“Surely thou, Guillaume, thou, who canst sing of love so tenderly, and with so much sweetness, thou, of all persons, should be the one to distinguish between a feigned passion and a real one. Methinks the eye of him who loves truly, could most certainly discover from the eye of the beloved one, whether the real flame were yet burning in her heart.” And even as she spoke, the glance of her dark and lustrous eye settled upon his own with such a dewy and quivering fire, that his soul at once became enlightened with her secret. The troubadour was necessarily an _improvisatore_. Guillaume de Cabestaign was admitted to be one of the most spontaneous in his utterance of all his order. His lyre took for him the voice which he could not well have used at that overpowering moment. He sung wildly and triumphantly, inspired by his new and rapturous consciousness, even while her eyes were yet fixed upon him, full still of the involuntary declaration which made the inspiration of his song. These verses, which embodied the first impulsive sentiment which he had ever dared to breathe from his heart of the passion which had long been lurking within it, have been preserved for us by the damsels of Provence. We translate them, necessarily to the great detriment of their melody, from the sweet South, where they had birth, to our harsher Runic region. The song of Guillaume was an apostrophe. Touch the weeping string! Those whose beauty fires me; Oh! how vainly would I sing The passion that inspires me. This, dear heart, believe, Were the love I’ve given, Half as warm for Heaven as thee, I were worthy heaven! Ah! should I lament, That, in evil hour, Too much loving to repent, I confess thy power. Too much blessed to fly, Yet, with shame confessing, That I dread to meet the eye, Where my heart finds blessing. Such a poem is beyond analysis. It was simply a gush of enthusiasm—the lyrical overflow of sentiment and passion, such as a song should be always. The reader will easily understand that the delicacy of the tune, the epigrammatic intenseness of the expression, is totally lost in the difficulty of subjugating our more stubborn language to the uses of the poet. A faint and inferior idea of what was said, sung at this moment of wild and almost spasmodical utterance, is all that we design to convey.