y slow degrees, in a country
that has no heed of them till her railroads and canals are
finished,--I need not jot down my petty impressions of the
movement writers. I wish to speak of one among them, aided,
honored by them, but not of them. He is to _la jeune France_
rather the herald of a tourney, or the master of ceremonies
at a patriotic festival, than a warrior for her battles, or an
advocate to win her cause.

'The works of M. de Vigny having come in my way, I have read
quite through this thick volume.

'I read, a year since, in the London and Westminster,
an admirable sketch of Armand Carrel. The writer speaks
particularly of the use of which Carrel's experience of
practical life had been to him as an author; how it had
tempered and sharpened the blade of his intellect to the
Damascene perfection. It has been of like use to de Vigny,
though not in equal degree.

'De Vigny _passed_,--but for manly steadfastness, he would
probably say _wasted_,--his best years in the army. He is now
about forty; and we have in this book the flower of these best
years. It is a night-blooming Cereus, for his days were passed
in the duties of his profession. These duties, so tiresome and
unprofitable in time of peace, were the ground in which the
seed sprang up, which produced these many-leaved and calm
night-flowers.

'The first portion of this volume, _Servitude et Grandeurs
Militaires_, contains an account of the way in which he
received his false tendency. Cherished on the "wounded
knees" of his aged father, he listened to tales of the great
Frederic, whom the veteran had known personally. After an
excellent sketch of the king, he says: "I expatiate here,
almost in spite of myself, because this was the first great
man whose portrait was thus drawn for me at home,--a portrait
after nature,--and because my admiration of him was the first
symptom of my useless love of arms,--the first cause of one of
the most complete delusions of my life." This admiration
for the great king remained so lively in his mind, that even
Bonaparte in his gestures seemed to him, in later days, a
plagiarist.

'At the military school, "the drum stifled the voices of our
masters, and the mysterious voices of books seemed to us cold
and pedantic. Tropes and logarithms seemed to us only steps