‘Il est de ceux qui voient les parfums et il sent Les couleurs. Et il s’intéresse Au scarabée cornu, au hérisson piquant, Et aux plantes des doctoresses. Mais le voici, avec sa figure camuse Et son sourire de Sylvain, Fatigué par l’amour bien plus que par les muses Qui aiment son cœur incertain ... Lui-même est un Silène, on le voit au jardin Veiller au légume, à la treille....’ This gentle Francis Jammes recalls sometimes the charming La Fontaine, and also Verlaine. A La Fontaine bereft of his philosophy, his deep knowledge of human nature; a Verlaine from whom the taint of corruption has been washed and therewith his terrible sincerity. And if we can imagine these two great poets mulcted so utterly in their essential substance, the residue in them, too, might remind us of a Faun and a young girl--a mischievous, experienced rustic maid, yet holding in her arms a bunch of lilies. The first prose study of our poet--which still remains one of his most exquisite pages--is the story of a young girl, _Clara d’Ellébeuse_. What a delightful book! It is the sort of little story one can read a dozen times in a dozen years, and find it as affecting the last time as the first. If any attentive student should feel inclined, having read these pages, to fill a shelf with some selected volumes of these modern French writers--with _Colette Baudoche_, for example, from among the novels of Barrès, and _Antoinette_ from Romain Rolland; with _La Jeune Fille Violaine_ from Paul Claudel; with _La Porte Étroite_ from André Gide; to which he might add _La Jeune Fille Bien Élevée_ from the works of René Boylesve; _L’Ombre de l’Amour_ by Madame Tinayre; _Marie-Claire_ by Marguerite Audoux; and the young girls of Francis Jammes, especially _Clara d’Ellébeuse_,--what an idea, what an admirable, unconventional idea such a reader would get of the young French girl! What a gift, at once instructive and delightful, he could make to some young English girl on, say, her five-and-twentieth birthday! Francis Jammes has spent nearly all his life in or near that little town of Orthez (in the department of the Lower Pyrenees), where he was born about 1869. In that part of France, almost as much as in Ireland, Protestants and Catholics divide society pretty equally. Our poet was born and baptized a Catholic, but many of his nearest relations were Huguenots, and, seeing so much of both sides, he does not seem to have taken either very seriously. He showed no particular precocity and, though he began to write poetry, like most people, in his twentieth year, he made his real debut only in 1898, with a volume called _De l’Angelus de l’Aube, à l’Angelus du soir_.