ine of his powers after the first
spontaneous inspiration was exhausted.

Lamartine may have equalled but he never surpassed the best poems
of his earliest volume. But the elegiac singer aspired to be a
philosophic poet, and, infusing his ideas into sentiment and
narrative, became the author of _Jocelyn_ and _La Chute d'un Ange_.
Recalling and idealising an episode in the life of his friend the
Abbe Dumont, he tells how Jocelyn, a child of humble parents--not
yet a priest--takes shelter among the mountains from the
Revolutionary terror; how a proscribed youth, Laurence, becomes his
companion; how Laurence is found to be a girl; how friendship passes
into love; how, in order that he may receive the condemned bishop's
last confession, Jocelyn submits to become a priest; how the lovers
part; how Laurence wanders into piteous ways of passion; how Jocelyn
attends her in her dying hours, and lays her body among the hills
and streams of their early love. It is Jocelyn who chronicles events
and feelings in his journal of joy and of sorrow. Lamartine
acknowledges that he had before him as a model the idyl dear to him
in childhood--Bernardin's _Paul et Virginie_.

The poem is complete in itself, but it was designed as a fragment
of that vast modern epopee, with humanity for the hero, of which _La
Chute d'un Ange_ was another fragment. The later poem, vast in
dimensions, fantastic in subject, negligent in style, is a work of
Lamartine's poetic decline. We are among the mountains of Lebanon,
where dwell the descendants of Cain. The angel, enamoured of the
maiden Daidha, becomes human. Through gigantic and incoherent
inventions looms the idea of humanity which degrades itself by
subjugation to the senses, as in _Jocelyn_ we had seen the type of
humanity which ascends by virtue of aspirations of the soul. It was
a poor jest to say that the title of his poem _La Chute d'un Ange_
described its author. Lamartine had failed; he could not handle so
vast a subject with plastic power; but in earlier years he had
accomplished enough to justify us in disregarding a late failure--he
had brought back the soul to poetry.

III

Among the romantic poets who made themselves known between 1820 and
1830, ALFRED DE VIGNY is distinguished by the special character of
his genius, and by the fact that nothing in his poetry is derived
from his contemporaries. Lamartine, Hugo, and, at a later date, Musset,
found models or suggestions in his writings