st in a fete, amidst the joys
of the villagers; and at the grief of a young girl, a fiancee whom a
severe attack of smallpox had deprived of her eyesight, and whom her
betrothed lover had abandoned to marry another.

"The grief of the poor abandoned girl, her changes of colour, her
attitude, her conversation, her projects--the whole surrounded by the
freshness of spring and the laughing brightness of the season--exhibits
a character of nature and of truth which very few poets have been able
to attain. One is quite surprised, on reading this simple picture, to be
involuntarily carried back to the most expressive poems of the ancient
Greeks--to Theocritus for example--for the Marguerite of Jasmin may be
compared with the Simetha of the Greek poet. This is true poetry, rich
from the same sources, and gilded with the same imagery. In his new
compositions Jasmin has followed his own bias; this man, who had few
books, but meditated deeply in his heart and his love of nature; and he
followed the way of true art with secret and persevering labour in what
appeared to him the most eloquent, easy, and happy manner...

"His language," Sainte-Beuve continues, "is always the most natural,
faithful, transparent, truthful, eloquent, and sober; never forget this
last characteristic. He is never more happy than when he finds that
he can borrow from an artizan or labourer one of those words which are
worth ten of others. It is thus that his genius has refined during the
years preceding the time in which he produced his greatest works. It is
thus that he has become the poet of the people, writing in the popular
patois, and for public solemnities, which remind one of those of the
Middle Ages and of Greece; thus he finds himself to be, in short, more
than any of our contemporaries, of the School of Horace, of Theocritus,
or of Gray, and all the brilliant geniuses who have endeavoured by study
to bring each of their works to perfection."{5}

The Blind Girl was the most remarkable work that Jasmin had up to this
time composed. There is no country where an author is so popular, when
he is once known, as in France. When Jasmin's poem was published he
became, by universal consent, the Poet Laureate of the South. Yet some
of the local journals of Bordeaux made light of his appearance in that
city for the purpose of reciting his as yet unknown poem. "That a barber
and hairdresser of Agen," they said, "speaking and writing in a vulgar
tongue, shou