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INTRODUCTION BY THE TRANSLATOR.

all the garniture of earth thus grown variously in richness, in moderation, and in a sweet and hum- LAMARTINE'S THOUGHTS ON POETRY. ble disorder, putteth it into man's mind, for he is doomed to dress himself so as to follow her law, and thus it is, that in any given number of persons, you shall see some few endowed with this natural gift and grace of slovenry.-Blackwood.

I was so much pleased with this essay by Lamartine that before I had read it half through in the original, I commenced the grateful task of rendering it into English. Its title, being simply "Des

Verses written by Sir Walter Raleigh, on the destinées de la poesie par M. A. de Lamartine, de night before his execution :

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l'académie Française," I presumed that it was some paper read before the French Academy, or some prize dissertation, offered to that learned institution. But in proceeding with my lecture and translation, I soon discovered that it was a preliminary essay to a collection of poems, offered to the reader as expressive and explanatory of its author's views and sentiments. I am not aware that it has been before transferred from the French. It certainly possesses, apart from its own merit, an extraordinary interest at this moment. The name of Lamartine has of late been "great in mouths of wisest censure." He has blazed "the comet of a season." At this moment his light is somewhat obscured; he has passed behind other shining spheres; erratic meteors flash athwart the troubled sky, and their lurid and flickering glare dims his superior and steadier lustre. Yet I doubt if the time of his obscuration will be long: he is not invisible to the telescopic eye of wisdom, and he will soon glow again before the "wondering, upturned gaze" of mortals, not as portentous of events more dire than have already occurred, but a presage of calm and happy seasons to his beloved country. If ever there was a sincere, honest man, such a one is Lamartine. In the law of a just freedom "doth he exercise himself day and night." His delight is in order and moderation. He abhors anarchy and rebellion. He would build up the French Republic, not like the structure of a day, to be tossed over by every storm of popular fury, but a high temple of classic strength and beauty, standing, like the Parthenon at Athens, unharmed for ages and glorious even it its distant, but inevitable ruin.

There is something singularly gentle and womanlike-using the expression in its nobler sense-in the character of Lamartine. He has that rare modesty which ever distinguishes true greatness and real virtue. He never speaks of himself, whether as a poet or a politician, except in a subdued tone. And yet there is no mistrust of his abilities; he has an unwavering confidence in the right and in his power to perform it. It would be inapposite for me in this place, even had I the least capability of doing so, to enter upon an examination of his conduct during the late momentous events in Paris, in which he has acted so prominent a part. But I may be permitted to remark that in all that he has lately spoken or written as a public man, there are discernible a beautiful consonance and harmony

with his private essays, with his views of life, with his hopes for the future, with his love for humanity, with his trust in God.

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wrote many a column of prose and verse at his request, and my name may be recollected by some of those readers, who still continue to support a peri. odical which has done not a little to elevate the literature of the country.

Dosoris, Long Island, Sept. 4, 1848.

THE DESTINIES OF POETRY.

BY ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE.

P. B.

Translated from the French by Park Benjamin.

has arrived.

