Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/20

12 more than had ever yet been done, and welcoming new poets, new romancists, even new historians and philosophers, as demigods come for the salvation of the world. Perhaps our worst quality now is, not so much that genius is wanting as that we have lost this universal spring of youthfulness, and are, though we suppose there is the same proportion of young minds as usual, a middle-aged period. In Englanc we have had no fit of intellectual youthfulness and eagerness since the days when Wordsworth, and Coleridge, and Scott, and Byron were in full song amongst us. Neither has France been young since the period when Victor Hugo and Lamartine began their career. They had this unspeakable advantage in their favour. The enthusiasm of their generation warmed and inspired them; they felt their foreheads strike against the skies, and believed in the aureole of stars which every worshipper attributed to them. It seems very likely, according to all evidence, that poetry requires this sublime self-confidence either supernaturally sustained from within, as in the case of Wordsworth—or fed by enthusiasm from without, as with the Frenchman. Lamartine probably drew this support of the poetic soul from both sources; but that he had the most flattering reception from the public d' elite which he specially addressed, there seems to be no manner of doubt.

He left Paris, he tells, on the day after his book was published, partly moved no doubt by necessity, but partly one feels sure by a trick of that amusing and openhearted vanity which a Frenchman makes no such attempt as an Englishman would do to conceal. " The only tidings," he says, " of my fate which I received was a word from M. Gosselin [his publisher] on the morning of my departure, announcing that his office was thronged by a crowd of the best classes in search of copies; and a note from the oracle the Prince de Talleyrand to his friend the sister of the famous prince Poniatowsky, which she forwarded to me at eight o'clock in the morning, and in which the great diplomatist informed her that he had spent the whole night in reading me, and that at last the soul had its poet." "Tame avait enfin son po 'ete!" what praise more delightful could be breathed into the ear of the young sentimentalist! " Je n'aspirais pas au genie, V&me?ne suffisait: " he adds, with much attendrissement and rapture as may be imagined, " tous ntes pauvres vers tfetaient que des soupirs,"

The character of these " Meditations," "Harmonies? " Recueillements? the appropriate names which he gives to his various collections of poems, may be gleaned at once by their titles. It is somewhat difficult to follow through many editions which have changed the arrangement and succession of the different poems, the actual verses which first saw the day; but they are all so similar in character that we cannot do the poet wrong by instancing at hazard the first that catch the eye. "Benediction de Dieu dans la Solitude." "Hymne du Soir dans les Temples," "Pensée des Morts," "L'Infini dans les Cieux," "Hymne de la Douleur," "Jéhovah; ou l'idée de Dieu,"—so run the strains. Vague piety of an elevated but very general kind, vague sentiment, melancholy, and sadness; vague descriptions of landscape, of rivers, of the sun, the sky, and the mountains,—are to be found in all, always gracefully, often melodiously expressed—sometimes resounding with the accumulation of epithets which suits declamation better than poetry; sometimes dropping into a murmurous sweet monotony, which, barring that the effort is produced by words instead of notes, resembles more (we are conscious of the apparent bull) a song without words than a succession of articulate verses. It is impossible to discover in them much thought; but they are profoundly and tenderly reflective, and express what is recognized as thought by the majority of ordinary- readers. Reflective, retrospective, full of the gentle sadness which is produced by recollections which are melancholy without being bitter—by the memory of the distant dead, whose loss has ceased to be a weighty and present grief—and by that consciousness of the transitory character of life, and peace, and happiness, and everything that man esteems, which is not pressed close by immediate neglect or dismay. They are of the class of poetry which delights youth at that stage when it loves to be made sad, and which affords to women and lonely persons a means of expressing the vague and causeless despondencies of a silent existence.

This is not the highest aim of poetry, but we are not sure that it is not one of its most beneficial uses. The active mind and passionate soul have need of stronger fare; but so long as human nature is framed as it is, the majority must always be subject to the languors and undefined dissatisfactions which result from nothing tangible in our lives, but are the very breath of a higher being—the proofs of