ty when he undertook to establish
a new religion, and built upon it a new and powerful empire; Lamartine
was nearly fifty when he left the fantastic for the real; and from the
inspiration without an object, returned to the only real poetry in
this world--the life of man. Lamartine, who until that period had been
youthful in his conceptions, and wild and _bizarre_ in his fancy, did
not, as Voltaire said of his countrymen, pass "from childhood to old
age," but paused at a green manhood, with a definite purpose, and the
mighty powers of his mind directed to an object large enough to afford
it scope for its most vigorous exercise. His muse was now directed to
the interests of humanity; he was what the French call _un poete
humanitaire_.

Thus far it was proper for us to follow the life of the poet to
understand that of the statesman, orator, and tribune. Men like
Lamartine must be judged in their totality, not by single or detached
acts of their lives. Above all men it is the poet who is a
self-directing agent, whose faculties receive their principal impulse
from _within_, and who stamps his own genius on every object of his
mental activity. Schiller, after writing the history of the most
remarkable period preceding the French Revolution, "the thirty years'
war," (for liberty of conscience,) and "the separation of the
Netherlands from the crown of Spain," felt that his energies were not
yet exhausted on the subject; but his creative genius found no theatre
of action such as was open to Lamartine in the French Chamber, in the
purification of the ideas engendered by the Revolution; and he had
therefore to content himself with bringing _his_ poetical conceptions
on the _stage_. Instead of becoming an actor in the great world-drama,
he gave us his _Wallenstein_ and _Don Carlos_; Lamartine gave us
_himself_ as the best creation of his poetic genius. The poet
Lamartine has produced the statesman. This it will be necessary to
bear in mind, to understand Lamartine's career in the Chamber of
Deputies, or the position he now holds at the head of the provisional
government.

Lamartine, as we have above observed, entered the French Chamber in
1833, as a cosmopolite, full of love for mankind, full of noble ideas
of human destiny, and deeply impressed with the degraded social
condition not only of his countrymen, but of all civilized Europe. He
knew and felt that the Revolution which had destroyed the social
elements of Europe, or thr