Avril | Page 7

the most famous of the many things he
wrote; and justly, for they have all these qualities.
_First_, they are exact specimens of their style. The Roundel should
interweave, repeat itself, and then recover its original strain, and these
two exactly give such unified diversity.
_Secondly_: they were evidently written in a moment of that unknown
power when words suggest something fuller than their own meaning,
and in which simplicity itself broadens the mind of the reader. So that it
is impossible to put one's finger upon this or that and say this adjective,
that order of the words has given the touch of vividness.
_Thirdly_: they have in them still a living spirit of reality; read them
to-day in Winter, and you feel the Spring. It is this quality perhaps
which most men have seized in them, and which have deservedly made
them immortal.
A further character which has added to their fame, is that, being perfect
lyrics, they are also specimens of an old-fashioned manner and metre
peculiar to the time. They are the resurrection not only of the Spring,
but of a Spring of the fifteenth century. Nor is it too fantastic to say that
one sees in them the last miniatures and the very dress of a time that
was intensely beautiful, and in which Charles of Orleans alone did not
feel death coming.
_THE TWO ROUNDELS OF SPRING._

_Les fourriers d'Esté sont venus
Pour appareillier son logis,
Et ont
fait tendre ses tappis,
De fleurs et verdure tissus.
En estandant
tappis velus
De verte herbe par le pais,
Les fourriers d'Esté sont
venus
Pour appareillier son logis.
Cueurs d'ennuy pieça morfondus,

Dieu merci, sont sains et jolis;
Alez vous en, prenez pais,
Yver
vous ne demourrez plus;
Les fourriers d'Esté sont venus._
_Le temps a laissié son manteau
De vent, de froidure et de pluye,
Et
s'est vestu de brouderie,
De soleil luyant, cler et beau.
Il n'y a beste,
ne oyseau,
Qu'en son jargon ne chant ou crie;
Le temps a laissié son
manteau
De vent de froidure et de pluye.
Riviere, fontaine et
ruisseau
Portent, en livrée jolie,
Gouttes d'argent d'orfavrerie,

Chascun s'abille de nouveau.
Le temps a laissié son manteau._
HIS LOVE AT MORNING.
(_The 6th of the "Songs"._)
In this delightful little song the spontaneity and freshness which saved
his work, its vigour and its clarity are best preserved.
It does indeed defy death and leaps four centuries: it is young and
perpetual. It thrills with something the failing middle ages had
forgotten: it reaches what they never reached, a climax, for one cannot
put too vividly the flash of the penultimate line, "I am granted a vision
when I think of her."
Yet it was written in later life, and who she was, or whether she lived at
all, no one knows.
_HIS LOVE AT MORNING._
_Dieu qu'il la fait bon regarder
La gracieuse bonne et belle!
Pour
les grans biens qui sont en elle,
Chascun est prest de la louer
Qui se
pourroit d'elle lasser!
Tousjours sa beaulté renouvelle.
Dieu, qu'il la
fait bon regarder,
La gracieuse, bonne et belle!
Par deça, ne delà la
mer,
Ne sçay Dame ne Damoiselle
Qui soit en tous biens parfais
telle;
C'est un songe que d'y penser.
Dieu, qu'il la fait bon

regarder!_
THE FAREWELL.
(_The 310th Roundel._)
Here is the last thing--we may presume--that Charles of Orleans ever
wrote: "Salute me all the company, I pray."
In that "company", not only the Court at Amboise, but the men of the
early wars, his companions, were round him, and the dead friends of his
gentle memory.
He was broken with age; he was already feeling the weight of isolation
from the Royal Family; he was beginning to suffer the insults of the
king. But, beneath all this, his gaiety still ran like a river under ice, and
in the ageing of a poet, humour and physical decline combined make a
good, human thing.
There is an excellent irony in the refrain: "Salute me, all the company,"
whose double interpretation must not be missed, though it may seem
far-fetched.
Till the last line it means, without any question, "Salute the company in
my name," but I think there runs through it also, the hint of "Salute me
for my years, all you present who are young," and that