Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848

My companion was lifted up and borne toward his uncle's. No music sounded upon the air as we approached – no voice of mirth escaped from the portal, for all inside were hushed into grief – that grief which anticipates a loss but knows not the sum of it. Several who entered the mansion first, and myself among the number, announced the coming of Victor, who had fallen in a fainting fit; but they would not believe us – they supposed at once that we came to save them from the sudden shock of an abrupt announcement of his death, and Estelle, with a piercing cry, rushed toward the hall – those bearing his body were at the moment entering the house – rushing toward them she clung to his inanimate form, uttering the most poignant cries of anguish. A few restoratives brought Victor to consciousness, and sweet were the accents of reproof which fell upon his ear with the first waking into life, for they betrayed to him the tender feelings of love which the fair Estelle had before concealed beneath her coquetry. While the tears of joy were bedewing her cheeks, on finding her lover safe, he like a skillful tactician pursued the advantage, and in a mock attitude of desperation threatened to rush out and cast himself amid the turbid waters of the lake, unless she at once promised to terminate his suspense by fixing the day of their marriage. The fair girl consented to throw around him, merely as she said for his preservation, the gentle authority of a wife, and I at once offered to seal a "quit claim" of my pretensions upon her rosy lips, but she preferred having Victor act as my attorney in the matter, and the tender negotiation was accordingly closed.

After partaking of a fragrant cup of Mocha, about the hour day was breaking, I started for home, and having arrived, I plunged beneath the blankets to rest my wearied body. Near noon I was awakened by the medical attendant feeling my pulse. On opening my eyes, the first impulse was to hide the neglected potions, which I had carelessly left exposed upon the table, but a glance partially relieved my fears about its discovery, for I had fortunately thrown my cravat over it and hid it from view. As Victor predicted, the doctor attributed the healthy state in which he found me entirely to his prescription, and following up its supposed good effect, with a repetition of his advice to keep quiet, he departed. I could scarcely suppress a smile in his presence. Little did he dream of the remedy which had banished my fever – cold baths and excitement had produced an effect upon me far more potent than drugs, either vegetable or mineral.

A month after the events here above mentioned, I made one of a gay assembly in that same old mansion at the foot of Lake St. Clair. It was Victor's wedding-night, about to be consummated where the confession was first won, and while he sat upon one side of a sofa holding his betrothed's hand, in all the joy of undisputed possession, I on the other gave her a description of the winter-spirits which hold their revel upon the ice of the lake. While she listened her eye kindled with excitement, and she clung unconsciously and with a convulsive shudder to the person of her lover.

"You are right, Estelle," said I, "hold him fast, or they will steal him away to their deep caves beneath the waters, where their dance is, to mortal, a dance of death."

Bidding me begone, for a spiteful croaker, who was trying out of jealousy to mar her happiness, she turned confidingly to the manly form beside her, and from the noble expression beaming from his eyes imbibed a fire which defied the whole spirit-world, so deep and so strong was their assurance of devoted affection. The good priest now bade them stand up, the words were spoken, the benediction bestowed, the bride and groom congratulated, and a general joy circled the company round.

The causes which led to, and the incidents which befel, a "night on the ice," I have endeavored faithfully to rehearse, and now let me add the pleasing sequel. Victor Druissel, folded in the embrace of beauty, now pillows his head upon a bosom as fond and true as ever in its wild pulsations of coquetry made a manly heart to ache with doubt.

