Various
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844
WESTMINSTER-HALL AND THE WORKS OF ART,
(On a Free Admission Day.)
By B. Simmons
I
By slow degrees, like rain-fraught breeze rising in time of dearth,
Whispers of Wisdom, far and wide, are muttering o'er the earth;
And lo! rough Reason's breath, that wafts strong human health to all,
Has blown aside the gates where Pride dozed in her feudal hall.
II
Stout Carter, drop that loutish look, nor hesitate before —
Eyeing thy frock and clouted shoes – yon dark enormous door;
'Tis ten to one thy trampled sires their ravaged granges gave
To spread the Wood from whence was hew'd that oaken architrave.34
III
Take now thy turn. We'll on and in, nor need the pealing tromp
(Once wont the lordlings thronging here to usher to the pomp)
To kindle our dull phantasies for yon triumphal show
That lights the roof so high aloof with the whiteness of its glow.
IV
Red William, couldst thou heave aside the marble of the tomb,
And look abroad from Winchester's song-consecrated gloom,35
A keener smart than Tyrrel's dart would pierce thy soul to see
In thy vast courts the Vileinage and peasants treading free.
V
Oh, righteous retribution! Ye Shades of those who here
Stood up in bonds before the slaves of sceptred fraud and fear!
Unswerving Somers! – More! – even thou, dark Somerset,36 who fell
In pride of place condignly, yet who loved the Commons well —
VI
And Ye who with undaunted hearts, immortal mitred Few!
For Truth's dear sake, the Tyrant foil'd to whom ye still were true —37
Rejoice! Who knows what scatter'd thoughts of yours were buried seeds,
Slow-springing for th' oppress'd and poor, and ripen'd now to deeds?
VII
Ha, ha! 'twould make a death's-head laugh to see how the cross-bones —
The black judicial formula devised by bloody thrones —
The Axe's edge this way, now that, borne before murder'd men,
Who died for aiding their true Liege on mountain and in glen,38
VIII
Are swept like pois'nous spiders' webs for ever from the scene,
Where in their place come crowding now the mighty and the mean;
The Peer walks by the Peasant's side,39 to see if grace and art
Can touch a bosom clad in frieze, can brighten Labour's heart.
IX
O! ye who doubt presumptuously that feeling, taste, are given
To all for culture, free as flowers, by an impartial heaven,
Look through this quiet rabble here – doth it not shame to-day
More polish'd mobs to whom we owe our annual squeeze in May?
X
Mark that poor Maiden, to her Sire interpreting the tale
There pictured of the Loved and Left,40 until her cheek grows pale: —
Yon crippled Dwarf that sculptured Youth41 eyeing with glances dim,
Wondering will he, in higher worlds, be tall and straight like him; —
XI
How well they group with yonder pale but fire-eyed Artisan,
Who just has stopp'd to bid his boys those noble features scan
That sadden us for Wilkie! See! he tells them now the story
Of that once humble lad, and how he won his marble glory.
XII
Not all alone thou weep'st in stone, poor Lady, o'er thy Chief,42
That huge-limb'd Porter, spell-struck there, stands sharer in thy grief.
Pert Cynic, scorn not his amaze; all savage as he seems,
What graceful shapes henceforward may whiten his heart in dreams!
XIII
A long adieu, dark Years! to you, of war on field and flood,
Battle afar, and mimic war at hone to train our blood —
The ruffian Ring – the goaded Bull – the Lottery's gates of sin —
The all to nurse the outward brute, and starve the soul within!
XIV
Here lives and breathes around us proof that those all-evil times
Are fled with their decrepit thoughts, their slaughter, and their crimes;
Long stood this Hall the type of all could Man's grim bonds increase —
Henceforth be it his Vestibule to hope, and light, and peace!
August, 1844
LINES ON THE LANDING OF HIS MAJESTY KING LOUIS PHILIPPE, TUESDAY, OCTOBER 8, 1844
By B. Simmons
I
Ho! Wardens of the Coast look forth
Upon your Channel seas —
The night is melting in the north,
There's tumult on the breeze;
Now sinking far, now rolling out
In proud triumphal swell,
That mingled burst of shot and shout
Your fathers knew so well,
What time to England's inmost plain
The beacon-fires proclaim'd
That, like descending hurricane,
Grim Blake, that Mastiff of the Main,
Beside your shores had once again
The Flemish lion tamed!43
War wakes not now that tumult loud,
Ye Wardens of the Coast,
Though looming large, through dawn's dim cloud,
Like an invading host
The Barks of France are bearing down,
One crowd of sails, while high
Above the misty morning's frown
Their streamers light the sky.
