viens accoutrer.

Je veux tant seulement a lui seul me montrer;
Au reste, si un dieu voulait pour moi descendre
Du ciel, ferme la porte et ne le laisse entrer.

Nine years after Cassandre came Marie, the fifteen-year-old daughter of
an Angevin villager, nut-brown, smiling, and with cheeks the colour of a
May rose. She died young, but not before she had made Ronsard suffer by
coquetting with another lover. What is more important still, not before
she had inspired him to write that sonnet which has about it so much of
the charm of the morning:--

Mignonne, levez-vous, vous etes paresseuse,
Ja la gaie alouette au ciel a fredonne,
Et ja le rossignol doucement jargonne,
Dessus l'epine assis, sa complainte amoureuse.

Sus! debout allons voir l'herbelette perleuse,
Et votre beau rosier de boutons couronne,
Et vos oeillets aimes auxquels aviez donne
Hier au soir de l'eau d'une main si soigneuse.

Harsoir en vous couchant vous jurates vos yeux
D'etre plus tot que moi ce matin eveillee:
Mais le dormir de l'aube, aux filles gracieux,

Vous tient d'un doux sommeil encor les yeux silleee.
Ca, ca, que je les baise, et votre beau tetin,
Cent fois, pour vous apprendre a vous lever matin.

Ronsard was old and grey--at least, he was old before his time and
grey--when he met Helene de Sorgeres, maid of honour to the Queen, and
began the third of his grand passions. He lived all the life of a young
lover over again. They went to dances together, Helene in a mask. Helene
gave her poet a crown of myrtle and laurel. They had childish quarrels
and swore eternal fidelity. It was for her that Ronsard made the most
exquisite of his sonnets: _Quand vous serez bien vieille_-a sonnet of
which Mr. Yeats has written a magical version in English.

It is in referring to the sonnets for Helene that M. Jusserand calls
attention to the realism of Ronsard's poetry. He points out that one
seems to see the women Ronsard loves far more clearly than the heroines
of many other poets. He notes the same genius of realism again when he
is relating how Ronsard, on the eve of his death, as he was transported
from priory to priory, in hope of relief in each new place, wrote a poem
of farewell to his friends, in which he described the skeleton horrors
of his state with a minute carefulness, Ronsard, indeed, showed himself
a very personal chronicler throughout his work. "He cannot hide the