Thus, by his vigor and breadth of thought, by his profound understanding of life, by the intensity of his dreams, Alfred de Vigny is superior to Victor Hugo, whose genius was quite different, in his power to portray picturesque scenes, in his remarkable fecundity of imagination, and in his sovereign mastery of technique.

But nowhere in De Vigny’s work is that superiority of poetic thought so clearly shown as in those productions wherein the point of departure was farthest from the domain of intellect, and better than any other has he understood that truth proclaimed by Hegel:  “The passions of the soul and the affections of the heart are matter for poetic expression only in so far as they are general, solid, and eternal.”

De Vigny was also the only one among our poets that had a lofty ideal of woman and of love.  And in order to convince one’s self of this it is sufficient to reread successively the four great love-poems of that period:  ’Le Lac, La Tristesse d’Olympio, Le Souvenir, and La Colere de Samson’.

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.