Before the sudden brilliancy of his late career,— a brilliancy softened, as it were, by the medium through which it passed, made purer by his unsullied character, resembling rather the lustre of the pearl than that of the diamond, Lamartine was chiefly known to readers in this country by his Voyage en L'Orient," (Pilgrimage to the Holy Land,) and his late history of the Girondists. But few translations of his poetry have appeared, and those were not of so high an order as to excite any There is nothing within the sphere of man's very lofty estimate of his genius. They were knowledge of which man knows so little as of himmostly descriptive and seemed to be extracted from self. The phenomena of his thoughts, the laws of the body of long poems, and not possessed of a his civilization, the phases of his progress, or desufficiently independent interest. It would be no cadence, are the mysteries which he has least inunworthy task for some good French scholar, well vestigated. He better knows the paths of those acquainted with the English language and its rules celestial orbs, that roll millions of miles away from of versification, to attempt a complete rendering of the door of his feeble senses, than those terrestrial a few of Lamartine's long poems. Whether, ac- roads, along which human destiny conducts him cording to the elegant phraseology and unselfish unknown; he is conscious that he tends towards sense of the retail trade, “it would pay," is worse something, but he knows not whither his spirit than doubtful; but there are surely lovers enough journeys, he cannot tell at what precise point he of the pure and beautiful in literature in our repubTossed upon the immensity of ocean lic to encourage such an effort,—at least so far as far from shore, the pilot can take his altitude and charitably to bestow upon the translator the remu- determine by his compass that line of the globe neration of a scrivener's clerk. But he must be which he crosses or follows; but it is not so with not only disinterested, but appreciative and indus- the human soul; there is no object, out of itself, trious who would undertake such a task. As for by which it can measure its journey, and everytime myself, I should shrink back appalled by the mag- it says "I am here, I go there, I advance, I renitude and difficulty of the labor, even were I less cede, I stop,"-it finds that it is self-deceived, that painfully conscious of my lack of learning and it has belied its own history--a history which can ability, and could I afford to lavish time unproduc- not be written until its subject has passed away, tively. Even the task, which I have here inef- which marks its traces only after they have been ficiently performed, has been onerous-although printed upon the earth, but which cannot by antici lightened by my love of the author and his subject. pation designate its road. God alone knows the Let him who deems it a facile performance to goal and the way; man knows nothing-false protransfer ornate diction and flowery phrases from phet, he foretells entirely at hazard, and, when fuone language into another, attempt to soar with ture events happen contrary to all his foresight, he Lamartine in one of his splendid flights. Simply is no longer here to witness the contradiction of to construe Lamartine's French, as interliners construe Homer and Virgil, by writing the English meaning under the Greek or Latin word, might be rapid work even for a school-boy; but to give not only the sense, but the style of such a writer, so as to impress the reader with a proper opinion of his genius and manner, is an undertaking which original authors, of far higher pretensions than the present translator, might be proud to accomplish. I can only hope that I may have partially succeeded.

his fate; he reposes in night and silence; he sleeps his sleep and other generations write upon his dust other dreams as vain and fleeting as his own. Religion, politics, philosophy, systems--man has pronounced upon them all, has been deceived about them all; he has believed all fixed and all have been modified, all immortal and all have perished, all true and all have proved false !

But let me speak of poetry.

I remember that at my entrance upon the stage of life, there was but one voice as to the irremediOf one thing I am sure. No one, even with my able downfall, the actual and already frozen death inadequate rendering, can fail to discern many lofty of this mysterious faculty of the human spirit. It and glorious thoughts, sacred aspirations, bright was the epoch of the empire; it was the hour of and hopeful prophecies, in this essay. I take plea- the incarnation of the materialist philosophy of the sure in offering it to the readers of the Southern eighteenth century in government and manners. Literary Messenger, and through it renewing my All the geometricians, who alone had the public ear, correspondence with that excellent magazine. In and who crushed us young men under the insoformer years, during the life of good Mr. White, I'lent tyranny of their triumph,-believed that they

had dried up forever in us, what had really faded all that could ferment in her a spirit of resistance, and perished in themselves, namely--all the moral, or concentrated indignation, in herself alone, an divine, melodious portion of the mind. Nothing active conspiracy, as capable of exciting lofty incan picture to them who were not subjected to it, tellects against that tyranny of reigning mediocrity, the vain-glorious sterility of that epoch. It was as of placing the poniard in the hands of conspirathe Satanic smile of an infernal genius, when de- tors, or of striking the blow herself, to restore to grading a whole generation, uprooting all national her own soul that liberty which she desired to give enthusiasm, destroying a virtue in the world. Those to all the world! Being chosen and set apart, men had the same sentiment of triumphant impo- whose like nature has not bestowed upon us—retence in their hearts and on their lips, when they uniting in her own character Corinna and Miratold us-"love, philosophy, religion, enthusiasm, beau! A sublime tribune, with the tender and exliberty. poetry--all are naught ! Calculation and pansive heart of a wonan-an adorable and com force, arithmetic and the sword, they are every-passionate woman with the genius of the Gracchi thing. We believe nothing but what they prove; and the hand of the last of the Catos! Failing to we perceive nothing to which they do not apply. excite a generous enthusiasm in her own country, Poetry died with the Spiritualism which created it!" from which she was expelled, as we put out a spark And they spoke truly; for poetry was truly dead in an edifice of straw, she took refuge in the mind in their own souls, dead to their intelligences, dead of England and Germany—who alone were at that in them and around them. By a sure and prophet-period living a moral life of poetry and philosoic instinct of their destiny, they trembled lest it phy-and thence cast forth into the world those should spring and flourish again with liberty in the sublime and thrilling pages which the clubs of the world; they cast to the wind its smallest roots, lest police crushed, the custom-house of the intellect it should germinate nnder their feet, in their schools, tore in pieces on the frontiers, the sworn minions in their lyceums, in their gymnasia, in their mili- of tyranny ridiculed at command,—but fragments tary and polytechnic academies. All were organi- of which, escaped from their destroying hands, zed against such a resurrection of the moral and came to console us for our intellectual abasement poetic sentiment; it was a universal league of math- and to waft to our ears and hearts the distant breathematical studies against reflection and poetry. ings of morals, of poetry, of liberty, which we Figures alone were permitted, honored, protected, could not inhale under the pneumatic blasts of slapaid. As arithmetic does not reason, as it is a won - | very and mediocrity.