Up! – greet for once the Tricolor,
For once the lilied flag!
Forth with gay barge and gilded oar,
While fast the volley'd salvoes roar
From batteried line, and echoing shore,
And gun-engirdled crag!
Forth – greet with ardent hearts and eyes,
The Guest those galleys bring;
In Wisdom's walks the more than Wise —
'Mid Kings the more than King!
No nobler visitant e'er sought
The Mighty's white-cliff'd isle,
Where Alfred ruled, where Bacon thought,
Where Avon's waters smile:
Hail to the tempest-vexed Man!
Hail to the Sovereign-Sage!
A wearier pilgrimage who ran
Than the immortal Ithacan,
Since first his great career began,
Ulysses of our age!
A more than regal welcome give,
Ye thousands crowding round;
Shout for the once lorn Fugitive,
Whose soul no solace found
Save in that Self-reliance – match
For adverse worlds, alone —
Which cheer'd the Tutor's humble thatch,
Nor left him on the throne.
The Wanderer Muller's sails they furl —
The Wave-encounterer, who,
When Freedom leagued with Crime to hurl
Up earth's foundations, from the whirl
Where vortex'd Empires raged, the pearl
Of matchless Prudence drew.
V
Shout for the Husband and the Sire,
Whose children, train'd to truth,
Repaid in feeling, grace, and fire,
The lessons taught their youth.
Recall his grief when bent above
His rose-zoned daughter's clay,
Beside whose marble, lifeless, Love,
And Art, and Genius lay.44
And his be homage still more dread,
From our mute spirits won,
For tears of heart-wrung anguish shed,
When with that gray "discrownèd head,"
On foot he follow'd to the dead
His gallant, princely son.
VI
Shout for the Hero and the King
In soul serene – alike,
If suppliant States the sceptre bring,
Or banded traitors strike!
Oh, if at times a thrall too strong
Round Freedom's form be laid,
Where Faction works by wrath and wrong
His pardon be display'd.
Be his this praise – unspoil'd by power
His course benignly ran,
A Monarch, mindful of the hour
He felt misfortune's wintry shower,
A Man, from hall to peasant's bower,
The common friend of Man.
VII
Again the ramparts' loosen'd load
Of thunder rends the air!
Peal on – such pomp is fitly show'd —
He lands no stranger there.
Hear from his lips your language grave
In earnest accents fall —
The memories of the home ye gave
He hastens to recall —
'Mid flash of spears and fiery thrill
Of trumpets speed him forth,
The Master-Mind your Shakspeare still
Had loved to draw – that to its will
Shapes Fate and Chance with potent skill —
The Numa of the North.
VIII
Windsor! henceforth a loftier spell
Invests thy storied walls —
The Bards of future years shall tell
That first within thy halls
Imperial Truth and Mercy met,
And in that hallow'd hour
Gave earth the hope that Peace shall yet
Be dear to Kings as Power.
When France clasp'd England's hand of old
There memory marks the wane
Of iron times, the bad and bold;45
Oh, may our Second Field of Gold
A portent still more fair unfold
Of Wisdom's widening reign!
LAMARTINE
It is remarkable, that although England is the country in the world which has sent forth the greatest number of ardent and intrepid travellers to explore the distant parts of the earth, yet it can by no means furnish an array of writers of travels which will bear a comparison with those whom France can boast. In skilful navigation, daring adventure, and heroic perseverance, indeed, the country of Cook and Davis, of Bruce and Park, of Mackenzie and Buckingham, of Burckhardt and Byron, of Parry and Franklin, may well claim the pre-eminence of all others in the world. An Englishman first circumnavigated the globe; an Englishman alone has seen the fountains of the Nile; and, five years after the ardent spirit of Columbus had led his fearful crews across the Atlantic, Sebastian Cabot discovered the shores of Newfoundland, and planted the British standard in the regions destined to be peopled with the overflowing multitudes of the Anglo-Saxon race.
