the bridegroom, is out of spirits and mute. He takes no part in the sports of the bridal party. He remembers with grief the blind girl he has abandoned.

In the cottage under the cliff Marguerite meditates a tragedy. She dresses herself, and resolves to attend the wedding at Saint-Amans with her little brother. While dressing, she slips a knife into her bosom, and then they start for the church. The bridal party soon arrived, and Marguerite heard their entrance.

The ceremony proceeded. Mass was said. The wedding-ring was blessed; and as Baptiste placed it on the bride's finger, he said the accustomed words. In a moment a voice cried: "It is he! It is he;" and Marguerite rushed through the bridal party towards him with a knife in her hand to stab herself; but before she could reach the bridegroom she fell down dead-- broken-hearted! The crime which she had intended to commit against herself was thus prevented.

In the evening, in place of a bridal song, the De Profundis was chanted, and now each one seemed to say :-


"The roads shall mourn, and, veiled in gloom,
So fair a corpse shall leave its home!
Should mourn and weep, ah, well-away,
So fair a corpse shall pass to-day!"3
This poem was finished in August 1835; and on the 26th of the same month it was publicly recited by Jasmin at Bordeaux, at the request of the Academy of that city.

There was great beauty, tenderness, and pathos in the poem. It was perfectly simple and natural. The poem might form the subject of a drama or a musical cantata. The lamentations of Marguerite on her blindness remind one of Milton's heart-rending words on the same subject:


"For others, day and joy and light,
For me, all darkness, always night."4
Sainte-Beuve, in criticising Jasmin's poems, says that "It was in 1835 that his talent raised itself to the eminence of writing one of his purest compositions--natural, touching and disinterested--his Blind Girl of Castel-Cuillé, in which he makes us assist in a fête, amidst the joys of the villagers; and at the grief of a young girl, a fiancée whom a severe attack of smallpox had deprived of her eyesight, and whom her betrothed lover had abandoned to marry another.

"The grief of the poor abandoned girl, her changes of colour, her attitude, her conversation, her projects-- the whole surrounded by the freshness of spring and the laughing brightness of the season--exhibits a character of nature and of truth which very few poets have been able to attain. One is quite surprised, on reading this simple picture, to be involuntarily carried back to the most expressive poems of the ancient Greeks--to Theocritus for example--for the Marguerite of Jasmin may be compared with the Simetha of the Greek poet. This is true poetry, rich from the same sources, and gilded with the same imagery. In his new compositions Jasmin has followed his own bias; this man, who had few books, but meditated deeply in his heart and his love of nature; and he followed the way of true art with secret and persevering labour in what appeared to him the most eloquent, easy, and happy manner. . .

"His language," Sainte-Beuve continues, "is always the most natural, faithful, transparent, truthful, eloquent, and sober; never forget this last characteristic. He is never more happy than when he finds that he can borrow from an artizan or labourer one of those words which are worth ten of others. It is thus that his genius has refined during the years preceding the time in which he produced his greatest works. It is thus that he has become the poet of the people, writing in the popular patois, and for public solemnities, which remind one of those of the Middle Ages and of Greece; thus he finds himself to be, in short, more than any of our contemporaries, of the School of Horace, of Theocritus, or of Gray, and all the brilliant geniuses who have endeavoured by study to bring each of their works to perfection."5

The Blind Girl was the most remarkable work that Jasmin had up to this time composed. There is no country where an author is so popular, when he is once known, as in France. When Jasmin's poem was published he became, by universal consent, the Poet Laureate of the South. Yet some of the local journals of Bordeaux made light of his appearance in that city for the purpose of reciting his as yet unknown

  By PanEris using Melati.

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