Humboldt is, in many respects, and perhaps upon the whole, at the head of the list; and to his profound and varied works we hope to be able to devote a future paper. He unites, in a degree that perhaps has never before been witnessed, the most various qualities, and which, from the opposite characters of mind which they require, are rarely found in unison. A profound philosopher, an accurate observer of nature, an unwearied statist, he is at the same time an eloquent writer, an incomparable describer, and an ardent friend of social improvement. Science owes to his indefatigable industry many of her most valuable acquisitions; geography, to his intrepid perseverance, many of its most important discoveries; the arts, to his poetic eye and fervid eloquence, many of their brightest pictures. He unites the austere grandeur of the exact sciences to the bewitching charm of the fine arts. It is this very combination which prevents his works from being generally popular. The riches of his knowledge, the magnitude of his contributions to scientific discovery, the fervour of his descriptions of nature, alternately awaken our admiration and excite our surprise; but they oppress the mind. To be rightly apprehended, they require a reader in some degree familiar with all these subjects; and how many of these are to be met with? The man who takes an interest in his scientific observations will seldom be transported by his pictures of scenery; the social observer, who extracts the rich collection of facts which he has accumulated regarding the people whom he visited, will be indifferent to his geographical discoveries. There are few Humboldts either in the reading or thinking world.
Chateaubriand is a traveller of a wholly different character—he lived entirely in antiquity. But it is not the antiquity of Greece and Rome which has alone fixed his regards, as it has done those of Clarke and Eustace—it is the recollections of chivalry, the devout spirit of the pilgrim, which chiefly warmed his ardent imagination. He is universally allowed by Frenchmen of all parties to be their first writer; and it may be conceived what brilliant works an author of such powers, and eminently gifted both with the soul of a poet and the eye of a painter, must have produced in describing the historic scenes to which his pilgrimages extended. He went to Greece and the Holy Land with a mind devout rather than enlightened, credulous rather than inquisitive. Thirsting for strong emotions, he would be satisfied; teeming with the recollections and visions of the past, he traversed the places hallowed by his early affections with the fondness of a lover who returns to the home of his bliss, of a mature man who revisits the scenes of his infancy. He cared not to enquire what was true or what was legendary in these time-hallowed traditions; he gladly accepted them as they stood, and studiously averted all enquiry into the foundation on which they rested. He wandered over the Peloponnesus or Judea with the fond ardour of an English scholar who seeks in the Palatine Mount the traces of Virgil's enchanting description of the hut of Evander, and rejects as sacrilege every attempt to shake his faith.
"When Science from Creation's face
Enchantment's visions draws,
What lovely visions yield their place
To cold material laws!"
Even in the woods of America, the same ruling passion was evinced. In those pathless solitudes, where no human foot had ever trod but that of the wandering savage, and the majesty of nature appeared in undisturbed repose, his thoughts were still of the Old World. It was on the historic lands that his heart was set. A man himself, he dwelt on the scenes which had been signalized by the deeds, the sufferings, the glories of man.
Michaud's mind is akin to that of Chateaubriand, and yet different in many important particulars. The learned and indefatigable historian of the Crusades, he has traversed the shores of the Mediterranean—the scene, as Dr Johnson observed, of all that can ever interest man—his religion, his knowledge, his arts—with the ardent desire to imprint on his mind the scenes and images which met the eyes of the holy warriors. He seeks to transport us to the days of Godfrey of Bouillon and Raymond of Toulouse; he thirsts with the Christian host at Dorislaus, he shares in its anxieties at the siege of Antioch, he participates in its exultation at the storming of Jerusalem. The scenes visited by the vast multitude of warriors who, during two hundred years, were precipitated from Europe on Asia, have almost all been visited by him, and described with the accuracy of an antiquary and the enthusiasm of a poet. With the old chronicles in his hand, he treads with veneration the scenes of former generous sacrifice and heroic achievements, and the vast and massy structures erected on either side during those terrible wars—when, for centuries, Europe strove hand to hand with Asia—most of which have undergone very little alteration, enable him to describe them almost exactly as they appeared to the holy warriors. The interest of his pilgrimage in the East, accordingly, is peculiar, but very great; it is not so much a book of travels as a moving chronicle; but, like Sir W. Scott's Minstrelsy of the Borders, it is a chronicle clothed in a very different garb from the homely dress of the olden time. It transports us back, not only in time but in idea, six hundred years; but it does so with the grace of modern times—it clothes the profound feelings, the generous sacrifices, the forgetfulness of self of the twelfth century, with the poetic mind, the cultivated taste, the refined imagery of the nineteenth.
