It would be a hopeless task for an English translator to attempt versions of these poems that should reproduce the original strophe forms.  A few such translations have been made into German, which possesses a much greater wealth of rhyme than English.  Let us repeat that it must not be imputed to Mistral as a fault that he is too clever a versifier.  His strophes are not the artificial complications of the Troubadours, and if these greatly varied forms cost him effort to produce, his art is most marvellously concealed.  More likely it is that the almost inexhaustible abundance of rhymes in the Provencal, and the ease of construction of merely syllabic verse, explain in great measure his fertility in the production of stanzas.  Some others of the Felibres, even Aubanel, in our opinion, have produced verse that is very ordinary in quality.  Verse may be made too easily in this dialect, and fluent rhymed language that merely expresses commonplace sentiment may readily be mistaken for poetry.

The wealth of rhyme in the Provencal language appears to be greater than in any other form of Romance speech.  As compared with Italian and Spanish, it may be noted that the Provencal has no proparoxytone words, and hence a whole class of words is brought into the two categories possible in Provencal.  Though the number of different vowels and diphthongs is greater than in these two languages, only three consonants are found as finals, n, r, s (l very rarely).  The consequent great abundance of rhymes is limited by an insistence upon the rich rhyme to an extent scarcely attainable in French; in fact, the merely sufficient rhyme is very rare.  It is unfortunate that so many of the feminine rhymes terminate in o.  In the Poem of the Rhone, composed entirely in feminine verses, passages occur where nine successive lines end in this letter, and the verses in o vastly out-number all others.  In this unrhymed poem, assonance is very carefully avoided.

The play, Queen Joanna, is remarkable among the productions of Mistral as being the only work of any length he has produced that makes extensive use of the Alexandrine.  In fact, the versification is precisely that of any modern French play written in verse; and we may note here the liberties as to caesura and enjambements which are now usual in French verse.  We remark elsewhere the lack of independence in the dialect of Avignon, that its vocabulary alone gives it life.  Not only has it no syntax of its own, but it really has been a difficulty of the poet in translating his own Alexandrines into French prose, not to produce verses; nor has he always avoided them.  Here, for instance, is a distich which not only becomes French when translated word for word, but also reproduces exactly metre and rhyme:—­

    “En un mot tout me dis que lou ceu predestino
    Un revieure de glori a terro latino.

    “En un mot tout me dit que le ciel prestine
    Un renouveau de gloire a terre latine.”