THE SONNET OF EXILE. France, Mère des arts, des armes, et des loix, Tu m'as nourry long temps du lait de ta mamelle : Ores, comme un aigneau qui sa nourisse appelle, Je remplis de ton nom les antres et les bois, Si tu m'as pour enfant advoué quelquefois Que ne me respons-tu maintenant, ô cruelle? Entre les loups cruels j'erre parmy la plaine D'une tremblante horreur fait herisser ma peau. ULYSSE." It was of a large gray house, moated, a town beside it, yet not far from woods and standing in rough fields, pure Angevin, Tourmélière, the Manor house of Liré, his home, that Du Bellay wrote this, the most dignified and perhaps the last of his sonnets. The sadness which is the permanent, though sometimes the unrecognized, moderator of his race, which had pierced through in his latter misfortunes, and which had tortured him to the cry that has been printed on the preceding page, here reached a final and a most noble form: something much higher than melancholy, and more majestic than regret. He turned to his estate, the mould of his family, a roof, the inheritance of which had formed his original burden and had at last crushed him; but he turned to it with affection. If one may use so small a word in connection with a great poet, the gentleman in him remembered an ancestral repose. There is very much in the Sonnet to mark that development of French verse in which Du Bellay played so great a part. The inversion of the sentence, a trick which gives a special character to all the later formal drama is prominent: the convention of contrast, the purely classical allusion, are mixed with a spirit that is still spontaneous and |