what is so
different; and while the big drums are beaten every day by perspiring
editors over the loss of a cock-boat or the rejection of a clause, and
nothing is heard that is not proclaimed with