e part devoted to this is so very much the largest,
and so very much the most characteristic, that popular and almost
traditional opinion is scarcely wrong in considering love-poetry and
Provencal poetry to be almost, and with the due limitation in the
first case, convertible terms.

[Sidenote: _Example of rhyme-schemes._]

The spirit of this poetry is nowhere better shown than in the refrain
of an anonymous _alba_, which begins--

"En un verger sotz folha d'albespi,"

and which has for burden--

"Oi deus! oi deus, de l'alba, tant tost ve!"

of which an adaptation by Mr Swinburne is well known. "In the
Orchard," however, is not only a much longer poem than the _alba_ from
which it borrows its burden, but is couched in a form much more
elaborate, and has a spirit rather early Italian than Provencal. It
is, indeed, not very easy to define the Provencal spirit itself, which
has sometimes been mistaken, and oftener exaggerated. Although the
average troubadour poem--whether of love, or of satire, or, more
rarely, of war--is much less simple in tone than the Northern lyric
already commented on, it cannot be said to be very complex; and, on
the whole, the ease, accomplishment, and, within certain strict
limits, variety of the form are more remarkable than any intensity or
volume of passion or of thought. The musical character (less
inarticulate and more regular), which has also been noted in the poems
of the _trouveres_, is here eminent: though the woodnote wild of the
Minnesinger is quite absent or very rarely present. The facility of
double rhymes, with a full vowel sound in each syllable, has a
singular and very pleasing effect, as in the piece by Marcabrun
beginning--

"L'autrier jost una sebissa,"

"the other day by a hedge," the curiously complicated construction of
which is worth dwelling on as a specimen. It consists of six double
stanzas, of fourteen lines or two septets each, finished by a sestet,
_aabaab_. The septets are rhymed _aaabaab_; and though the _a_ rhymes
vary in each set of fourteen, the _b_ rhymes are the same throughout;
and the first of them in each septet is the same word, _vilana_
(peasant girl), throughout. Thus we have as the rhymes of the first
twenty-eight lines _sebissa_, _mestissa_, _massissa_, _vilana_,
_pelissa_, _treslissa_, _lana_; _planissa_, _faitissa_, _fissa_,
_vilana_, _noirissa_, _m'erissa_, _sana_; _pia_, _via_, _companhia_,
_vilana_, _paria_, _bestia_, _soldan