Now for an extract or two. In the “Edinburgh Review,” of a date not far from fifty years past now, we find our translation. A day of festival, followed by a long evening of out-door dancing to music, has just closed. The breaking-up is described, with the sequel of young Jocelyn’s pensive and yearning emotions:

Then later, when the fife and hautboy’s voice Began to languish like a failing voice, And moistened ringlets, by the dance unstrung, Close to the cheek in drooping tresses clung, And wearied groups along the darkening green Gliding, in converse soft and low, were seen, What sounds enchanting to the ear are muttered! Adieus, regrets, the kiss, the word half uttered— My soul was stirred; my ear with sweet sounds rife Drank languidly the luscious draught of life; I followed with my step, my heart, my eye, Each maiden that with wearied eyes went by, Thrilled at the rustle of each silken dress, And felt that each that passed still left a joy the less. At last the dance is hushed, the din at rest, The moon is risen above the mountain’s crest; Only some lover, heedless of the hour, Wends homeward, dreaming, to his distant bower; Or, where the village paths divide, there stand Some loitering couples, lingering hand in hand, Who start to hear the clock’s unwelcome knell, Then dive and vanish in the forest dell. And now I am at home alone. ’Tis night. All still within the house, no fire, no light. Let me, too, sleep. Alas! no sleep is there! Pray then. My spirit will not hear my prayer. My ear is still with dancing measures ringing, Echoes which memory back to sense is bringing; I close my eyes: before my inward glance Still swims the fête, still whirls the giddy dance; The graceful phantoms of the vanished ball Come flitting by in beauty each and all; A glance still haunts my couch; a soft hand seems To press my hand, that trembles in my dreams, Fair tresses in the dance’s flight brought nigh, Just touch my cheek, and like the wind flow by, I see from maiden brows the roses falling, I hear beloved lips my name recalling— Anne, Lucy, Blanche!—Where am I—What is this? What must love be, when even love’s dream is bliss!

There is an indefinable French difference, but, that apart, the foregoing is somewhat like Goldsmith in his “Deserted Village.” Or is it the resemblance of meter that produces the impression?

“Jocelyn,” though certainly intended by the author to be pure, wavers at points on the edge of the exceptionably ambiguous. The following spring song, however, put by the poet into the mouth of his Laurence, is an inspiration as innocent as it is sweet:

See, in her nest, the nightingale’s mute mate, Hatching her young, her patient vigil hold. See how with love her fostering wings dilate, As if to screen her nurslings from the cold. Her neck alone, in restlessness upraised, O’ertops the nest in which her brood reposes, And her bright eye, with weary watching glazed, Closing to sleep, with every sound uncloses. Care for her callow young consumes her rest, My very voice her downy bosom shakes, And her heart pants beneath its plumy vest, And the nest trembles with each breath she takes. What spell enchains her to this gentle care? Her mate’s sweet melody the groves among, Who, from some branching oak, high poised in air Sends down the flowing river of his song. Hark! dost thou hear him, drop by drop distilling The sighs that sweetest after transport be, Then suddenly the vault above us filling With foaming cataracts of harmony? What spell enchains him in his turn—what makes His very being thus in languor melt— But that his voice a living echo wakes, His lay within one loving heart is felt! And, ravished by the note, his mate still holds Her watch attentive through the weary time; The season comes, the bursting shell unfolds, And life is music all, and love, and prime.

Passing now from Lamartine’s poetry, expressly such, we go to his prose, which, however, is scarcely, if at all, less poetical. Poetry, or at least, the presence in power, and in great proportionate excess of power, of imagination, lording it over every thing else, over memory, judgment, taste, good sense, veracity—characterizes all that proceeded from Lamartine’s pen. His history is valueless, almost valueless, as history. His travels are utterly untrustworthy as records of fact. Lamartine cannot tell the simple truth. Persons, things, events, suffer a sea-change, always to something rich and strange seen by him looming in the luminous haze of atmosphere with which his imagination perpetually invests them. His men are ennobled, like Ulysses transfigured by Pallas-Athene. His women are beautiful as houris fresh from paradise. The aspects of ocean and shore and wood and stream and mountain and sky, are all, to Lamartine, washed with a light that never was on sea or land or in heaven overhead, the consecration and the poet’s dream. This quality in Lamartine’s style does not prevent his being very fine. He is very fine; but you feel, Oh, if this all were also true!

On the whole, large, splendid, scenic, admirable in instinct for choosing his point of view, as Lamartine is in his histories, brilliant even, and fecund in suggestion, we turn from the ostensibly historical in our author to the ostensibly autobiographical, in order to find our prose specimens of his quality in the “Confidences.” Lamartine never perhaps did any thing finer, any thing more characteristic, than in telling his story of “Graziella” in that work. This story is an “episode” where it appears; or rather—for it is hardly so much as let into the continuous warp and woof of the “Confidences”—it is a separable device of ornament embroidered upon the surface of the fabric. It is probably, indeed, to some extent autobiographic; but the imagination had as much part in it as the memory. For instance, the actual girl that is transfigured into the “Graziella” of the story was not a coral-grinder, as she is represented by Lamartine, but an operative in a tobacco factory. The real beauty of the tale is, by a kind of just retribution on the author, inseparably bound up with unconscious revelation on his part of heartless vanity and egotism in his own character. You admire, but while you admire you wonder, you reprobate, you contemn. A man such as this, you instinctively feel, was not worthy to live immortally as an author. You are reconciled to let Lamartine pass.

“Graziella” is a story of love and death, on one side, of desertion and expiation—expiation through sentimental tears—on the other. One would gladly trust, if one could, that the reality veiled under the fiction was as free in fact from outward guilt as it is idealized to have been by the writer’s fancy. But neither this supposition, nor any other charitable supposition whatever, can redeem “Graziella” from the condemnation of being steeped in egregious vanity, egotism, and false sentiment, from the heart of the author.

We strike into the midst of the narrative, toward the end. There has been described the growth of relation between the author and the heroine of the idyll, a fisherman’s daughter. And now this heroine, Graziella, is desired in marriage by a worthy young countryman of hers. Such a suitor—for she loves, though secretly, the author (this by the way is a thing almost of course with Lamartine)—the girl cannot bring herself to accept. In despair she flees to make herself a nun. She is found by the autobiographer alone in a deserted house. He ministers to her in her exhausted state—and this to the following result: