“To thee I dedicate Mireio; it is my heart and my soul; it is the flower of my years; it is a bunch of grapes from Crau with all its leaves—­a rustic’s offering.”

With the publication of Mireio Mistral instantly “arrived,” instantly found himself on that throne which, as year has followed year, has become more securely his own.  Since then he has written much noble poetry, all embodying and vitalizing the legendary lore of his native land, a land richer in momentous history, perhaps, than any other section of Europe.  But in addition to his poetry he has, single-handed, carried through the tremendous scholarly task of compiling a dictionary of the Provencal language—­a Thesaurus of the Felibrige, for which work the Institute awarded him a prize of ten thousand francs.

In 1904, he was awarded the Nobel prize of 100,000 francs, but such is his devotion to his fellow-countrymen that he did not keep that prize for himself, but used it to found the Musee Arlesien at Arles, a museum designed as a treasure house of anything and everything pertaining to the history and life of Provence—­antiquities, furniture, costumes, paintings, and so forth.

It was in Arles in 1909, the fiftieth birthday of Mireio, that Mistral, then seventy-nine years old, may be said to have reached the summit of his romantic fame.  A great festival was held in his honour, in which the most distinguished men of France took part.  A dramatized version of his Mireio was played in the old Roman amphitheatre, and a striking statue of him was unveiled in the antique public square, the Place du Forum, with the shade of Constantine looking on, one might feel, from his mouldering palace hard by.

In Arles Mistral is a well-known, beloved figure, for it is his custom, every Saturday, to come there from Maillane, to cast his eye over the progress of his museum, the pet scheme of his old age.  One wonders how it must seem to pass that figure of himself, pedestaled high in the old square.  To few men is it given to pass by their own statues in the street.  Sang a very different poet—­

          They grind us to the dust with poverty,
          And build us statues when we come to die.

But poor Villon had the misfortune to be a poet of the “langue d’oil,” and the Montfaucon gibbet was the only monument of which he stood in daily expectation.  Could the lines of two poets offer a greater contrast?  Blessed indeed is he who serves the rural gods, Pan and Old Sylvanus and the sister nymphs—­as Virgil sang; and Virgilian indeed has been the golden calm, and sunlit fortunes, as Virgilian, rather than Homeric, is the gracious art, of the poet whom his first Parisian admirer, Adolphe Dumas, called “the Homer of Provence”—­as Virgilian, too, seemed the landscape through which at length, one April afternoon, we found ourselves on pilgrimage to the home of him whose name had been on the lips of every innkeeper, shopkeeper, and peasant, all the way from Marseilles to Tarascon.