But if we come to the literary works which have followed these ardent and energetic efforts, and which are destined to perpetuate their memory to future times – the interesting discoveries which have so much extended our knowledge and enlarged our resources – the contemplation is by no means to an inhabitant of these islands equally satisfactory. The British traveller is essentially a man of energy and action, but rarely of contemplation or eloquence. He is seldom possessed of the scientific acquirements requisite to turn to the best account the vast stores of new and original information which are placed within his reach. He often observes and collects facts; but it is as a practical man, or for professional purposes, rather than as a philosopher. The genius of the Anglo-Saxon race – bold, sagacious, and enterprising, rather than contemplative and scientific – nowhere appears more strongly than in the accounts of the numerous and intrepid travellers whom they are continually sending forth into every part of the earth. We admire their vigour, we are moved by their hardships, we are enriched by their discoveries; but if we turn to our libraries for works to convey to future ages an adequate and interesting account of these fascinating adventures, we shall, in general, experience nothing but disappointment. Few of them are written with the practised hand, the graphic eye, necessary to convey vivid pictures to future times; and though numerous and valuable books of travels, as works of reference, load the shelves of our libraries, there are surprisingly few which are fitted, from the interest and vivacity of the style in which they are written, to possess permanent attractions for mankind.
One great cause of this remarkable peculiarity is without doubt to be found in the widely different education of the students in our universities, and our practical men. In the former, classical attainments are in literature the chief, if not exclusive, objects of ambition; and in consequence, the young aspirants for fame who issue from these learned retreats, have their minds filled with the charms and associations of antiquity, to the almost entire exclusion of objects of present interest and importance. The vigorous practical men, again, who are propelled by the enterprise and exertions of our commercial towns, are sagacious and valuable observers; but they have seldom the cultivated minds, pictorial eye, or powers of description, requisite to convey vivid or interesting impressions to others. Thus our scholars give us little more than treatises on inscriptions, and disquisitions on the sites of ancient towns; while the accounts of our practical men are chiefly occupied with commercial enquiries, or subjects connected with trade and navigation. The cultivated and enlightened traveller, whose mind is alike open to the charm of ancient story and the interest of modern achievement – who is classical without being pedantic, graphic and yet faithful, enthusiastic and yet accurate, discursive and at the same time imaginative, is almost unknown amongst us. It will continue to be so as long as education in our universities is exclusively devoted to Greek and Latin verses or the higher mathematics; and in academies to book-keeping and the rule of three; while so broad and sullen a line as heretofore is drawn between the studies of our scholars and the pursuits of our practical citizens. To travel to good purpose, requires a mind stored with much and varied information, in science, statistics, geography, literature, history, and poetry. To describe what the traveller has seen, requires, in addition to this, the eye of a painter, the soul of a poet, and the hand of a practised composer. Probably it will be deemed no easy matter to find such a combination in any country or in any age; and most certainly the system of education, neither at our learned universities nor our commercial academies, is fitted to produce it.
It is from inattention to the vast store of previous information requisite to make an accomplished traveller, and still more a writer of interesting travels, that failures in this branch of literature are so glaring and so frequent. In other departments of knowledge, a certain degree of information is felt to be requisite before a man can presume to write a book. He cannot produce a treatise on mathematics without knowing at least Euclid, nor a work on history without having read Hume, nor on political economy without having acquired a smattering of Adam Smith. But in regard to travels, no previous information is thought to be requisite. If the person who sets out on a tour has only money in his pocket, and health to get to his journey's end, he is deemed sufficiently qualified to come out with his two or three post octavos. If he is an Honourable, or known at Almack's, so much the better; that will ensure the sale of the first edition. If he can do nothing else, he can at least tell the dishes which he got to dinner at the inns, and the hotels where comfortable beds are to be found. This valuable information, interspersed with a few descriptions of scenes, copied from guide-books, and anecdotes picked up at tables-d'hôte or on board steamboats, constitute the stock in trade of many an adventurer who embarks in the speculation of paying by publication the expenses of his travels. We have no individuals in view in these remarks; we speak of things in general, as they are, or rather have been; for we believe these ephemeral travels, like other ephemerals, have had their day, and are fast dying out. The market has become so glutted with them that they are, in a great many instances, unsaleable.
