Explore "French Love-Songs" by Agnes Repplier on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Quand on est coquette, il faut être sage; / L'oiseau de passage / Qui vole à plein cœur / Ne dort pas en l'air comme une hirondelle, / Et peut, d'un coup d'aile, / Briser une fleur. / -- ALFRED DE MUSSET.
The literature of a nation is rooted in national characteristics. Foreign influences may dominate it for a time; but that which is born of the soil is imperishable, and must, by virtue of tenacity, conquer in the end. England, after the Restoration, tried very hard to be French, and the "happy and unreflecting wantonness" of her earlier song was chilled into sobriety by the measured cadences of Gallic verse; yet the painful and perverse effort to adjust herself to strange conditions left her more triumphantly English than before. We are tethered to our kind, and the wisest of all wise limitations is that which holds us well within the sphere of natural and harmonious development.