Which way have they passed, the kings?
Behind the mountain.
Alas this melancholy and sadness clings always around the things seen with the eyes of our youth. However grand, however beautiful the landscape we have known in early days, when we return, eager to see it once more, something is ever lacking, something or some one!
“Oh, let me, dreaming, lose myself down yonder
Where widespread cornfields, red with poppies, lie,
As when a little lad, I used to wander
And lose myself, beneath the self-same sky.
Some one, searching every cover,
Seeks for me, the whole field over,
Saying her angelus piously;
But where yon the skylarks, singing,
Through the sun their way are winging,
I follow so fast and eagerly.
O poor mother! loving-hearted,
Dear, great soul! thou hast departed;
No more shall I hear thee, calling me.”[4]
(From “Les Isclo d’Or.” Trans. Alma Strettell).
Who can give me back the ideal joy and delight of my child-heart as I sat at my mother’s knee drinking in the wonder-tales and fables, the old songs and rhymes, as she sang and spoke them in the soft sweet language of Provence.
There was the “Pater des Calandes,” Marie-Madeleine the poor fisher-girl, The Cabin-boy of Marseilles, the Swineherd, the Miser, and how many other tales and legends of Provence to which the cradle of my early years was rocked, filling my dreams with poetic visions. Thus from my mother I drew not only nourishment for my body but for my mind and soul, the sweet honey of noble tradition and faith in God.
In the present day, the narrow materialistic system refuses to reckon with the wings of childhood, the divine instincts of the budding imagination and its necessity to wonder, that faculty which formerly gave us our saints and heroes, poets and artists. The child of to-day no sooner opens his eyes than his elders try to wither up both heart and soul. Poor lunatics! Life and the day-school, above all the school of experience, will teach him but too soon the mean realities of life, and the disillusions, analectic and scientific, of all that so enchanted our youth.
If some tiresome anatomist told the young lover that the fair maiden of his heart, in the bloom of her youth and beauty, was but a grim skeleton when robbed of her outer covering, would he not be justified in shooting him out of hand?
In connection with those traditions and wonder-tales of Provence, familiar to my childhood, I cannot do better than quote old Dame Renaude, a gossip of our village when I was a boy.