let us keep it free and pure, and bright as silver,
for a whole people drinks at this spring; for when, with faces on the
ground, a people falls into slavery, if it holds its language, it holds
the key that delivers it from the chains."

The final stanza of the poem, written in honor of Jasmin in 1870, is as
follows:--

"For our dead and our fathers, and our sacred rights as a people and as
poets, that yesterday were trampled beneath the feet of the usurper,
and, outraged, cried out, now live again in glory! Now, between the two
seas the language of Oc triumphs. O Jasmin, thou hast avenged us!"

In the _Rock of Sisyphus_ the poet says, "Formerly we kept the language
that Nature herself put upon our lips."

In the _Poem to the Latin Race_ we read:--

"Thy mother tongue, the great stream that spreads abroad in seven
branches, pouring out love and light like an echo from Paradise, thy
golden speech, O Romance daughter of the King-People, is the song that
will live on human lips as long as speech shall have reason."

Elsewhere we find:--

"Oh, maintain thy historic speech. It is the proof that always thou
carriest on high and free, thy coat of arms. In the language, a mystery,
an old treasure is found. Each year the nightingale puts on new plumage,
but keeps its song."

One entire poem, _Espouscado_, is a bitterly indignant protest against
those who would suppress the dialect, against the regents and the
rectors whom "we must pay with our pennies to hear them scoff at the
language that binds us to our fathers and our soil!" And the poet cries
out, "No, no, we'll keep our rebellious _langue d'oc_, grumble who will.
We'll speak it in the stables, at harvest-time, among the silkworms,
among lovers, among neighbors, etc., etc. It shall be the language of
joy and of brotherhood. We'll joke and laugh with it;--and as for the
army, we'll take it to the barracks to keep off homesickness."

And his anger rising, he exclaims:--

"O the fools, the fools, who wean their children from it to stuff them
with self-sufficiency, fatuity, and hunger! Let them get drowned in the
throng! But thou, O my Provence, be not disturbed about the sons that
disown thee and repudiate thy speech. They are dead, they are still-born
children that survive, fed on bad milk."

And he concludes:--

"But, eldest born of Nature, you, the sun-browned boys, who speak with
the maidens in the ancient tongue, fear not; you shall remain the
masters! Lik