serves for delicate ornament, and they weave into the
airy nothingness of their verses their trite reflexions on the vanity of
life; just as the grotesques of the charnel-house nest themselves,
together with birds and flowers and the fancies of the pagan mythology,
in the traceries of the architecture of that time, which wantons in its
delicate arabesques with the images of old age and death.

Ronsard became deaf at sixteen; and it was this circumstance which
finally determined him to be a man of letters instead of a diplomatist,
significantly, one might fancy; of a certain premature agedness, and of
the tranquil, temperate sweetness appropriate to that, in the school of
poetry which he founded. Its charm is that of a thing not vigorous or
original, but full of the grace that comes of long study and reiterated
refinements, and many steps repeated, and many angles worn down, with an
exquisite faintness, une fadeur exquise, a certain tenuity and caducity,
as for those who can bear nothing vehement or strong; for princes weary
of love, like Francis the First, or of pleasure, like Henry the Third,
or of action, like Henry the Fourth. Its merits are those of the
old,--grace and finish, perfect in minute detail. For these people are a
little jaded, and have a constant desire for a subdued and delicate
excitement, to warm their creeping fancy a little. They love a constant
change of rhyme in poetry, and in their houses that strange, fantastic
interweaving of thin, reed-like lines, which are a kind of rhetoric in
architecture.

But the poetry of the Pleiad is true not only to the physiognomy of its
age, but also to its country--ce pays du Vendomois--the names and scenery
of which so often recur in it; the great Loire, with its long spaces of
white sand; the little river Loir; the heathy, upland country, with its
scattered pools of water and waste road-sides, and retired manors, with
their crazy old feudal defences half fallen into decay; La Beauce, the
granary of France, where the vast rolling fields of corn seem to
anticipate the great western sea itself. It is full of the traits of that
country. We see Du Bellay and Ronsard gardening, or hunting with their
dogs, or watch the pastimes of a rainy day; and with this is connected a
domesticity, a homeliness and simple goodness, by which this Northern
country gains upon the South. They have the love of the aged for warmth,
and understand the poetry of winter; for they are not far