L'onde qui baise ce rivage,
De quoi se plaint-elle à ses bords?
Pourquoi le roseau sur la plage, pourquoi le ruisseau sous l'ombrage,
Rendent-ils de tristes accords?
De quoi gémit la tourterelle? Tout naist, tout paise.
Such a depth of sympathy and dreamy dolorous reverie was new to France, but Rousseau had broken the ice, and henceforward feeling flowed freely. To Lamartine the theist, as to the pantheists Goethe, Shelley, and Byron, Nature was a friend and lover.
Victor Hugo was of the same mind, but his poetry is clearer and more plastic than Lamartine's. We quote from his finest poems, the Feuilles d'Automne. He was a true lyrist, familiar both with the external life of Nature and the inner life of man. His beautiful 'Ce qu'on entend sur la montagne' has the spirit of Faust. He imagines himself upon a mountain top, with earth on one side, the sea on the other; and there he hears two voices unlike any ever heard before:
L'une venait des mers, chant de gloire! hymne heureux!
C'était la voix des flots qui se parlaient entre eux....
Or, comme je l'ai dit, l'Océan magnifique