derful, passive instrument of tyranny, which never M. de Chateaubriand, a genius more melancholy asks for what it is employed, which never inquires and sweet,---a harmonious and enchanted reminiswhether it is made to subserve the oppression of cence of a past, the cinders of which we tread upon mankind, or their deliverance, the slavery of the and whose soul is found in him,-a Homeric imaginamind, or its emancipation, the chief soldier of that tion thrown into the midst of our social convulsions, epoch wished for no other missionary, no other aid, resembling those beautiful columns of Palmyra, and this aid served him well. There was not an which remain erect and brilliant, unbroken and unidea in Europe, which was not trodden under its soiled, above the black and ragged tents of the heel, nor a mouth which was not gagged by its Arabs, to make us understand, wonder at and weep leaden hand. Since then, I abhor the science of over the monument which is no more! A man, numbers--that negation of all thought. Against who sought for a spark of the sacred fire among that exclusive and jealous power of mathematics, the fragments of the sanctuary, in the still smoking I retain the same sentiment, the same horror, which a galley-slave feels for the hard iron and frozen fetters upon his limbs, and of which he thinks that he can still perceive the cold and deathly chill, whenever he hears the clanking of a chain. Mathematics were the chains of human thought. I quently and less loftily in his altogether poetic pabreathe : those chains are broken.

ruins of Christian temples, and who, seducing their demolishers by pity and indifferent observers by his genius, found again some doctrine in the heart and restored faith to the imagination. The words of liberty and of political virtue sound less fre

ges; he was not the Dante of an enslaved FlorTwo great geniuses, whom tyranny watched with ence, he was the Tasso of a lost country, of a unquiet eye, protested aloud against this death- family of proscribed Kings, singing of its affecWarrant of the soul, of the intellect, of poetry-- tions betrayed, its altars overthrown, its towers deMadame de Staël and M. de Chateaubriand. Ma- molished, its goods and its Kings driven awaydame de Staël, a masculine genius in the form of singing of them in the ears of the proscribers, on a woman,--a mind distracted by the superabun- the borders even of the rivers of the country. dance of its strength, restless, passionate, anda- Still, his grand and noble soul inparted to the songs cious, capable of generous and sudden resolves, of the poet something of the accent of the citizen. not able to breathe in that atmosphere of cowar- He thrilled all the generous fibres of the breast; dice and servitude, demanding space and free air he ennobled the mind; he resuscitated the soul; around her, attracting as if by magnetic instinct it was sufficient to disturb the slumbers of the jail

ers of our intellect. By I know not what instinct the wintry north-east, or the rolling of the heavy of their nature they presaged an avenger in the clouds that broke against the corners of the mounman, who charmed them in their own despite. tains, or to the aerial melody of the lark, which They know that nobler sentiments meet and en- the wind bore from its sphere of music-even as gender more, and that in hearts stirred by religious my thoughts, stronger than myself, transported my emotions and manly, independent thoughts, tyranny soul. Were these impressions of joy or sadness, would find judges and liberty accomplices. of grief or suffering I cannot tell they partook of all those sentiments at the same time. They were of love and religious presentiments of after life both delicious and sad, of ecstacies and

