The Minnesingers have found heirs and continuators in the modern writers of Germany.  Side by side with the increasing tendency to unity in all national literature is working the force of races confounded under one political banner, to assert their existence as such.  Congresses have shaped new kingdoms; but they have not reached or removed the limits of nationalities that have each their expression in song, whether in Moldavia or among the Czechs of Bohemia.  The regeneration of local idioms, which is fast working its way from the Bosphorus to the Atlantic, was first undertaken in Provence, at the instigation of Roumanille.  The son of a gardener of St. Remy, he was first struck with the insufficiency of French literature for his immediate countrymen, when, on his return from college, seeking to recite some of his earlier poems in the language of Racine to his aged mother, she failed to understand them.  For her he translated, and found that his own Provencal was richer, more copious and melodious than the French itself, and, if less finical and restrained by grammatical forms, more pliant for the poet, and better answering the exigencies of primitive, spontaneous expression of feeling.  From that moment his efforts were unceasingly directed towards the reintegration of his mother-tongue, which had so long played but the part of a Cinderella among the Romanic nations.

His poems, collected in 1847, under the title of “Margarideto,” (Daisies,) were hailed by his countrymen with their habitual national enthusiasm.  Nor did he remain inactive during the Revolution of 1848, addressing the people in home-phrase in several small volumes of prose.  In 1852, he sent forth a call to his brother-writers, the felibre, who had joined with him in his efforts.  The result was the publication of “Li Prouvencalo,” a charming selection from those modern Troubadours who in all ranks of society sing, because sing they must, in bright and sunny Provence, and who in very deed find poetry

  “In the forge’s dust and ashes, in the tissues
  of the loom.”

The call of Roumanille was the signal for a revival.  Since that time, he himself, now a publisher in Avignon, has steadily watched and fostered the movement.  The new literature has rapidly gone beyond its home-limits.  Within the present year, Paris has republished several of the most noted works.

The volume which has called forth these remarks, “Lis Oubreto,” comprises the poems of M. Roumanille,—­“Li Margarideto,” “Li Nouve,” “Li Sounjarello,” “La Part de Dieu,” “Li Flour de Sauvi.”  They are characterized by an elevation in the thoughts and a religious purity of sentiment, qualities which, it has been urged, and justly too, were lacking in many of the former productions in various dialects of France.  We call the poetry of Roumanille elevated, yet it always addresses itself to the people of Provence, and borrows its images from the many-colored life of those to whom it speaks;