The enthusiasm of the poet leads him into exaggeration whenever he comes to a wonder of Provence.  Things are relative in this world, and the same words carry different meanings.  Avignon is scarcely a colossal pile of towers, and would not remind many of Venice, even at sunset, and we must make a discount when we hear that the boats are engulfed in the fierce (sic) arch of the colossal bridge of stone that Benezet, the shepherd, erected seven hundred years ago.  A moment later he refers daintily and accurately to the chapel of Saint Nicholas “riding on the bridge, slender and pretty.”  The epithets sound larger, too, in Provencal; the view of Avignon is “espetaclouso,” the walls of the castle are “gigantesco.”

Especially admirable in its sober, energetic expression is the account of the Remonte, in the eleventh canto, wherein we see the eighty horses, grouped in fours, tug slowly up the river.

“The long file on the rough-paved path, dragging the weighty train of boats, in spite of the impetuous waters, trudges steadily along.  And beneath the lofty branches of the great white poplars, in the stillness of the Rhone valley, in the splendor of the rising sun, walking beside the straining horses that drive a mist from their nostrils, the first driver says the prayer.”

With each succeeding poem the vocabulary of Mistral seems to grow, along with the boldness of expression.  All his poems he has himself translated into French, and these translations are remarkable in more than one respect.  That of the Poem of the Rhone is especially full of rare French words, and it cannot be imputed to the leader of the Provencal poets that he is not past master of the French vocabulary.  Often his French expression is as strange as the original.  Not many French writers would express themselves as he does in the following:—­

“Et il tressaille de jumeler le nonchaloir de sa jeunesse au renouveau de la belle ingenue.”

In this translation, also, more than in the preceding, there is occasionally an affectation of archaism, which rather adds to than detracts from the poetic effect of his prose, and the number of lines in the prose translation that are really ten-syllable verses is quite remarkable.  On one page (page 183 of the third edition, Lemerre) more than half the lines are verses.

Is the Poem of the Rhone a great poem?  Whether it is or not, it accomplishes admirably the purpose of its author, to fix in beautiful verse the former life of the Rhone.  That much of it is prosaic was inevitable; the nature of the subject rendered it so.  It is full of beauties, and the poet who wrote Mireio and completed it before his thirtieth year, has shown that in the last decade of his threescore years and ten he could produce a work as full of fire, energy, life, and enthusiasm as in the stirring days when the Felibrige was young.  In this poem there occurs a passage put into the mouth of the Prince, which gives a view of life that we suspect is the poet’s own.  He here calls the Prince a young sage, and as we look back over Mistral’s life, and review its aims, and the conditions in which he has striven, we incline to think that here, in a few words, he has condensed his thought.