very carefully avoided. The effect of this unbroken succession of
feminine verses is slightly monotonous, though the poet shifts his
pauses skilfully. The rhythm of the lines is marked, the effect upon the
ear being quite like that of English iambic pentameters hypercatalectic.
The absence of rhyme is the more noteworthy in that rhyme offers little
difficulty in Provencal. Doubtless the poet was pleased to show an
additional claim to superiority for his speech over the French as a
vehicle for poetic thought; for while on the one hand the rules of rhyme
and hiatus give the poet writing in Provencal less trouble than when
writing in French, on the other hand this poem proves that splendid
blank verse may be written in the new language.

The plan of the poem is briefly as follows: it describes the departure
of a fleet of boats from Lyons, accompanies them down the river to
Beaucaire, describes the fair and the return up the river, the boats
being hauled by eighty horses; narrates the collision with a steamboat
coming down the stream, which drags the animals into the water, setting
the boats adrift in the current, destroying them and their cargo, and
typifying as it were the ruin of the old traffic on the Rhone. The river
itself is described, its dangerous shoals, its beautiful banks, its
towns and castles. We learn how the boats were manoeuvred; the life on
board and the ideas of the men are set before us minutely. Legends and
stories concerning the river and the places along the shores abound, of
course; and into this general background is woven the tale of a Prince
of Orange and a little maiden called the Anglore, two of the curiously
half-real, half-unreal beings that Mistral seems to love to create. The
Prince comes on board the fleet, intending to see Orange and Provence;
some day he is to be King of Holland, but has already sickened of court
ceremonies and intrigues.

"Uno foulie d'amour s'es mes en testo."

This dreamy, imaginative, blond Prince is in search of a Naiade and the
mysterious "swan-flower," wherein the fair nymph is hidden. This flower
he wears as an emblem. When the boatmen see it, they recognize it as the
_fleur de Rhone_ that the Anglore is so fond of culling. The men get
Jean Roche, one of their number, to tell the Prince who this mysterious
Anglore is, and we learn that she is a little, laughing maiden, who
wanders barefoot on the sand, so charming that any of the sailors, were
she to make a