of which an adaptation by Mr Swinburne is well known. "In the Orchard," however, is not only a much longer poem than the _alba_ from which it borrows its burden, but is couched in a form much more elaborate, and has a spirit rather early Italian than Provencal. It is, indeed, not very easy to define the Provencal spirit itself, which has sometimes been mistaken, and oftener exaggerated. Although the average troubadour poem--whether of love, or of satire, or, more rarely, of war--is much less simple in tone than the Northern lyric already commented on, it cannot be said to be very complex; and, on the whole, the ease, accomplishment, and, within certain strict limits, variety of the form are more remarkable than any intensity or volume of passion or of thought. The musical character (less inarticulate and more regular), which has also been noted in the poems of the _trouveres_, is here eminent: though the woodnote wild of the Minnesinger is quite absent or very rarely present. The facility of double rhymes, with a full vowel sound in each syllable, has a singular and very pleasing effect, as in the piece by Marcabrun beginning-- "L'autrier jost una sebissa," "the other day by a hedge," the curiously complicated construction of which is worth dwelling on as a specimen. It consists of six double stanzas, of fourteen lines or two septets each, finished by a sestet, _aabaab_. The septets are rhymed _aaabaab_; and though the _a_ rhymes vary in each set of fourteen, the _b_ rhymes are the same throughout; and the first of them in each septet is the same word, _vilana_ (peasant girl), throughout. Thus we have as the rhymes of the first twenty-eight lines _sebissa_, _mestissa_, _massissa_, _vilana_, _pelissa_, _treslissa_, _lana_; _planissa_, _faitissa_, _fissa_, _vilana_, _noirissa_, _m'erissa_, _sana_; _pia_, _via_, _companhia_, _vilana_, _paria_, _bestia_, _soldana_; _sia_, _folia_, _parelharia_, _vilana_, _s'estia_, _bailia_, _l'ufana_. [Sidenote: _Provencal poetry not great._]