So, when they read, they attached the highest value to the external forms which produce impressions: they were affected more by these than by ideas. The wife of Guillaume Budé declared that she loved her husband’s books, not for their contents, but because she regarded them as his offspring. Women adored magnificence of expression—the rhetoric, the rhythm, the “gay trimmings” of style; poetry seemed to them the supreme enchantment, because it answered at once to their personal craving for “sensibility” and to their mission, which consisted precisely in sowing a little charm in life, that is, in garnishing life externally with a little poetry. However, what they called poetry we should rather call music. Poetry in those days was only a perpetual libretto; there was rhythm and cadence in the arrangement of the words, and the impression they gave was a musical one. Perfect clearness was not insisted on; the thought was allowed to remain in semi-obscurity, like a melody flowing uncertainly through a strain of music, rather betrayed than revealed by the harmony. Our great Lamartine, with his lofty but indefinite thought, has been regarded even by us as the first of poets. On the other hand, the aim of musical melody was boldly to seize all these words, to give them a precise value, intensity, brilliance, and force. The employment chiefly, or indeed exclusively, of human voices brought this quality still further into prominence; the delicate modulations of the voice, thrown out with matchless skill, seemed to outline the very soul of the singer, like traceries against the sky. The admirable inspirations of Vittoria and her predecessors will never cease to touch us. In that old idealistic music there lies a whole intangible world; our vows, our love, our poignant sorrows, our prayers gush forth in it like a fountain, flash like a bursting rocket in the sky: “God has given us nothing more pleasant, nothing more sweet,” exclaimed a poet: “music is a messenger from heaven, the solace of all our woes.”[237]