THE THANKSGIVING OF THE SORROWFUL

BY MRS. JOSEPH C. NEAL"Thanksgiving," said the preacher."What hast thou,Oh heart" – I asked – "for which to render thanks!What – crushed and stricken – canst thou here recallWorthy for this rejoicing. That thy homeHath suddenly been made so desolate;Or that the love for which thy being yearnedThrough years of youth, was given but to showHow fleet are life's enjoyments? For the smileThat never more shall greet thee at the dawn,Or the low, earnest blessing, which at eveMerged thoughts of human love in dreams of Heaven;That these are taken wilt thou now rejoice?That thou art censured, where thou seekest love —And all thy purest thoughts, are turned to illSoon as they knew expression? Offerest praiseThat such has been thy lot in earliest youth?"Thou murmurer!" – thus whispered back my heart,"Thou – of all others – shouldst this day give thanks:Thanks for the love which for a little spaceMade thy life beautiful, and taught thee wellBy precept, and example, so to actThat others might in turn be blessed by thee.The patient love, that checked each wayward word;The holy love, that turned thee to thy God —Fount of all pure affection! Hadst thou dweltLonger in such an atmosphere, thy strengthHad yielded to the weakness of idolatry,Forgetting Him, the Giver, in his gifts.So He recalled them. Ay, for that rejoice,That thou hast added treasure up in Heaven;O, let thy heart dwell with thy treasure there;The dream shall thus become reality.The blessing may be resting on thy browCold as it is with sorrow. Thou hast lostThe love of earth – but gained an angel's care.And that the world views thee with curious eyes,Wronging the pure expression of thy thoughts, —Censure may prove to thee as finer's fire,That purifies the gold."Then gave I thanks,Reproved by that low whisper. Father hear!Forgive the murmurer thus in love rebuked;And may I never cease through all to payThis tribute to thy bounty.

DE LAMARTINE,

MINISTER OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS OF THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT OF FRANCEBY FRANCIS J. GRUND[SEE ENGRAVING.]

Alphonse de Lamartine, the present Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of France, was born in 1792, at Saint Pont, near Mâcon, in the Department of the Saone and Loire. His true family name is De Prat; but he took the name of De Lamartine from his uncle, whose fortune he inherited in 1820. His father and uncle were both royalists, and suffered severely from the Jacobins during the revolution. Had they lived in Paris their heads might have fallen from the block, but even in the province they did not escape persecution – a circumstance which, from the earliest youth of Lamartine, made a deep and indelible impression on his mind. His early education he received at the College of Belley, from which he returned in 1809, at the age of 18 years.

The splendor of the empire under Napoleon had no attractions for him. Though, at that period, Napoleon was extremely desirous to reconcile some of the old noble families, and for that purpose employed confidential ladies and gentlemen to correspond with the exiles and to represent to them the nobility of sentiment, and the magnanimity of the emperor; Lamartine refused to enter the service of his country under the new régime. So far from taking an interest in the great events of that period, he devoted himself entirely to literary studies, and improved his time by perambulating Italy. The fall of Napoleon did not affect him, for he was no friend of the first revolution, (whose last representative Napoleon still continued to be, though he had tamed it;) and when, in 1814, the elder line of Bourbons was restored, Lamartine returned from Naples, and entered, the service of Louis XVIII., as an officer of the garde-du-corps. With the return of Napoleon from Elba he left the military service forever.

A contemporary of Chateaubriand, Delavigne and Beranger, he now devoted himself to that species of lyric and romantic poetry which at first exasperated the French critics, but, in a very short time, won for him the European appellation of "the French Schiller." His first poems, "Méditations Poétiques," which appeared in Paris in 1820, were received with ten times the bitter criticism that was poured out on Byron by the Scotch reviewers, but with a similar result; in less than two months a second edition was called for and published. The spirit of these poems is that of a deep but undefined religion, presentiments and fantastic dreams of another world, and the consecration of a noble and disinterested passion for the beau ideal of his youth, "Elvire," separated from him forever by the chilly hand of death. In the same year Lamartine became Secretary of the French Legation at Naples, and in 1822, Secretary of the Legation in London – Chateaubriand being at the time minister plenipotentiary.

