The idea from this time on acquired more and more adherents.  Scores of writers appeared, and volumes whose titles filled many pages swelled the output of Provencal verse.  These new aims were due to the success of Mireio; but it must not be forgotten that Mistral himself, in that poem and in the shorter poems of the same period, gave distinct expression to the new order of ideas, so that we are constantly led back to him, in all our study of the matter, as the creator, the continuer, and the ever present inspirer of the Felibrige.  Whatever it is, it is through him primarily.  Roumanille must be classed as one of those precursors who are unconscious of what they do.  To him the Felibres owe two things:  first of all, the idea of writing in the dialect works of literary merit; and, secondly, the discovery of Frederic Mistral.

Among these new ideas, one that dominates henceforth in the story of the Felibrige, is the idea of race.  Mistral is well aware that there is no Latin race, in the sense of blood relationship, of physical descent; he knows that the so-called Latin race has, for the base of its unity, a common history, a common tradition, a common religion, a common language.

But he believes that there is a race meridionale that has been developed into a kind of unity out of the various elements that compose it, through their being mingled together, and accumulating during many centuries common memories, ideas, customs, and interests.  So Mistral has devoted himself to promoting knowledge of its history, traditions, language, and religion.  As the Felibrige grew, and as Mistral felt his power as a poet grow, he sought a larger public; he turned naturally to the peoples most closely related to his own, and Italy and Spain were embraced in his sympathies.  The Felibrige spread beyond the limits of France first into Spain.  Victor Balaguer, exiled from his native country, was received with open arms by the Provencals.  William Bonaparte-Wyse, an Irishman and a grand-nephew of the first Napoleon, while on a journey through Provence, had become converted to the Felibrean doctrines, and became an active spirit among these poets and orators.  He organized a festival in honor of Balaguer, and when, later, the Catalan poet was permitted to return home, the Catalans sent the famous cup to their friends in Provence.  For the Felibres this cup is an emblem of the idea of a Latin federation, and as it passes from hand to hand and from lip to lip at the Felibrean banquets, the scene is not unlike that wherein the Holy Graal passes about among the Knights of the Round Table.[3]