he gods are jealous exceedingly if any goddess takes a
mortal man to her paramour, as Demeter chose Iasion." The least that
mortal poets can do is to show the Olympians an example of toleration.

"Les Cariatides" have delayed us too long. They are wonderfully varied,
vigorous, and rich, and full of promise in many ways. The promise has
hardly been kept. There is more seriousness in "Les Stalactites" (1846),
it is true, but then there is less daring. There is one morsel that must
be quoted,--a fragment fashioned on the air and the simple words that
used to waken the musings of George Sand when she was a child, dancing
with the peasant children:

"Nous n'irons plus an bois: les lauries sont coupes,
Les amours des bassins, les naiades en groupe
Voient reluire au soleil, en cristaux decoupes
Les flots silencieux qui coulaient de leur coupe,
Les lauriers sont coupes et le cerf aux abois
Tressaille au son du cor: nous n'irons plus au bois!
Ou des enfants joueurs riait la folle troupe
Parmi les lys d'argent aux pleurs du ciel trempes,
Voici l'herbe qu'on fauche et les lauriers qu'on coupe;
Nous n'irons plus au bois; les lauriers sont coupes."

In these days Banville, like Gerard de Nerval in earlier times,
RONSARDISED. The poem 'A la Font Georges,' full of the memories of
childhood, sweet and rich with the air and the hour of sunset, is written
in a favourite metre of Ronsard's. Thus Ronsard says in his lyrical
version of five famous lines of Homer--

"La gresle ni la neige
N'ont tels lieux pour leur siege
Ne la foudre oncques la
Ne devala."

(The snow, and wind, and hail
May never there prevail,
Nor thunderbolt doth fall,
Nor rain at all.)

De Banville chose this metre, rapid yet melancholy, with its sad emphatic
cadence in the fourth line, as the vehicle of his childish memories:

"O champs pleins de silence,
Ou mon heureuse enfance
Avait des jours encor
Tout files d'or!"

O ma vieille Font Georges,
Vers qui les rouges-gorges
Et le doux rossignol
Prenaient leur vol!

So this poem of the fountain of youth begins, "tout file d'or," and
closes when the dusk is washed with silver--

"A l'heure ou sous leurs voiles
Les tremblantes etoiles
Brodent le ciel changeant
De fleurs d'argent."

The "Stalactites" might detain one