Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/27

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This is finely touched, and with real tenderness of feeling. It is part of the poem entitled "Bénédiction de Dieu dans la Solitude" and was suggested, the poet tells us, by a pretty group formed of his mother, his young wife, her mother and her child, seated in a summer landscape close to the old house which had sheltered his infancy. In this kind of gentle strain, whether it be prose or poetry, he is beyond rivalry. When all other inspiration fails, the inspiration of home never fails him. Whatever he may be elsewhere, at Milly he is ever a true poet. This is the highest praise we can give to Lamartine. His longer poems are monotonous and cloying; his poetical romances of a mawkish and unwholesome sweetness. But on his native soil, in the homely house of his mother, all objectionable qualities disappear. He loves the skies which overarch that dear bit of country; he loves the hills and the fields because they surround that centre of all associations; and in his companionship with nature he is always tender and natural, seldom exaggerated, and scarcely ever morbid. His shorter strains are full of the fresh atmosphere of the country he loved; and the sentiment of pensive evenings and still nights, soft-breathing, full of stars and darkness, is to be found everywhere in the gentle melodious verse; not lofty or all-absorbing like the nature-worship of Wordsworth, but more within the range of the ordinary mind, and quite as genuine and true. Had he been content with this, and not aspired to represent passion of which he knew nothing, his fame would have been more real and more lasting. He was such a poet as the quieter intellectualist, the pensive thinker loves. He could not touch the greater springs of human feeling; but he could so play upon the milder stops of that great instinct as to fill his audience with a soft enthusiasm. Some of his prose works reach to a profounder influence; and those readers who remember, when it came out, the "History of the Girondists," will not refuse to the poet a certain power of moving and exciting the mind: but this work and the many others which preceded and followed it, have little to do with our argument. They are poetical and exaggerated prose, and have no claim to the higher title of poetry.

In the midst of his manifold productions, however, there happened to Lamartine such a chance as befalls few poets. He had it in his power once in his life to do something greater than the greatest lyric, more noble than any vers. At the crisis of the Revolution of 1848, chance (to use the word without irreverence) thrust him and no other into the place of master, and held him for one supreme moment alone between France and anarchy—between, we might almost say, the world and a second terrible Revolution. And there the sentimentalist proved himself a man; he confronted raving Paris, and subdued it. The old noble French blood in his veins rose to the greatness of the crisis. With a pardonable thrill of pride in the position, so strange to a writer and man of thought, into which