Lamartine’s conception of love was a sort of mild ecstasy, the sacred rapture in which the senses play no part, and noble emotions that cause neither trouble nor remorse.  He ever regarded love as a kind of sublime and passionate religion, of which ‘Le Lac’ was the most beautiful hymn, but in which the image of woman is so vague that she almost seems to be absent.

On the other hand, what is ‘La Tristesse d’Olympio’ if not an admirable but common poetic rapture, a magnificent summary of the sufferings of the heart—­a bit of lyric writing equal to the most beautiful canzoni of the Italian masters, but wherein we find no idea of love, because all is artificial and studied; no cry from the soul is heard,—­no trace of passion appears.

After another fashion the same criticism applies to Le Souvenir; it was written under a stress of emotion resulting from too recent events; and the imagination of the author, subservient to a memory relentlessly faithful, as is often the case with those to whom passion is the chief principle of inspiration, was far from fulfilling the duties of his high vocation, which is to purify the passions of the poet from individual and accidental characteristics in order to leave unhampered whatever his work may contain that is powerful and imperishable.

Alfred de Vigny alone, of the poets of his day, in his ’Colere de Samson’, has risen to a just appreciation of woman and of love; his ideal is grand and tragic, it is true, and reminds one of that gloomy passage in Ecclesiastes which says:  “Woman is more bitter than death, and her arms are like chains.”

It is by this character of universality, of which all his writings show striking evidence, that Alfred de Vigny is assured of immortality.  A heedless generation neglected him because it preferred to seek subjects in strong contrast to life of its own time.  But that which was not appreciated by his contemporaries will be welcomed by posterity.  And when, in French literature, there shall remain of true romanticism only a slight trace and the memory of a few great names, the author of the ‘Destinees’ will still find an echo in all hearts.

No writer, no matter how gifted, immortalizes himself unless he has crystallized into expressive and original phrase the eternal sentiments and yearnings of the human heart.  “A man does not deserve the name of poet unless he can express personal feeling and emotion, and only that man is worthy to be called a poet who knows how to assimilate the varied emotions of mankind.”  If this fine phrase of Goethe’s is true, if true poetry is only that which implies a mastery of spiritual things as well as of human emotion, Alfred de Vigny is assuredly one of our greatest poets, for none so well as he has realized a complete vision of the universe, no one has brought before the world with more boldness the problem of the soul and that of humanity.  Under the title of poet he belongs not only to our national literature, but occupies a distinctive place in the world of intellect, with Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe, among those inspired beings who transmit throughout succeeding centuries the light of reason and the traditions of the loftiest poetic thought.