Celuy qui recommencera.
TO HIS LADY IN SICKNESS.
(The 16th Epistle.)
It is the way this is printed that makes some miss its value. It is, like all the best he wrote, a song; it needs the varying time of human expression, the effect of tone, the repose and the re-lifting of musical notes; illuminated thus it greatly charmed, and if any one would know the order of such a tune, why, it should follow the punctuation: a cessation at the third line; a rise of rapid accents to the thirteenth, and then a change; the last three lines of the whole very much fuller and strong.
So I would hear it sung on a winter evening in an old house in Auvergne, and re-enter the sixteenth century as I heard.
TO HIS LADY IN SICKNESS.
Ma mignonne,
Je vous donne
Le bon jour.