Yet it was under these circumstances that his genius yielded its best
fruits. From Rome, which to most men of an imaginative temperament such
as his would have yielded so many pleasurable sensations, with all the
curiosities of the Renaissance still fresh there, his thoughts went back
painfully, longingly, to the country of the Loire, with its wide
expanses of waving corn, its homely pointed roofs of grey slate, and its
far-off scent of the sea. He reached home at last, but only to die
there, quite suddenly, one wintry day, at the early age of thirty-five.
Much of Du Bellay's poetry illustrates rather the age and school to
which he belonged than his own temper and genius. As with the writings
of Ronsard and the other poets of the Pleiad, its interest depends not
so much on the impress of individual genius upon it, as on the
circumstance that it was once poetry a la mode, that it is part of the
manner of a time--a time which made much of manner, and carried it to a
high degree of perfection. It is one of the decorations of an age which
threw much of its energy into the work of decoration.
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