Love among the Ruins."

"Where the quiet coloured end of evening smiles
Miles and miles
On the solitary pastures where our sheep,
Half asleep," etc.

From the fact, already pointed out, that the romantic movement in France
was, more emphatically than in England and Germany, a breach with the
native literary tradition, there result several interesting
peculiarities. The first of these is that the new French school, instead
of fighting the classicists with weapons drawn from the old arsenal of
mediaeval France, went abroad for allies; went especially to the modern
writers of England and Germany. This may seem strange when we reflect
that French literature in the Middle Ages was the most influential in
Europe; and that, from the old heroic song of Roland in the eleventh
century down to the very popular court allegory, the "Roman de la Rose",
in the fourteenth, and to the poems of Villon in the fifteenth, it
afforded a rich treasure-house of romantic material in the shape of
chronicles, _chansons de geste_, _romans d'aventures_, _fabliaux_,
_lais_, legends of saints, homilies, miracles, songs, farces,
_jeuspartis_, _pastourelles_, _ballades_--of all the literary forms in
fact which were then cultivated. Nor was this mass of work entirely
without influence on the romanticists of 1830. Theophile Dondey, wrote a
poem on Roland, and Gerard de Nerval (Labrunie) hunted up the old popular
songs and folklore of Touraine and celebrated their naivete and truly
national character. Attention was directed to the Renaissance group of
poets who preceded the Louis XIV. writers--to Ronsard and "The Pleiade."
Later the Old French Text Society was founded for the preservation and
publication of mediaeval remains. But in general the innovating school
sought their inspiration in foreign literatures. Antony Deschamps
translated the "Inferno"; Alfred de Vigny translated "Othello" as the
"Moor of Venice" (1829), and wrote a play on the story of Chatterton,[21]
and a novel, "Cinq Mars," which is the nearest thing in French literature
to the historical romances of Scott.[22] Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo
were both powerfully impressed by Macpherson's "Ossian." Gerard de
Nerval made, at the age of eighteen, a translation of "Faust" (1828),
which Goethe read with admiration, and wrote to the translator, saying
that he had never before understood his own meaning so well. "It was a
difficult task at that time," says Gauti