"Socrates, observe my lessons. Fill thyself with poetic enthusiasm: by its potent charm thou shalt know how to win the object that thou lovest; thou shalt enchain her to the sound of the lyre, by carrying the finished image of thy passion through her ear to her heart." The breath of the Muses, passing over the women of Rome without inspiring them, came to quicken the nation of Clovis, still in its cradle. The _langue d'Oyl_ had Marie de France[330]; the _langue d'Oc_ the Dame de Die[331], who, in her castle of Vaucluse, complained of a cruel friend: "I would know, my gentle and fair friend, why you treat me so fiercely and so harshly:" Per que vos m'etz tan fers, ni tan salvatges. The middle-ages handed those ballads on to the Renascence. Loyse Labé[332] said: Oh! si j'étois en ce beau sein ravie De celui-là pour lequel vais mourant[333]! [Sidenote: Mediæval poetesses.] Clémence de Bourges[334], surnamed the Oriental Pearl, who was buried with her face uncovered and her head crowned with flowers because of her beauty; the two Margarets[335] and Mary Stuart[336], all three Queens, expressed ingenuous frailties in ingenuous language. I had an aunt at about that period of our Parnassus: Madame Claude de Chateaubriand; but I am more embarrassed with Madame Claude than with Mademoiselle de Boistelleul. Madame Claude, disguising herself under the name of the Lover, addresses her seventy sonnets to her mistress. Reader, forgive my Aunt Claude's two-and-twenty years: _parcendum teneris._ If my Aunt de Boistelleul was more discreet, she reckoned fifteen lustres and a half when she was singing, and the traitor Trémigon no longer appeared before her old Warbler's thought save as a Sparrow-hawk[337]. When the language was settled, liberty of sentiment and thought contracted. One remembers hardly any one, under Louis XIV., expect Madame Deshoulières[338], by turns too much extolled and too much depreciated. Elegy extended, through woman's sorrow, under the reign of Louis XV. to the reign of Louis XVI., when the great elegies of the people commence; the old school came to die with Madame de Bourdic[339], who is but little known to-day, although she left a remarkable Ode on Silence. The new school has thrown its thoughts into another mould: Madame Tastu walks in the midst of the modern choir of poetesses in prose or verse, the Allarts[340], the Waldors[341], the Valmores[342], the Ségalas[343], the Révoils[344], the Mercœurs[345], and so on, and so on: _Castalidum turba._ Must we regret that, following the example of the Aonides, she has not celebrated the passion which, according to antiquity, smooths the brow of Cocytus and makes it smile at Orpheus' sighing? At Madame Tastu's concerts, love recites only hymns borrowed from foreign voices. This reminds me of what is related of Madame Malibran[346]: when she wanted to tell of a bird whose name she had forgotten, she used to imitate its song. [Sidenote: Gorge Sand.]