But the author of the Génie du Christianism, les Martyrs, and Bonaparte et des Bourbons, "did not seem to have been much pleased with Lamartine, whom he treated with studied neglect, and afterward entirely forgot as minister of foreign affairs. Chateaubriand, shortly before taking the place of Mons. Decazes in London, had published his Mémoires, lettres, et pièces authentiques touchant la vie et la mort du Duc de Berri,"3 and was then preparing to accompany the Duke of Montmorency, whom, in December 1822, he followed as minister of foreign affairs to the Congress of Verona. It is very possible that Chateaubriand, who was truly devoted to the elder branch of the Bourbons,4 may at that time have discovered in Lamartine little of that political talent or devotion which could have recommended him to a diplomatic post. Chateaubriand was a man of positive convictions in politics and religion, while Lamartine, at that period, though far surpassing Chateaubriand in depth of feeling and imagination, had not yet acquired that objectiveness of thought and reflection which is indispensable to the statesman or the diplomatist.

After the dismission of Chateaubriand from the ministry, in July, 1824, Lamartine became Secretary to the French Legation at Florence. Here he wrote "Le dernier chant du pélerinage d'Harold," (the Last Song of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage,) which was published in Paris in 1825. Some allusions to Italy which occur in this poem, caused him a duel with Col. Pepe, a relation of General Pepe – who had commanded the Neapolitan Insurgents – in which he was severely wounded. In the same year he published his "Chant du Sacre," (Chant of the Coronation,) in honor of Charles X., just about the time that his contemporary, Beranger, was preparing for publication his "Chansons inédittes," containing the most bitter sarcasm on Charles X., and for which the great Chansonnier was afterward condemned to nine month's imprisonment, and a fine of 10,000 francs. The career of Lamartine commences in 1830, after he had been made a member of the Academy, when Beranger's muse went to sleep, because, with Charles X.'s flight from France, he declared his mission accomplished. Delavigne, in 1829, published his Marino Falieri.

While in London, Lamartine married a young English lady, as handsome as spirituelle, who had conceived a strong affection for him through his poems, which she appreciated far better than his compeer, Chateaubriand, and requited with the true troubadour's reward. With the accession of Louis Philippe, Lamartine left the public service and traveled through Turkey, Egypt, and Syria. Here he lost his daughter, a calamity which so preyed on his mind that it would have incapacitated him for further intellectual efforts, had he not been suddenly awakened to a new sphere of usefulness. The town of Bergues, in the Department of the North, returned him, in his absence, to the Chamber of Deputies. He accepted the place, and was subsequently again returned from his native town, Mâcon, which he represented at the period of the last Revolution, which has called him to the head of the provisional government.

It is here worthy of remark, that Lamartine, from the commencement of his political career, did not take that interest in public affairs which seriously interferred with his poetical meditations; on the contrary, it was his muse which gave direction to his politics. He took a poetical view of religion, politics, morals, society, and state; the Chambers were to him but the medium for the realization of his beaux ideals. But it must not be imagined that Lamartine's beaux ideals had a distinct form, definitive outlines, or distinguishing lights and shades. His imagination has never been plastic, and his fancy was far better pleased with the magnitude of objects than with the artistical arrangement of their details. His conceptions were grand; but he possessed little power of elaboration; and this peculiarity of his intellect he carried from literature into politics.

Shortly after his becoming a member of the French Academy, he publishes his "Harmonies politiques et religieuses."5 Between the publication of these "Harmonies," and the "Poetical Meditations," with which he commenced his literary career, lies a cycle of ten years; but no perceptible intellectual progress or developement. True, the first effusions of a poet are chiefly marked by intensity of feeling and depth of sentiment. (What a world of emotions does not pervade Schiller's "Robbers," or Goethe's "Götz of Berlichingen, with the iron hand!") but the subsequent productions must show some advancement toward objective reality, without which it is impossible to individualize even genius. To our taste, the "Meditations" are superior to his "Harmonies," in other words, we prefer his præludium to the concert. The one leaves us full of expectation, the other disappoints us. Lamartine's religion is but a sentiment; his politics at that time were but a poetical conception of human society. His religion never reached the culmination point of faith; his politics were never condensed into a system; his liquid sympathies for mankind never left a precipitate in the form of an absorbing patriotism. When his contemporary, Beranger, electrified the masses by his "Roi d'Yvetot," and "le Senateur," (in 1813,) Lamartine quietly mused in Naples, and in 1814 entered the body guard of Louis XVIII., when Cormenin resigned his place as counsellor of state, to serve as a volunteer in Napoleon's army.

