and
daintiness, and a certain air of foreign elegance about them, crept into
the French language: and there were other strange words which the poets
of the Pleiad forged for themselves, and which had only an ephemeral
existence.

With this was mixed the desire to taste a more exquisite and various
music than that of the older French verse, or of the classical poets.
The music of the measured, scanned verse of Latin and Greek poetry is
one thing; the music of the rhymed, unscanned verse of Villon and the
old French poets, la poesie chantee, is another. To unite together these
two kinds of music in a new school of French poetry, to make verse which
should scan and rhyme as well, to search out and harmonise the measure
of every syllable, and unite it to the swift, flitting, swallow-like
motion of rhyme, to penetrate their poetry with a double music--this was
the ambition of the Pleiad. They are insatiable of music, they cannot
have enough of it; they desire a music of greater compass perhaps than
words can possibly yield, to drain out the last drops of sweetness which
a certain note or accent contains.

This eagerness for music is almost the only serious thing in the poetry
of the Pleiad; and it was Goudimel, the severe and protestant Goudimel,
who set Ronsard's songs to music. But except in this matter these poets
seem never quite in earnest. The old Greek and Roman mythology, which
for the great Italians had been a motive so weighty and severe, becomes
with them a mere toy. That "Lord of terrible aspect," Amor, has become
Love, the boy or the babe. They are full of fine railleries; they
delight in diminutives, ondelette, fontelette, doucelette, Cassandrette.
Their loves are only half real, a vain effort to prolong the imaginative
loves of the middle age beyond their natural lifetime. They write
love-poems for hire. Like that party of people who tell the tales in
Boccaccio's Decameron, they form a circle which in an age of great
troubles, losses, anxieties, amuses itself with art, poetry, intrigue.
But they amuse themselves with wonderful elegance; and sometimes their
gaiety becomes satiric, for, as they play, real passions insinuate
themselves, and at least the reality of death; their dejection at the
thought of leaving this fair abode of our common daylight--le beau
sejour du commun jour--is expressed by them with almost wearisome
reiteration. But with this sentiment too they are able to trifle: the
imagery of death