This is a phrase of different discovery from that which reveals a local rhyme-balanced epigram, a gracious antithesis, taking an intellectual place—­Felice chi vi mira—­or the art-critic’s phrase—­piuttosto bruttini—­of easy, companionable, and equal contempt.

As for French, if it had no other sacred words—­and it has many—­who would not treasure the language that has given us—­no, not that has given us, but that has kept for its own—­ensoleille?  Nowhere else is the sun served with such a word.  It is not to be said or written without a convincing sense of sunshine, and from the very word come light and radiation.  The unaccustomed north could not have made it, nor the accustomed south, but only a nation part-north and part-south; therefore neither England nor Italy can rival it.  But there needed also the senses of the French—­those senses of which they say far too much in every second-class book of their enormous, their general second-class, but which they have matched in their time with some inimitable words.  Perhaps that matching was done at the moment of the full literary consciousness of the senses, somewhere about the famous 1830.  For I do not think ensoleille to be a much older word—­I make no assertion.  Whatever its origin, may it have no end!  They cannot weary us with it; for it seems as new as the sun, as remote as old Provence; village, hill-side, vineyard, and chestnut wood shine in the splendour of the word, the air is light, and white things passing blind the eyes—­a woman’s linen, white cattle, shining on the way from shadow to shadow.  A word of the sense of sight, and a summer word, in short, compared with which the paraphrase is but a picture.  For ensoleille I would claim the consent of all readers—­that they shall all acknowledge the spirit of that French.  But perhaps it is a mere personal preference that makes le jour s’annonce also sacred.

If the hymn, “Stabat Mater dolorosa,” was written in Latin, this could be only that it might in time find its true language and incomparable phrase at last—­that it might await the day of life in its proper German.  I found it there (and knew at once the authentic verse, and knew at once for what tongue it had been really destined) in the pages of the prayer-book of an apple-woman at an Innsbruck church, and in the accents of her voice.

A POINT OF BIOGRAPHY

There is hardly a writer now—­of the third class probably not one—­who has not something sharp and sad to say about the cruelty of Nature; not one who is able to attempt May in the woods without a modern reference to the manifold death and destruction with which the air, the branches, the mosses are said to be full.