The classical travellers of England, from Addison to Eustace and Clarke, constitute an important and valuable body of writers in this branch of literature, infinitely superior to the fashionable tours which rise up and disappear like bubbles on the surface of society. It is impossible to read these elegant productions without feeling the mind overspread with the charm which arises from the exquisite remains and heart-stirring associations with which they are filled. But their interest is almost exclusively classical; they are invaluable to the accomplished scholar, but they speak in an unknown tongue to the great mass of men. They see nature only through the medium of antiquity: beautiful in their allusion to Greek or Roman remains, eloquent in the descriptions of scenes alluded to in the classical writers, they have dwelt little on the simple scenes of the unhistoric world. To the great moral and social questions which now agitate society, and so strongly move the hearts of the great body of men, they are entire strangers. Their works are the elegant companions of the scholar or the antiquary, not the heart-stirring friends of the cottage or the fireside.
Inferior to Britain in the energy and achievements of the travellers whom she has sent forth, and beyond measure beneath her in the amount of the addition she has made to geographical science, France is yet greatly superior, at least of late years, in the literary and scientific attainments of the wanderers whose works have been given to the world. Four among these stand pre-eminent, whose works, in very different styles, are at the head of European literature in this interesting department – Humboldt, Chateaubriand, Michaud, and Lamartine. Their styles are so various, and the impression produced by reading them so distinct, that it is difficult to believe that they have arisen in the same nation and age of the world.
Humboldt is, in many respects, and perhaps upon the whole, at the head of the list; and to his profound and varied works we hope to be able to devote a future paper. He unites, in a degree that perhaps has never before been witnessed, the most various qualities, and which, from the opposite characters of mind which they require, are rarely found in unison. A profound philosopher, an accurate observer of nature, an unwearied statist, he is at the same time an eloquent writer, an incomparable describer, and an ardent friend of social improvement. Science owes to his indefatigable industry many of her most valuable acquisitions; geography, to his intrepid perseverance, many of its most important discoveries; the arts, to his poetic eye and fervid eloquence, many of their brightest pictures. He unites the austere grandeur of the exact sciences to the bewitching charm of the fine arts. It is this very combination which prevents his works from being generally popular. The riches of his knowledge, the magnitude of his contributions to scientific discovery, the fervour of his descriptions of nature, alternately awaken our admiration and excite our surprise; but they oppress the mind. To be rightly apprehended, they require a reader in some degree familiar with all these subjects; and how many of these are to be met with? The man who takes an interest in his scientific observations will seldom be transported by his pictures of scenery; the social observer, who extracts the rich collection of facts which he has accumulated regarding the people whom he visited, will be indifferent to his geographical discoveries. There are few Humboldts either in the reading or thinking world.
Chateaubriand is a traveller of a wholly different character – he lived entirely in antiquity. But it is not the antiquity of Greece and Rome which has alone fixed his regards, as it has done those of Clarke and Eustace – it is the recollections of chivalry, the devout spirit of the pilgrim, which chiefly warmed his ardent imagination. He is universally allowed by Frenchmen of all parties to be their first writer; and it may be conceived what brilliant works an author of such powers, and eminently gifted both with the soul of a poet and the eye of a painter, must have produced in describing the historic scenes to which his pilgrimages extended. He went to Greece and the Holy Land with a mind devout rather than enlightened, credulous rather than inquisitive. Thirsting for strong emotions, he would be satisfied; teeming with the recollections and visions of the past, he traversed the places hallowed by his early affections with the fondness of a lover who returns to the home of his bliss, of a mature man who revisits the scenes of his infancy. He cared not to enquire what was true or what was legendary in these time-hallowed traditions; he gladly accepted them as they stood, and studiously averted all enquiry into the foundation on which they rested. He wandered over the Peloponnesus or Judea with the fond ardour of an English scholar who seeks in the Palatine Mount the traces of Virgil's enchanting description of the hut of Evander, and rejects as sacrilege every attempt to shake his faith.
"When Science from Creation's face
Enchantment's visions draws,
What lovely visions yield their place
To cold material laws!"
Even in the woods of America, the same ruling passion was evinced. In those pathless solitudes, where no human foot had ever trod but that of the wandering savage, and the majesty of nature appeared in undisturbed repose, his thoughts were still of the Old World. It was on the historic lands that his heart was set. A man himself, he dwelt on the scenes which had been signalized by the deeds, the sufferings, the glories of man.
