At first, with Malherbe, you may find
it, like the architecture, the whole mode of life, the very dresses of
that time, fantastic, faded, rococo. But if you look long enough to
understand it, to conceive its sentiment, you will find that those
wanton lines have a spirit guiding their caprices. For there is style
there; one temper has shaped the whole; and everything that has style,
that has been done as no other man or age could have done it, as it
could never, for all our trying, be done again, has its true value and
interest. Let us dwell upon it for a moment, and try to gather from it
that special flower, ce fleur particulier, which Ronsard himself tells
us every garden has.
It is poetry not for the people, but for a confined circle, for
courtiers, great lords and erudite persons, people who desire to be
humoured, to gratify a certain refined voluptuousness they have in them.
Ronsard loves, or dreams that he loves, a rare and peculiar type of
beauty, la petite pucelle Angevine, with golden hair and dark eyes.
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