s," he said; "he would have
liked, throughout his philosophy, to be able to do without God, but he
could not help making Him give just a flick to set the world in motion;
after that he didn't know what to do with God." A severe, but a true
saying; Descartes had required everything of pure reason; he had felt a
foreshadowing of the infinite and the unknown without daring to venture
into them. In the name of reason, others have denied the infinite and
the unknown. Pascal was wiser and bolder when, with St. Augustine, he
found in reason itself a step towards faith. "Reason would never give in
if she were not of opinion that there are occasions when she ought to
give in."

By his philosophical method, powerful and logical, as well as by the
clear, strong, and concise style he made use of to expound it, Descartes
accomplished the transition from the sixteenth century to the seventeeth;
he was the first of the great prose-writers of that incomparable epoch,
which laid forever the foundations of the language. At the same moment
the great Corneille was rendering poetry the same service.

It had come out of the sixteenth century more disturbed and less formed
than prose; Ronsard and his friends had received it from the hands of
Marot, quite young, unsophisticated and undecided; they attempted, at the
first effort, to raise it to the level of the great classic models of
which their minds were full. The attempt was bold, and the Pleiad did
not pretend to consult the taste of the vulgar. "The obscurity of
Ronsard," says M. Guizot, in his _Corneille et son Temps,_ "is not that
of a subtle mind torturing itself to make something out of nothing; it is
the obscurity of a full and a powerful mind, which is embarrassed by its
own riches, and has not learned to regulate the use of them. Furnished,
by his reading of the ancients, with that which was wanting in our
poetry, Ronsard thought he could perceive in his lofty and really
poetical imagination what was needed to supply it; he cast his eyes in
all directions, with the view of enriching the domain of poetry.
'Thou wilt do well to pick dexterously,' he says, in his abridgment of
the art of French poetry, 'and adopt to thy work the most expressive
words in the dialects of our own France; there is no need to care whether
the vocables are Gascon, or Poitevin, or Norman, or Mancese, or Lyonnese,
or of other districts, provided that they are good, and properly express
what thou woul