It would be a hopeless task for an English translator to attempt
versions of these poems that should reproduce the original strophe
forms. A few such translations have been made into German, which
possesses a much greater wealth of rhyme than English. Let us repeat
that it must not be imputed to Mistral as a fault that he is too clever
a versifier. His strophes are not the artificial complications of the
Troubadours, and if these greatly varied forms cost him effort to
produce, his art is most marvellously concealed. More likely it is that
the almost inexhaustible abundance of rhymes in the Provençal, and the
ease of construction of merely syllabic verse, explain in great measure
his fertility in the production of stanzas. Some others of the Félibres,
even Aubanel, in our opinion, have produced verse that is very ordinary
in quality. Verse may be made too easily in this dialect, and fluent
rhymed language that merely expresses commonplace sentiment may readily
be mistaken for poetry.

The wealth of rhyme in the Provençal language appears to be greater than
in any other form of Romance speech. As compared with Italian and
Spanish, it may be noted that the Provençal has no proparoxytone words,
and hence a whole class of words is brought into the two categories
possible in Provençal. Though the number of different vowels and
diphthongs is greater than in these two languages, only three consonants
are found as finals, _n_, _r_, _s_ (_l_ very rarely). The consequent
great abundance of rhymes is limited by an insistence upon the rich
rhyme to an extent scarcely attainable in French; in fact, the merely
sufficient rhyme is very rare. It is unfortunate that so many of the
feminine rhymes terminate in _o_. In the _Poem of the Rhone_, composed
entirely in feminine verses, passages occur where nine successive lines
end in this letter, and the verses in _o_ vastly out-number all others.
In this unrhymed poem, assonance is very carefully avoided.