Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/322

280 faculty of expressing moods explicitly, takes the lead. Let us remember again Deschamps’ ballads, celebrating the beauty of the castles, which we compared with and found inferior to the perfect miniatures of the brothers of Limburg. These poems of Deschamps lack power and splendour; he has not succeeded in reproducing the vision of these glorious halls. But now compare the ballad in which he paints himself, lying ill in his poor little castle of Fismes, kept awake by the cries of barn-owls, starlings, crows and sparrows, nesting in his tower.

At night the owls come with their sinister screeching, evoking thoughts of death:

This trick of the mere enumeration of a multitude of details loses its wearisome character, as soon as the faintest trace of humour is mixed up with it. In the middle of a very prolix allegorical poem, L’Espinette amoureuse, Froissart diverts us