Vers le divin bocage où la panthère
Pleure d'amour sous les rosiers lascifs:
Embarquons-nous pour la belle Cythère.
Envoi.
"Rassasions d'azur nos yeux pensifs!
Oiseaux chanteurs, dans la brise expansifs,
Ne souillons pas nos ailes sur la terre.
Volons, charmés, vers les dieux primitifs!
Embarquons-nous pour la belle Cythère."
This is the type of the ballade in its most elaborate and highly-finished form, which it cannot be said to have reached until the 14th century. It arose from the canzone de ballo of the Italians, but it is in Provençal literature that the ballade first takes a modern form. It was in France, however, and not until the reign of Charles V., that the ballade as we understand it began to flourish; instantly it became popular, and in a few years the out-put of these poems was incalculable. Machault, Froissart, Eustache Deschamps and Christine de Pisan were among the poets who cultivated the ballade most abundantly. Later, those of Alain Chartier and Henri Baude were famous, while the form was chosen by François Villon for some of the most admirable and extraordinary poems which the middle ages have handed down to us. Somewhat later, Clément Marot composed ballades of great precision of form, and the fashion culminated in the 17th century with those of Madame Deshoulières, Sarrazin, Voiture and La Fontaine. Attacked by Molière, and by Boileau, who wrote