e
atmosphere of Rome, to him so strange and mournful, that these pale
flowers grew up; for that journey to Italy, which he deplored as the
greatest misfortune of his life, put him in full possession of his
talent, and brought out all its originality. And in effect you do find
intimacy, intimite, here. The trouble of his life is analysed, and the
sentiment of it conveyed directly to our minds; not a great sorrow or
passion, but only the sense of loss in passing days, the ennui of a
dreamer who has to plunge into the world's affairs, the opposition
between actual life and the ideal, a longing for rest, nostalgia,
home-sickness--that pre-eminently childish, but so suggestive sorrow, as
significant of the final regret of all human creatures for the familiar
earth and limited sky. The feeling for landscape is often described as a
modern one; still more so is that for antiquity, the sentiment of ruins.
Du Bellay has this sentiment. The duration of the hard, sharp outlines of
things is a grief to him, and passing his wearisome days among the ruins
of ancient Rome, he is consoled by the thought that all must one day end,
by the sentiment of the grandeur of nothingness--la grandeur du rien.
With a strange touch of far-off mysticism, he thinks that the great
whole--le grand tout--into which all other things pass and lose
themselves, ought itself sometimes to perish and pass away. Nothing less
can relieve his weariness. From the stately aspects of Rome his thoughts
went back continually to France, to the smoking chimneys of his little
village, the longer twilight of the North, the soft climate of Anjou--la
douceur Angevine; yet not so much to the real France, we may be sure,
with its dark streets and its roofs of rough-hewn slate, as to that other
country, with slenderer towers, and more winding rivers, and trees like
flowers, and with softer sunshine on more gracefully-proportioned fields
and ways, which the fancy of the exile, and the pilgrim, and of the
schoolboy far from home, and of those kept at home unwillingly,
everywhere builds up before or behind them.

He came home at last, through the Grisons, by slow journeys; and there,
in the cooler air of his own country, under its skies of milkier blue,
the sweetest flower of his genius sprang up. There have been poets whose
whole fame has rested on one poem, as Gray's on the Elegy in a Country
Churchyard, or Ronsard's, as many critics have thought, on the eighteen
lines of one fa