When I have once opened the covers of Turner,--especially upon such a wet day as this,--it is hard for me to leave him until I have wandered all up and down the Loire, revisited Tours and its quiet cathedral, and Blois with its stately chateau, and Amboise with its statelier, and coquetted again with memories of the Maid of Orleans. From the Upper Loire it is easy to slip into the branching valleys which sidle away from it far down into the country of the Auvergne. Turner does not go there, indeed; the more's the pity; but I do, since it is the most attractive region rurally (Brittany perhaps excepted) in all France. The valleys are green, the brooks are frequent, the rivers are tortuous, the mountains are high, and luxuriant walnut-trees embower the roads. It was near to Moulins, on the way hither, through the pleasant Bourbonnois, that Tristram Shandy met with the poor, half-crazed Maria, piping her evening service to the Virgin. And at that thought I must do no less than pull down my "Tristram Shandy," (on which the dust of years has accumulated,) and read again that tender story of the lorn maiden, with her attendant goat, and her hair caught up in a silken fillet, and her shepherd's pipe, from which she pours out a low, plaintive wail upon the evening air. It is not a little singular that a British author should have supplied the only Arcadian resident of all this Arcadian region. The Abbe Delille was, indeed, born hereabout, within sight of the bold Puy de Dome, and within marketing-distance of the beautiful Clermont. But there is very little that is Arcadian, in freshness or simplicity, in either the "Gardens" or the other verse of Delille. Out of his own mouth (the little green-backed book, my boy) I will condemn him:-- "Ce n'est plus cette simple et rustique deesse Qui suit ses vieilles lois; c'est une enchanteresse Qui, la baguette en main, par des hardis travaux Fait naitre des aspects et des tresors nouveaux, Compose un sol plus riche et des races plus belles, Fertilise les monts, dompte les rocs rebelles." The _baguette_ of Delille is no shepherd's crook; it has more the fashion of a drumstick,--_baguette de tambour_. If I follow on southward to Provence, whither I am borne upon the scuds of rain over Turner's pictures, and the pretty Bourbonnois, and the green mountains of Auvergne, I find all the characteristic literature of that land of olives is only of love or war: the vines, the olive-orchards, and the yellow hill-sides pass for nothing. And if I read an old _Sirvente_ of the Troubadours, beginning with a certain redolence of the fields, all this yields presently to knights, and steeds caparisoned,-- "Cavalliers ab cavals armatz." It is smooth reading, and is attributed to Bertrand de Born,[3] who lived in the time when even the lion-hearted King Richard turned his brawny fingers to the luting of a song. Let us listen:--