Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/165

Rh itself sometimes to perish and pass away. Nothing less can relieve his weariness. From the stately aspects of Rome his thoughts went back continually to France, to the smoking chimneys of his little village, the longer twilight of the North, la douceur Angevine; yet not so much to the real France, we may be sure, with its dark streets and roofs of rough-hewn slate, as to that other country with slenderer towers, and more winding rivers, and trees like flowers, and softer sunshine on more gracefully-proportioned fields and ways, which the fancy of the exile, and the pilgrim, and of the schoolboy far from home, and of those kept at home unwillingly, everywhere builds up before or behind them.

He came home at last through the Grisons, by slow journeys, and there in the cooler air of his own country, under its skies of milkier blue, the sweetest flower of his genius sprang up. There have been poets whose whole fame has rested on one poem, as Gray's on the 'Elegy in a Country Churchyard,' or Ronsard's, as many critics have thought, on the eighteen lines of one famous ode. Du Bellay has almost been the poet of one poem, and this one poem of his is an Italian thing transplanted into that green country of Anjou; out of the Latin verses of Naugerius, into French; but it is a thing in which the matter is almost nothing, and the form