Michaud's mind is akin to that of Chateaubriand, and yet different in many important particulars. The learned and indefatigable historian of the Crusades, he has traversed the shores of the Mediterranean – the scene, as Dr Johnson observed, of all that can ever interest man – his religion, his knowledge, his arts – with the ardent desire to imprint on his mind the scenes and images which met the eyes of the holy warriors. He seeks to transport us to the days of Godfrey of Bouillon and Raymond of Toulouse; he thirsts with the Christian host at Dorislaus, he shares in its anxieties at the siege of Antioch, he participates in its exultation at the storming of Jerusalem. The scenes visited by the vast multitude of warriors who, during two hundred years, were precipitated from Europe on Asia, have almost all been visited by him, and described with the accuracy of an antiquary and the enthusiasm of a poet. With the old chronicles in his hand, he treads with veneration the scenes of former generous sacrifice and heroic achievements, and the vast and massy structures erected on either side during those terrible wars – when, for centuries, Europe strove hand to hand with Asia – most of which have undergone very little alteration, enable him to describe them almost exactly as they appeared to the holy warriors. The interest of his pilgrimage in the East, accordingly, is peculiar, but very great; it is not so much a book of travels as a moving chronicle; but, like Sir W. Scott's Minstrelsy of the Borders, it is a chronicle clothed in a very different garb from the homely dress of the olden time. It transports us back, not only in time but in idea, six hundred years; but it does so with the grace of modern times – it clothes the profound feelings, the generous sacrifices, the forgetfulness of self of the twelfth century, with the poetic mind, the cultivated taste, the refined imagery of the nineteenth.
Lamartine has traversed the same scenes with Chateaubriand and Michaud, and yet he has done so in a different spirit; and the character of his work is essentially different from either. He has not the devout credulity of the first, nor the antiquarian zeal and knowledge of the last; but he is superior to either in the description of nature, and the painting vivid and interesting scenes on the mind of the reader. His work is a moving panorama, in which the historic scenes and azure skies, and placid seas and glowing sunsets, of the East, are portrayed in all their native brilliancy, and in richer even than their native colours. His mind is stored with the associations and the ideas of antiquity, and he has thrown over his descriptions of the scenes of Greece or Holy Writ, all the charms of such recollections; but he has done so in a more general and catholic spirit than either of his predecessors. He embarked for the Holy Land shortly before the Revolution of 1830; and his thoughts, amidst all the associations of antiquity, constantly reverted to the land of his fathers – its distractions, its woes, its ceaseless turmoil, its gloomy social prospects. Thus, with all his vivid imagination and unrivaled powers of description, the turn of his mind is essentially contemplative. He looks on the past as an emblem of the present; he sees, in the fall of Tyre and Athens and Jerusalem, the fate which one day awaits his own country; and mourns less the decay of human things, than the popular passions and national sins which have brought that instability in close proximity to his own times. This sensitive and foreboding disposition was much increased by the death of his daughter – a charming child of fourteen, the companion of his wanderings, the depositary of his thoughts, the darling of his affections – who was snatched away in the spring of life, when in health and joy, by one of the malignant fevers incident to the pestilential plains of the East.
Though Lamartine's travels are continuous, he does not, like most other wanderers, furnish us with a journal of every day's proceedings. He was too well aware that many, perhaps most, days on a journey are monotonous or uninteresting; and that many of the details of a traveller's progress are wholly unworthy of being recorded, because they are neither amusing, elevating, nor instructive. He paints, now and then, with all the force of his magical pencil, the more brilliant or characteristic scenes which he visited, and intersperses them with reflections, moral and social; such as would naturally be aroused in a sensitive mind by the sight of the rains of ancient, and the contemplation of the decay of modern times.
