dwell apart; one who, born for poetry,
chose to look on verse as no more than an accident of his existence.
In the year 1820 had appeared a slender volume entitled _Meditations
Poetiques_. The soul, long departed, returned in this volume to French
poetry. Its publication was an event hardly less important than that
of the _Genie du Christianisme_. The well-springs of pure inspiration
once more flowed. The critics, indeed, were not all enthusiastic;
the public, with a surer instinct, recognised in Lamartine the singer
they had for many years desired, and despaired to find.

ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE, born at Macon in 1790, of royalist parents,
had passed his childhood among the tranquil fields and little hills
around his homestead at Milly. From his mother he learned to love
the Bible, Tasso, Bernardin, and a christianised version of the
Savoyard Vicar's faith; at a later time he read Chateaubriand,
Rousseau, Milton, Byron, and was enchanted by the wandering gleams
and glooms of Ossian. From the melancholy of youth he was roused by
Italian travel, and by that Italian love romance of Graziella, the
circumstances of which he has dignified for the uses of idealised
autobiography. A deeper passion of love and grief followed; Madame
Charles, the "Julie" of Lamartine's _Raphael_, the "Elvire" of his
_Meditations_, died. Lamartine had versified already in a manner
which has affinities with that of those eighteenth-century poets and
elegiac singers of the Empire whom he was to banish from public regard.
Love and grief evoked finer and purer strains; his deepest feelings
flowed into verse with perfect sincerity and perfect spontaneity.
Without an effort of the will he had become the most illustrious poet
of France.

Lamartine had held and had resigned a soldier's post in the body-guard
of Louis XVIII. He now accepted the position of attache to the embassy
at Naples; published in 1823 his _Nouvelles Meditations_, and two
years later _Le Dernier Chant du Pelerinage d'Harold_ (Byron's Childe
Harold); after which followed a long silence. Secretary in 1824 to
the legation at Florence, he abandoned after a time the diplomatic
career, and on the eve of the Revolution of July (1830) appeared again
as a poet in his _Harmonies Poetiques et Religieuses_; travelled in
the East in company with his wife, and recorded his impressions in
the _Voyage en Orient_; entered into political life, at first a
solitary in politics as he had been in literat