The poem of “Mirèio,” in parallel French and Provençal, first fell in my way in the summer of 1871; and I admire my own audacity in immediately attempting to turn it into English verse,[1] almost as much as I do that of the men who first preached the Provençal crusade against the language of Racine and Molière. Of course I knew no more of the idiom in which it was originally composed than could be gathered from a close comparison of the same with Mistral’s own French, aided by a smattering of old Provençal. I may plead in extenuation of my effrontery that there was virtually no more to be known at that time, for even the grammar already mentioned had not then been published. There is not very much more to be known even now. [1] Boston, U.S.A., Roberts Bros., 1872. The scheme of the Provençal verse, though elaborate, and seemingly very artificial, was easily enough intelligible to an English ear; more so, I should fancy, than to a Parisian one, on account of its obvious _jingle_--or, to speak by the book, the exuberance of its rhymes, and the strength of its tonic accents. The same remark, as is well known, applies in a general way to the songs of the Troubadours. Mistral’s stanza consists of five eight-syllabled iambic lines with feminine rhymes, in groups of two and three, and two twelve-syllabled iambic lines, with masculine rhymes. The Quaker poet Whittier had fallen upon a somewhat similar verse, in one of the finest of his earlier poems--“Lines written at Hampton Beach”:-- “So when Time’s veil shall fall asunder, The soul may know No sudden change, no curious wonder, Nor sink the weight of mystery under, But with the upward rise, and with the vastness grow.” But this is far simpler than Mistral’s. I did actually make an attempt to transfer this florid measure to our own sober English tongue, and that eminent American poet and very distinguished connoisseur in poetic metres, the late Mr. Longfellow, once told me that he greatly wished I had persevered, and that he thought it would have been quite possible to render the whole poem in the same way. Perhaps it would have been, to a master of versification, like himself; and for his sake, and out of respect for his opinion, I subjoin the opening stanzas of the poem in Provençal, and my own attempt to imitate their metre, premising, for the benefit of the unskilled, that in Provençal every letter sounds, the vowels as in French, while of the consonants _g_ and _j_ before _e_ and _i_ are pronounced like _ds_, and _ch_ always like _ts_. A final vowel is elided, in scanning, before another vowel; and the tonic accent is strongly marked:--