If that love, like all that is a unit, were intense, it must also be calm in its expression, sweet and pure like the sonnets of the Italian poet.
At sunset this child of solitude began to sing, in the marvellous voice which had entered suddenly, like a hope, into the dullest of all ears to music,--those of his father.

He expressed his melancholy by varying the same air, which he repeated, again and again, like the nightingale.

This air, attributed to the late King Henri IV., was not the so-called air of "Gabrielle," but something far superior as art, as melody, as the expression of infinite tenderness.

The admirers of those ancient tunes will recognize the words, composed by the great king to this air, which were taken, probably, from some folk-song to which his cradle had been rocked among the mountains of Bearn.
"Dawn, approach, I pray thee; It gladdens me to see thee; The maiden Whom I love Is rosy, rosy like thee; The rose itself, Dew-laden, Has not her freshness; Ermine has not Her pureness; Lilies have not Her whiteness." After naively revealing the thought of his heart in song, Etienne contemplated the sea, saying to himself: "There is my bride; the only love for me!" Then he sang too other lines of the canzonet,-- "She is fair Beyond compare,"-- repeating it to express the imploring poesy which abounds in the heart of a timid young man, brave only when alone.

Dreams were in that undulating song, sung, resung, interrupted, renewed, and hushed at last in a final modulation, the tones of which died away like the lingering vibrations of a bell.
At this moment a voice, which he fancied was that of a siren rising from the sea, a woman's voice, repeated the air he had sung, but with all the hesitations of a person to whom music is revealed for the first time.
He recognized the stammering of a heart born into the poesy of harmony.
Etienne, to whom long study of his own voice had taught the language of sounds, in which the soul finds resources greater than speech to express its thoughts, could divine the timid amazement that attended these attempts.