pression, I have never hoped to surpass this unrhymed and unmeasured version, which needed, as it seemed to me, only a rhythmic form to render it worthy of the essentially musical original.
What that form should be, I found, when I came myself to think of translating "Mirèio" into verse, a question of no little difficulty. The Provençal measure is very un-English and alluring,—highly ornate in melody, abounding in double and triple rhymes, echoes and assonances; in general effect most like the elaborate Latin metres invented by the monks of the Middle Age, as Bernard of Cluny's in "De Contemptu Mundi." I can think of no English verse at all resembling it unless it be Whittier's in one of the best of his earlier poems,—Lines written at Hampton Beach:—
"So when Time's veil shall fall asunder
The soul may know
No sudden change, no curious wonder,
Nor sink the weight of mystery under,
But with the inward rise, and with the vastness grow."
But this is far simpler than Mistral's. Hopeless as the notion seemed, I did make an attempt to transfer this florid measure to our sober English tongue, but soon became convinced that a few pages at most would exhaust its possibilities and render it wofully tedious. Only the plainest and most transparent of English metres could, I thought, endure and adapt itself with