He embarked at Marseilles, with Madame Lamartine and his little daughter Julia, on the 10th July 1830. The following is the picture of the yearnings of his mind on leaving his native land; and they convey a faithful image of his intellectual temperament: —
"I feel it deeply: I am one only of those men, without a distinctive character, of a transitory and fading epoch, whose sighs have found an echo – only because the echo was more poetical than the poet. I belong to another age by my desires: I feel in myself another man: the immense and boundless horizon of philosophy, at once profound, religious, and poetical, has opened to my view, but the punishment of a wasted youth overtook me; it soon faded from my sight. Adieu, then, to the dreams of genius, to the aspirations of intellectual enjoyment! It is too late: I have not physical strength to accomplish any thing great. I will sketch some scenes – I will murmur some strains, and that is all. Yet if God would grant my prayers, here is the object for which I would petition – a poem, such as my heart desires, and his greatness deserves! – a faithful, breathing image of his creation: of the boundless world, visible and invisible! That would indeed be a worthy inheritance to leave to an era of darkness, of doubt, and of sadness! – an inheritance which would nourish the present age, and cause the next to spring with renovated youth." – (Voyages en Orient, I. 49-60.46)
One of his first nocturnal reveries at sea, portrays the tender and profoundly religious impressions of his mind: —
"I walked for an hour on the deck of the vessel alone, and immersed alternately in sad or consoling reflections. I repeated in my heart all the prayers which I learned in infancy from my mother: the verses, the fragments of the Psalms, which I had so often heard her repeat to herself, when walking in the evening in the garden of Melly. I experienced a melancholy pleasure in thus scattering them, in my turn, to the waves, to the winds, to that Ear which is ever open to every real movement of the heart, though not yet uttered by the lips. The prayer which we have heard repeated by one we have loved, and who is no more, is doubly sacred. Who among us would not prefer a few words of prayer taught us by our mother, to the most eloquent supplication composed by ourselves? Thence it is that whatever religious creed we may adopt at the age of reason, the Christian prayer will be ever the prayer of the human race. I prayed, in the prayer of the church for the evening at sea; also for that dear being, who never thought of danger to accompany her husband, and that lovely child, who played at the moment on the poop with the goat which was to give it milk on board, and with the little kids which licked her snow-white hands, and sported with her long and fair ringlets." – (I. 57.)
A night-scene on the coast of Provence gives a specimen of his descriptive powers.
"It was night – that is, what they call night in those climates; but how many days have I seen less brilliant on the banks of the Thames, the Seine, the Saone, or the Lake of Geneva! A full noon shone in the firmament, and cast into the shade our vessel, which lay motionless on the water at a little distance from the quay. The moon, in her progress through the heavens, had left a path marked as if with red sand, with which she had besprinkled the half of the sky: the remainder was clear deep blue, which melted into white as she advanced. On the horizon, at the distance of two miles, between two little isles, of which the one had headlands pointed and coloured like the Coliseum at Rome, while the other was violet like the flower of the lilac, the image of a vast city appeared on the sea. It was an illusion, doubtless; but it had all the appearance of reality. You saw clearly the domes glancing – dazzling lines of palaces – quays flooded by a soft and serene light; on the right and the left the waves were seen to sparkle and enclose it on either side: it was Venice or Malta reposing in the midst of the waters. The illusion was produced by the reflection of the moon, when her rays fell perpendicularly on the waters; nearer the eye, the radiance spread and expanded in a stream of gold and silver between two shores of azure. On the left, the gulf extended to the summit of a long and obscure range of serrated mountains; on the right opened a narrow and deep valley, where a fountain gushed forth beneath the shade of aged trees; behind, rose a hill, clothed to the top with olives, which in the night appeared dark, from its summit to its base – a line of Gothic towers and white houses broke the obscurity of the wood, and drew the thoughts to the abodes, the joys, and the sufferings of man. Further off, in the extremity of the gulf, three enormous rocks rose, like pillars without base, from the surface of the waters – their forms were fantastic, their surface polished like flints by the action of the waves; but those flints were mountains – the remains, doubtless, of that primeval ocean which once overspread the earth, and of which our seas are but a feeble image." – (II. 66.)
