The rail, looking for tin snails, glides down the rain-drenched meadows.[1]
The landscape is evoked with detached abrupt details, artfully selected, discerned with keen insight and painted with deliberate touch.
The mist smells of smoke; a fountain-jet seems motionless, as of ice,—on the sky of dirty wool, which withered leaves are drifting through.[2]
He is to be ranked with such singers of simple homely life as Cowper and Wordsworth, and particularly Crabbe, whose rude and somewhat bare style, whose minuteness of observation and scrupulous exactitude of detail he often closely recalls, not, of course, for imitation, but by a kinship of mind. He feels that he was born to a simple, lonely life; he has partly realized this ideal, yet there still lives in his inmost heart a craving for mountain solitude, where he would commune with God and nature, where he would tend his flock among the blue gentians and the far gleaming glaciers.—Or it is a yearning to the quiet of a pious life, to 'the peace which passeth understanding.'
My soul is always terrible, sweet and sad.—Why has not my heart always been alone?—I should not have this horrid void in my heart's depths, and, a peasant priest, I should have adorned the crosses with rose-campion, fennel and flag-flowers.[3]
His love for the meek and the humble is prominent in his works.[4] This feeling of charity draws him further and further to God; his aim is now to sing His praise and to give Him the treasures of his heart; he 'strives to be truly His in faith and works;' his prevailing mood is now a continual sense of His presence, an aspiration to Heaven. In the silence of his secluded life he hears these divine whisperings, and, yielding to the call, his soul aspires to its last and only end, to its home and eternal dwelling; he seeks God alone, and wishes to rest in Him, to be dissolved in His love. We seem to hear the cry of St. Augustine.
- ↑ De l'Angelus de l'Aube, 184.
- ↑ Ib., 112.
- ↑ Le Deuil des Primevères, 193, and see, passim, Des Choses, in Le Roman du Lievre, Paris, Mercure de France, 1917, and Pensées des Jardins, Feuilles dans le Vent, Le Poète Rustique (Paris, Mercure de France).
- ↑ Cf. his novels, Le Rosaire au Soliel, Paris, Mercure de France, 1918, and Monsieur le Curé d'Ozeron (id. 1921).
