50

LIRE

-DU BELLAY.

enemy. The prize is then cut adrift, and makes the best of her way back to Angers, while the victorious pirate, laden with booty and captives, proceeds to Nantes. The whole transaction does not take many minutes, and if one's head is not very cool, or one's ear not very well awake to a foreign language, it bears a most sinister, not to say alarming, aspect.

Nearly opposite Ancenis is the bourg of Liré, the birthplace of Du Bellay, surnamed by his contemporaries, the French Catullus. While residing at Rome, in what to him was a kind of banishment, this agreeable poet and amiable man composed a series of sonnets, recalling the charms and delights of his unforgotten Loire. The reader may not be displeased to see one of them.

Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage!

Où comme celui-là qui conquit la toison,

Et puis est retourné, plein d'usage et raison,
Vivre entre ses parents le rest de son âge!

Quand reverrai-je, hélas ! de mon petit village
Fumer la cheminée, et en quelle saison
Reverrai-je le clos de ma pauvre maison,
Qui m'est une province, et beaucoup davantage?

Plus me plait le séjour qu'un bâtit mes aïeux,
Que des palais Romains le front audacieux;
Plus que le marbre dur me plait l'ardoise fine;
Plus mon Loire Gaulois que le Tibre Latin,
Plus mon petit Liré que le Mont-Palatin,

Et plus que l'air marin la douceur Angevine.

Soon after leaving Ancenis, we glide insensibly into a new world. Everything here is heavy, massive, and colossal; the broad river, blackened with the huge shadow of its banks, rolls sternly and majestically between; a meaning silence seems to brood in the air; and the excited