A rocky bay on the same romantic coast, now rendered accessible to travellers by the magnificent road of the Corniché, projected, and in part executed by Napoleon, furnishes another subject for this exquisite pencil: —
"A mile to the eastward on the coast, the mountains, which there dip into the sea, are broken as if by the strokes of enormous clubs – huge fragments have fallen, and are strewed in wild confusion at the foot of the cliffs, or amidst the blue and green waves of the sea, which incessantly laves them. The waves break on these huge masses without intermission, with a hollow and alternating roar, or rise up in sheets of foam, which besprinkle their hoary fronts. These masses of mountains – for they are too large to be called rocks – are piled and heaped together in such numbers, that they form an innumerable number of narrow havens, of profound caverns, of sounding grottoes, of gloomy fissures – of which the children of some of the neighbouring fishermen alone know the windings and the issues. One of these caverns, into which you enter by a natural arch, the summit of which is formed by an enormous block of granite, lets in the sea, through which it flows into a dark and narrow valley, which the waters fill entirely, with a surface as limpid and smooth as the firmament which they reflect. The sea preserves in this sequestered nook that beautiful tint of bright green, of which marine painters so strongly feel the value, but which they can never transfer exactly to their canvass; for the eye sees much which the hand strives in vain to imitate.
"On the two sides of that marine valley rise two prodigious walls of perpendicular rock, of an uniform and sombre hue, similar to that of iron ore, after it has issued and cooled from the furnace. Not a plant, not a moss can find a slope or a crevice wherein to insert its roots, or cover the rocks with those waving garlands which so often in Savoy clothe the cliffs, where they flower to God alone. Black, naked, perpendicular, repelling the eye by their awful aspect – they seem to have been placed there for no other purpose but to protect from the sea-breezes the hills of olives and vines, which bloom under their shelter; an image of those ruling men in a stormy epoch, who seem placed by Providence to bear the fury of all the tempests of passion and of time, to screen the weaker but happier race of mortals. At the bottom of the bay the sea expands a little, assumes a bluer tint as it comes to reflect more of the cloudless heavens, and at length its tiny waves die away on a bed of violets, as closely netted together as the sand upon the shore. If you disembark from the boat, you find in the cleft of a neighbouring ravine a fountain of living water, which gushes beneath a narrow path formed by the goats, which leads up from this sequestered solitude, amidst overshadowing fig-trees and oleanders, to the cultivated abodes of man. Few scenes struck me so much in my long wanderings. Its charm consists in that exquisite union of force and grace, which forms the perfection of natural beauty as of the highest class of intellectual beings; it is that mysterious hymen of the land and the sea, surprised, as it were, in their most secret and hidden union. It is the image of perfect calm and inaccessible solitude, close to the theatre of tumultuous tempests, where their near roar is heard with such terror, where their foaming but lessened waves yet break upon the shore. It is one of those numerous chefs-d'œuvre of creation which God has scattered over the earth, as if to sport with contrasts, but which he conceals so frequently on the summit of naked rocks, in the depth of inaccessible ravines, on the unapproachable shores of the ocean, like jewels which he unveils rarely, and that only to simple beings, to children, to shepherds or fishermen, or the devout worshippers of nature." – (I. 73 – 74.)
This style of description of scenery is peculiar to this age, and in it Lamartine may safely be pronounced without a rival in the whole range of literature. It was with Scott and Chateaubriand that the graphic style of description arose in England and France; but he has pushed the art further than either of his great predecessors. Milton and Thompson had long ago indeed, in poetry, painted nature in the most enchanting, as well as the truest colours; but in prose little was to be found except a general and vague description of a class of objects, as lakes, mountains, and rivers, without any specification of features and details, so as to convey a definite and distinct impression to the mind of the reader. Even the classical mind and refined taste of Addison could not attain this graphic style; his descriptions of scenery, like that of all prose writers down to the close of the eighteenth century, are lost in vague generalities. Like almost all descriptions of battles in modern times, they are so like each other that you cannot distinguish one from the other. Scott and Chateaubriand, when they did apply their great powers to the delineation of nature, were incomparably faithful, as well as powerfully imaginative; but such descriptions were, for the most part, but a secondary object with them. The human heart was their great study; the vicissitudes of life the inexhaustible theme of their genius. With Lamartine, again, the description of nature is the primary object. It is to convey a vivid impression of the scenes he has visited that he has written; to kindle in his reader's mind the train of emotion and association which their contemplation awakened in his own, that he has exerted all his powers. He is much more laboured and minute, in consequence, than either of his predecessors; he records the tints, the forms, the lights, the transient effects, with all a painter's enthusiasm and all a poet's power; and succeeds, in any mind at all familiar with the objects of nature, in conjuring up images as vivid, sometimes perhaps more beautiful, than the originals which he portrayed.