of rhyme, though indispensable in works of descriptive imagination, has no ‘raison d’etre’ in poems dominated by sentiment and thought.  But, having said that, we must recognize in his poetry an element, serious, strong, and impressive, characteristic of itself alone, and admire, in the strophes of ‘Mozse’, in the imprecations of ‘Samson’, and in the ‘Destinees’, the majestic simplicity of the most beautiful Hebraic verse.

Moreover, the true originality of De Vigny does not lie in the manner of composition; it was primarily in the role of precursor that he played his part on the stage of literature.  Let us imagine ourselves at the period about the beginning of the year 1822.  Of the three poets who, in making their literary debuts, had just published the ’Meditations, Poemes antiques et modernes, and Odes’, only one had, at that time, the instinct of renewal in the spirit of French poesy, and a sense of the manner in which this must be accomplished; and that one was not Lamartine, and certainly it was not Victor Hugo.

Sainte-Beuve has said, with authority, that in Lamartine there is something suggestive of Millevoye, of Voltaire (he of the charming epistles), and of Fontanes; and Victor Hugo wrote with very little variation from the technical form of his predecessors.  “But with Alfred de Vigny,” he says, “we seek in vain for a resemblance to any French poetry preceding his work.  For example, where can we find anything resembling ‘Moise, Eloa, Doloeida’?  Where did he find his inspiration for style and composition in these poems?  If the poets of the Pleiades of the Restoration seem to have found their inspiration within themselves, showing no trace of connection with the literature of the past, thus throwing into confusion old habits of taste and of routine, certain it is that among them Alfred de Vigny should be ranked first.”

Even in the collection that bears the date of 1822, some years before the future author of Legende des Siecles had taken up romanticism, Alfred de Vigny had already conceived the idea of setting forth, in a series of little epics, the migrations of the human soul throughout the ages.  “One feels,” said he in his Preface, “a keen intellectual delight in transporting one’s self, by mere force of thought, to a period of antiquity; it resembles the pleasure an old man feels in recalling first his early youth, and then the whole course of his life.  In the age of simplicity, poetry was devoted entirely to the beauties of the physical forms of nature and of man; each step in advance that it has made since then toward our own day of civilization and of sadness, seems to have blended it more and more with our arts, and even with the sufferings of our souls.  At present, with all the serious solemnity of Religion and of Destiny, it lends to them their chief beauty.  Never discouraged, Poetry has followed Man in his long journey through the ages, like a sweet and beautiful companion.  I have attempted, in our language, to show some of her beauties, in following her progress toward the present day.”