Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/161

Rh 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, a 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, that pays du Vendomois, the names and scenery of which so often occur in it; the great Loire, with its spaces of white sand; the little river Loir; the heathy, upland country, Le Bocage, with its scattered pools of water and waste road-sides; La Beauce, the granary of France, where the vast rolling fields of corn seem to anticipate the great western sea itself.