The feeling for nature and for natural beauty is very marked in all the members of the Pleiade. Pelletier speaks of war, love, agriculture, and pastoral life as the chief themes of poetry.[406] He warns the poet to observe nature and life itself, and not depend on books alone; and he dwells on the value of descriptions of landscapes, tempests, and sunrises, and similar natural scenes.[407] The feeling for nature is even more intense in Ronsard; and like Pelletier, he urges the poet to describe in verse the rivers, forests, mountains, winds, the sea, gods and goddesses, sunrise, night, and noon.[408] In another place the poet is advised to embellish his work with accounts of trees, flowers, and herbs, especially those dignified by some medicinal or magical virtues, and with descriptions of rivers, towns, forests, mountains, caverns, rocks, harbors, and forts. Here the appreciation of natural beauty as introduced into modern Europe by the Italian Renaissance--the feeling for nature in its wider aspects, the broad landscape, the distant prospect--first becomes visible in France. "In the painting or rather imitation of nature," says Ronsard, "consists the very soul of heroic poetry." Ronsard also gives warning that ordinary speech is not to be banished from poetry, or too much evaded, for by doing so the poet is dealing a death-blow to "naive and natural poetry."[409] This sympathy for the simple and popular forms of poetry as models for the poetic artist is characteristic of the Pleiade. There is a very interesting passage in Montaigne, in which the popular ballads of the peasantry are praised in a manner that recalls the famous words of Sir Philip Sidney concerning the old song of Percy and Douglas,[410] and which seems to anticipate the interest in popular poetry in England two centuries later:-- "Popular and purely natural and indigenous poetry has a certain native simplicity and grace by which it may be favorably compared with the principal beauty of perfect poetry composed according to the rules of art; as may be seen in the villanelles of Gascony, and in songs coming from nations that have no knowledge of any science, not even of writing. But mediocre poetry, which is neither perfect nor popular, is held in disdain by every one, and receives neither honor nor reward."[411]