Lamartine has traversed the same scenes with Chateaubriand and Michaud, and yet he has done so in a different spirit; and the character of his work is essentially different from either. He has not the devout credulity of the first, nor the antiquarian zeal and knowledge of the last; but he is superior to either in the description of nature, and the painting vivid and interesting scenes on the mind of the reader. His work is a moving panorama, in which the historic scenes and azure skies, and placid seas and glowing sunsets, of the East, are portrayed in all their native brilliancy, and in richer even than their native colours. His mind is stored with the associations and the ideas of antiquity, and he has thrown over his descriptions of the scenes of Greece or Holy Writ, all the charms of such recollections; but he has done so in a more general and catholic spirit than either of his predecessors. He embarked for the Holy Land shortly before the Revolution of 1830; and his thoughts, amidst all the associations of antiquity, constantly reverted to the land of his fathers—its distractions, its woes, its ceaseless turmoil, its gloomy social prospects. Thus, with all his vivid imagination and unrivaled powers of description, the turn of his mind is essentially contemplative. He looks on the past as an emblem of the present; he sees, in the fall of Tyre and Athens and Jerusalem, the fate which one day awaits his own country; and mourns less the decay of human things, than the popular passions and national sins which have brought that instability in close proximity to his own times. This sensitive and foreboding disposition was much increased by the death of his daughter—a charming child of fourteen, the companion of his wanderings, the depositary of his thoughts, the darling of his affections—who was snatched away in the spring of life, when in health and joy, by one of the malignant fevers incident to the pestilential plains of the East.
Though Lamartine's travels are continuous, he does not, like most other wanderers, furnish us with a journal of every day's proceedings. He was too well aware that many, perhaps most, days on a journey are monotonous or uninteresting; and that many of the details of a traveller's progress are wholly unworthy of being recorded, because they are neither amusing, elevating, nor instructive. He paints, now and then, with all the force of his magical pencil, the more brilliant or characteristic scenes which he visited, and intersperses them with reflections, moral and social; such as would naturally be aroused in a sensitive mind by the sight of the rains of ancient, and the contemplation of the decay of modern times.
He embarked at Marseilles, with Madame Lamartine and his little daughter Julia, on the 10th July 1830. The following is the picture of the yearnings of his mind on leaving his native land; and they convey a faithful image of his intellectual temperament:—
"I feel it deeply: I am one only of those men, without a distinctive character, of a transitory and fading epoch, whose sighs have found an echo—only because the echo was more poetical than the poet. I belong to another age by my desires: I feel in myself another man: the immense and boundless horizon of philosophy, at once profound, religious, and poetical, has opened to my view, but the punishment of a wasted youth overtook me; it soon faded from my sight. Adieu, then, to the dreams of genius, to the aspirations of intellectual enjoyment! It is too late: I have not physical strength to accomplish any thing great. I will sketch some scenes—I will murmur some strains, and that is all. Yet if God would grant my prayers, here is the object for which I would petition—a poem, such as my heart desires, and his greatness deserves!—a faithful, breathing image of his creation: of the boundless world, visible and invisible! That would indeed be a worthy inheritance to leave to an era of darkness, of doubt, and of sadness!—an inheritance which would nourish the present age, and cause the next to spring with renovated youth."—(Voyages en Orient, I. 49-60.[46])
One of his first nocturnal reveries at sea, portrays the tender and profoundly religious impressions of his mind:—