From those days I have loved those gifted precursors of genius, who appeared to me and gave me consolation on my entrance into life. Staël and Chateaubriand-those two names fill much of discouragements, of horizons of lights and depths the void, illumine much of the shadow. They were for us like two living protestations against the oppression of the soul and the heart, against the debasement and ruin of the age; they were the aliment of our solitary households, the concealed bread of our oppressed souls; they seemed to us a family heritage, they were of our blood and we of theirs, and there is scarcely one among us who owes not to them what he was, is, or will be.

of darkness, of gladness and tears, of the future and of despair. Nature was speaking by her thonsand voices to the still virgin heart of man; above all it was poetry. That poetry I sometimes essayed to express in verses; but I had no one to whom these verses could be repeated; sometimes I read them to myself; and I found with surprise and grief that they bore no resemblance to those which I read in the collections and volumes of the At that time, I lived alone, my heart overflowing day. I said to myself-none will desire to read with suppressed sentiments, with unwritten poetry, them; they will appear strange, ridiculous, silly— sometimes in Paris hidden in that crowd where you so I burned them half written out. I thus destroyare jostled only by gallants and soldiers; some-ed some volumes of that first and vague poetry of times at Rome, where no other noise was heard but the heart; and it was well that I did so; for, at that of stones falling one by one in the desert of that period, they would have been brought forth in the abandoned streets; sometimes at Naples where ridicule and died in the general contempt of all that the warm sky, the blue sea, and the balmy earth, was denominated literature.

enervated without putting me to sleep, and where What I have since written is not worth much an inner voice always told me that there was some-more; but the times have changed; poetry returnthing more lively, more noble, more delightful to ed to France with liberty, with free thought, with the soul than that torpid life of the senses and that that moral life, which was restored to us by the voluptuous softness of its music and its loves. restoration. It seemed as if the return of the Oftener still I resorted to the country to spend the Bourbons and of liberty to France imparted a new melancholy autumn in the lonely mansion of my fa- inspiration, another soul to the oppressed and slumther and mother, in peace, in stillness, in the domes- bering literature of the day, and we then saw arise tic sanctity of the sweet impressions of the fire- a host of celebrated names in poetry or in philososide; by day traversing the forests, at evening read-phy, which still throng our academies and constiing what I found under the ancient radiance of the tute the brilliant chain of transition between the family library. two epochs. Who could then have told me that, Job, Homer, Virgil, Tasso, Milton, Rousseau, and fifteen years after, poetry would overflow the souls more than all, Ossian and Paul and Virginia-these of the youth of France; that talents of various book-friends spoke to me in solitude the language and new orders would spring from that cold and of my heart; a language of harmony, of images, dead soil; that the press, multiplied to infinitude, of passion; I lived sometimes with one, sometimes would scarcely suffice to disseininate the fervent with another, not changing them except when, so thoughts of an army of young writers; that the to speak, I had quite exhausted them. As long as drama would be knocking at the doors of the thea I live, I shall remember certain hours of summer tres; that the lyric and religious soul of a generawhich I passed extended on the grass in a clearing tion of Christian bards would invent a new lanof the woods, in the shadow of an old trunk of the guage to reveal unknown enthusiasms; that liberwild apple tree, reading The Jerusalem Delwered, ty, faith, philosophy, politics, doctrines the most and as many evenings of autumn or winter spent ancient as well as modern, would in the face of in roaming over the hills already garmented in fogs day be manifested by genius, glory, talents and arand frost, with Ossian or Werther for a compan-dor, and that a vast and sublime combination of ion, sometimes lifted up by the inner enthusiasm minds would cover not only France, but the world, that consumed me, running over the furze as if with the most powerful as well as beautiful intelwafted by a spirit which prevented my feet from lectuality that any age has ever beheld! If any touching the sod; sometimes seated on a gray rock, one would have predicted all this, I should not have my forehead in my hands, listening, with a name- believed it; and yet it is so. Poetry was not even less emotion, to the sharp and plaintive whistle of then defunct in the souls of men, though we were

so told in those years of scepticism and algebraand, if it did not then expire, surely it will live for

ever.

