[Footnote 9: _Les Amours_. Par Pierre de Ronsard. Texte etabli par
Ad. van Bever. Two volumes. (Paris: Cres.)]
With the more obvious, and in their way delightful, surprises Ronsard
is generous. He can hold the attention longer than any poet of an equal
tenuity of matter. Chiefly for two reasons, of which one is hardly
capable of further analysis. It is the obvious reality of his own
delight in 'Petrarchising.' He is perpetually in love with making; he
disports himself with a childlike enthusiasm in his art. There are
moments when he seems hardly to have passed beyond the stage of naive
wonder that words exist and are manipulable.
'Dous fut le trait, qu'Amour hors de sa trousse
Pour me tuer, me tira doucement,
Quand je fus pris au dous commencement
D'une douceur si doucettement douce....'
Ronsard is here a boy playing knucklebones with language; and some of
his characteristic excellences are little more than a development of
this aptitude, with its more striking incongruities abated.
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