- I. “Reposez-vous et remerciez.”
- II. “La Cabane du Highlander.”
- III. “Le Château de Bothwell.”
Sainte-Beuve cite en outre dans ses Nouveaux Lundis des 21 et 22 Avril 1862, trois sonnets de Wordsworth traduits en vers, par l’Abbé Roussel. Ces traductions assez pauvres de poésie sont celles des sonnets suivants—
- “Nuns fret not.…”
- “Dark and more dark.…”
- “These words were uttered as in pensive mood.”
Jean Aicard a traduit We are Seven dans La Chanson de l’Enfant.
Paul Bourget (Études et Portraits, vol. ii. op. cit.) a traduit l’un des sonnets au Duddon.
“What aspect bore the Man …?”
III
INFLUENCE
Wordsworth’s influence on French literature was altogether very slight, nor did it make itself felt till about 1830; when, after a very limited period, it silently died away.
Wordsworth was but little known by his contemporary Châteaubriand, who merely names him among other poets in his Essai sur la Littérature anglaise. Byron, Walter Scott, and in a lesser degree Thomas Moore, were the only writers of Great Britain whose works told on our literature at that time. Villemain, in his criticism of Byron, contemptuously dismisses all the so-called lake-poets to fix on his hero. He calls them: “Des métaphysiciens, raisonneurs sans invention, mélancoliques sans passion, qui, dans l’éternelle rêverie d’une vie étroite et peu agitée, n’avaient produit que des singularités sans puissance sur l’imagination des autres hommes. Tel était Woodsworth (sic) et le subtil mais non touchant Coléridge.”