All this is poetry. It is even man himself; it is the instinct of all his epochs; it is the inner echo of all his human impressions; it is the voice of thinking and sentient humanity, taken up and remodulated by certain men-more manly than the common herd-mens divinior-hovering over this tumultuous and confused noise of generations existing longer than they and giving witness to posterity of their lamentations and their joys, their deeds and their thoughts. Never will this voice be silent in the world; for it was not invented by man. It was bestowed by God himself, and it was the first cry from humanity which ascended to his throne. It will also be the latest which the Creator will hear from the lips of the created, when he shall break in pieces the work of his hands. De

So long as man himself survives, can his finest faculty be extinguished? And is not poetry that faculty? Since it constitutes all that is divine within us, it cannot be defined by one word or a thousand words. It is an incarnation of all that is most precious in the heart of man and most holy in his spirit, of all that is most sublime in the aspect of Nature and most melodious in her tones. It is at the same time sentiment and sensation, mind and matter, and this is the reason that it is a complete language the language which above all appeals to man through his entire humanity—an idea for the spirit, sentiment for the soul, image for the fancy, and music for the ear! This is why this lan-rived from him, to him it will return. guage, when well spoken, strikes man like a thun- One day, while journeying in the Holy Land, I der-peal, overpowers him with internal conviction, had pitched my tent in a rude and rocky field, in or irresistible evidence, or enchants him like a magic potion, or rocks him into moveless pleasure like a child charmed in its cradle by the touching refrains of its mother's lullaby. Hence it is that man can neither create nor bear too much poetry; for, possessing him wholly by his soul and sense, exciting at the same time this double facultythought by thought, sense by sensation, it exhausts him, it weighs him down too soon, like all too exquisite joys, with a voluptuous weariness, and causes him to express, in but few verses and brief time, all the innermost life and power of sentiment in his double organization.

which there grew many knotty and stunted olivetrees, under the walls of Jerusalem, some hundred paces from the tower of David, a little below

"Siloa's brook that flowed Fast by the oracle of God,"*

which still glided over the used basin of its grotto, not distant from the tomb of the poet-king who had so often sung its beauties. The high and black terraces, which formerly supported Solomon's temple, rose on my left, crowned by the three azure domes and the light and aërial columns of the Prose addresses itself only to the mind; poetry Mosque of Omar, which now overlooks the ruins speaks to the mind and the sensations at the same of the mansion of Jehovah. The city of Jerusatime. This language, all mysterious, all instinc- lem, where the plague then raged, was at the motive as it is, or rather because it is mysterious and ment inundated with the rays of a dazzling sun, instinctive,—this language will never die! It is glinted back from its thousand domes, its white not-as people have not ceased to say in spite of marble structures, its towers of gilded stone, and the successive contradictions of all ages, it is not its walls polished by ages and the salt breezes of solely the language of mankind's infancy; it is the the Asphaltic lake. No noise came from its prelanguage of all the periods of humanity, simple cincts, dumb and solemn as the couch of the dying; and modest in the babyhood of nations, story-tel- its large gates were open, and from time to time, ling and marvellous as the nurse at the bedside of were descried the white turban and red mantle of the child, loving and pastoral with young and pas- the Arab soldier,-useless guardian of those abantoral people, warlike and epic with contending and doned portals. Nothing went in, nothing departconquering hordes; mystical, lyrical, prophetic, ed. The wind of the morning alone raised the or sententious, in the theocracies of Egypt or Ju-wave-like dust of the roads and created the modea; grave, philosophical and corrupting in the mentary illusion of a moving caravan; but when matured civilizations of Rome, Florence, or Louis the gusts of wind had passed on, when they had XIV.; reckless and noisy in the epochs of convul- died away in murmurs over the battlements of the sion and ruin as in the year 1793; novel, melan-tower of the Pisans or the three palms before the choly, uncertain, timid and audacious at the same house of Caiaphas, the dust subsided, the desert time, in days of new birth and social reconstruc- reappeared, and neither the step of mule nor camel tion like the present! By and by, in the servility resounded on the pavements of the way. Only, of mankind, sad, sombre, lamenting and despairing, every quarter of an hour, were the two iron leaves breathing in its strophes mournful presentiments, of each of the gates of Jerusalem thrown apart, and fantastic visions of the final catastrophe of the

world, or giving utterance to fixed and holy hopes *The quotation is so appropriate, that I needs must inof the resurrection of humanity under another troduce it instead of writing simply, "the fountains of Siform.

loa.”—TE.

VOL. XIV-77

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