allow full freedom. He was scrupulous and timid. He soon shook off this
timidity and became a really remarkable wielder of the French tongue.
His translations of his own works have doubtless reached a far wider
public than the works themselves, and are certainly characterized by
great boldness, clearness, and an astonishingly large vocabulary.

His earlier work is clearly inspired by his love of Greek literature,
and those qualities in Latin literature wherein the Greek genius shines
through, possibly also by some mysterious affinity with the Greek spirit
resulting from climate or atavism. This never entirely left him. When
later he writes of Provence in the Middle Age, of the days of the
Troubadours, his manner does not change; his work offers no analogies
here with the French Romantic school.

No poet, it would seem, was ever so in love with his own language; no
artist ever so loved the mere material he was using. Mistral loves the
words he uses, he loves their sound, he loves to hear them from the lips
of those about him; he loves the intonations and the cadences of his
verse; his love is for the speech itself aside from any meaning it
conveys. A beautiful instrument it is indeed. Possibly nothing is more
peculiarly striking about him than this extreme enthusiasm for his
golden speech, his _lengo d'or_.

To him must be conceded the merit of originality, great originality. In
seeking the source of many of his conceptions, one is led to the
conclusion, and his own testimony bears it out, that they are the
creations of his own fancy. If there is much prosaic realism in the
_Poem of the Rhone_, the Prince and the Anglore are purely the children
of Mistral's almost naive imagination, and Calendau and Esterello are
attached to the real world of history by the slenderest bonds. When we
seek for resemblances between his conceptions and those of other poets,
we can undoubtedly find them. Mireille now and then reminds of Daphnis
and Chloe, of Hermann and Dorothea, of Evangeline, but the differences
are far more in evidence than the resemblances. Esterello is in an
attitude toward Calendau not without analogy to that of Beatrice toward
Dante, but it would be impossible to find at any point the slightest
imitation of Dante. Some readers have been reminded of Faust in reading
_Nerto_, but beyond the scheme of the Devil to secure a woman's soul,
there is little similarity. Nothing could be more utterly without
philosophy than _N