t was not Victor Hugo.

Sainte-Beuve has said, with authority, that in Lamartine there is
something suggestive of Millevoye, of Voltaire (he of the charming
epistles), and of Fontanes; and Victor Hugo wrote with very little
variation from the technical form of his predecessors. "But with Alfred
de Vigny," he says, "we seek in vain for a resemblance to any French
poetry preceding his work. For example, where can we find anything
resembling 'Moise, Eloa, Doloeida'? Where did he find his inspiration for
style and composition in these poems? If the poets of the Pleiades of the
Restoration seem to have found their inspiration within themselves,
showing no trace of connection with the literature of the past, thus
throwing into confusion old habits of taste and of routine, certain it is
that among them Alfred de Vigny should be ranked first."

Even in the collection that bears the date of 1822, some years before the
future author of Legende des Siecles had taken up romanticism, Alfred de
Vigny had already conceived the idea of setting forth, in a series of
little epics, the migrations of the human soul throughout the ages. "One
feels," said he in his Preface, "a keen intellectual delight in
transporting one's self, by mere force of thought, to a period of
antiquity; it resembles the pleasure an old man feels in recalling first
his early youth, and then the whole course of his life. In the age of
simplicity, poetry was devoted entirely to the beauties of the physical
forms of nature and of man; each step in advance that it has made since
then toward our own day of civilization and of sadness, seems to have
blended it more and more with our arts, and even with the sufferings of
our souls. At present, with all the serious solemnity of Religion and of
Destiny, it lends to them their chief beauty. Never discouraged, Poetry
has followed Man in his long journey through the ages, like a sweet and
beautiful companion. I have attempted, in our language, to show some of
her beauties, in following her progress toward the present day."

The arrangement of the poems announced in this Preface is tripartite,
like that of the 'Legende des Siecles: Poemes antiques, poemes judaiques,
poemes modernes.--Livre mystique, livre antique, livre moderne'. But the
name of precursor would be a vain title if all that were necessary to
merit it was the fact that one had been the first to perceive a new path
to literary glory, to salute it from a distance,