from the
Atlantic, and the west wind which comes up from it, turning the poplars
white, spares not this new Italy in France. So the fireside often
appears, with the pleasures of winter, about the vast emblazoned chimneys
of the time, and with a bonhomie as of little children, or old people.

It is in Du Bellay's Olive, a collection of sonnets in praise of a
half-imaginary lady, Sonnetz a la louange d'Olive, that these
characteristics are most abundant. Here is a perfectly crystallised
specimen:--

D'amour, de grace, et de haulte valeur
Les feux divins estoient ceinctz et les cieulx
S'estoient vestuz d'un manteau precieux
A raiz ardens di diverse couleur:
Tout estoit plein de beaute, de bonheur,
La mer tranquille, et le vent gracieulx,
Quand celle la nasquit en ces bas lieux
Qui a pille du monde tout l'honneur.
Ell' prist son teint des beux lyz blanchissans,
Son chef de l'or, ses deux levres des rozes,
Et du soleil ses yeux resplandissans:
Le ciel usant de liberalite,
Mist en l'esprit ses semences encloses,
Son nom des Dieux prist l'immortalite.

That he is thus a characteristic specimen of the poetical taste of that
age, is indeed Du Bellay's chief interest. But if his work is to have the
highest sort of interest, if it is to do something more than satisfy
curiosity, if it is to have an aesthetic as distinct from an historical
value, it is not enough for a poet to have been the true child of his
age, to have conformed to its aesthetic conditions, and by so conforming
to have charmed and stimulated that age; it is necessary that there
should be perceptible in his work something individual, inventive,
unique, the impress there of the writer's own temper and personality.
This impress M. Sainte-Beuve thought he found in the Antiquites de Rome,
and the Regrets, which he ranks as what has been called poesie intime,
that intensely modern sort of poetry in which the writer has for his aim
the portraiture of his own most intimate moods, and to take the reader
into his confidence. That generation had other instances of this intimacy
of sentiment: Montaigne's Essays are full of it, the carvings of the
church of Brou are full of it. M. Sainte-Beuve has perhaps exaggerated
the influence of this quality in Du Bellay's Regrets; but the very name
of the book has a touch of Rousseau about it, and reminds one of a whole
generation of self-pitying poets in modern times. It was in th