Lamartine's political career did not, at first, interfere with his literary occupation, it was merely an agreeable pastime – a respite from his most ardent and congenial labors. In 1835 appeared his "Souvenirs, impressions, pensées et paysages pendant un voyage en Orient, &c."6 This work, though written from personal observations, is any thing but a description of travels, or a faithful delineation of Eastern scenery or character. It is all poetry, without a sufficient substratum of reality – a dream of the Eastern world with its primitive vigor and sadness, but wholly destitute of either antiquarian research or living pictures. Lamartine gives us a picture of the East by candle-light – a high-wrought picture, certainly; but after all nothing but canvas. Shortly after this publication, there appeared his "Jocelyn, journal trouvé chez un curé de village,"7 a sort of imitation of the Vicar of Wakefield; but with scarcely an attempt at a faithful delineation of character. Lamartine has nothing to do with the village parson, who may be a very ordinary personage; his priest is an ideal priest, who inculcates the doctrines of ideal Christianity in ideal sermons without a text. Lamartine seems to have an aversion to all positive forms, and dislikes the dogma in religion as much as he did the principles of the Doctrinaires. It would fetter his genius or oblige it to take a definite direction, which would be destructive to its essence.

As late as in 1838 Lamartine published his "La chute d'un age."8 This is one of his poorest productions, though exhibiting vast powers of imagination and productive genius. The scene is laid in a chaotic antediluvian world, inhabited by Titans, and is, perhaps, descriptive of the author's mind, full of majestic imagery, but as yet undefined, vague, and without an object worthy of its efforts. Lamartine's time had not yet come, though he required but a few years to complete the fiftieth anniversary of his birth.

The year following, in 1839, he published his "Recueillements poétiques," which must be looked upon as the commencement of a new era in his life. Mahomed was past forty 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 thrown them in disorder, had not reconstructed and arranged them; and that the re-organization of society on the basis of humanity and mutual obligation, was still an unfinished problem. Lamartine felt this; but did the French Chambers, as they were then organized, offer him a fair scope for the development of his ideas, or the exercise of his genius? Certainly not. The French Chamber was divided into two great dynastic interests – those of the younger and elder Bourbons. The Republican party (the extreme left) was small, and without an acknowledged leader; and the whole assembly, with few individual exceptions, had taken a material direction. During seventeen years – from 1830 to 1847 – no organic principle of law or politics was agitated in the Chambers, no new ideas evolved. The whole national legislation seemed to be directed toward material improvements, to the exclusion of every thing that could elevate the soul or inspire the masses with patriotic sentiments. The government of Louis Philippe had at first become stationary, then reactionary; the mere enunciation of a general idea inspired its members with terror, and made the centres (right and left) afraid of the horrors of the guillotine. The government of Louis Philippe was not a reign of terror, like that of 1793, but it was a reign of prospective terror, which it wished to avoid. Louis Philippe had no faith in the people; he treated them as the keeper of a menagerie would a tame tiger – he knew its strength, and he feared its vindictiveness. To disarm it, and to change its ferocious nature, he checked the progress of political ideas, instead of combating them with the weapons of reason, and banished from his counsel those who alone could have served as mediators between the throne and the liberties of the nation. The French people seemed stupified at the contre-coups to all their hopes and aspirations. Even the more moderate complained; but their complaints were hushed by the immediate prospect of an improved material condition. All France seemed to have become industrious, manufacturing, mercantile, speculating. The thirst for wealth had succeeded to the ambition of the Republicans, the fanaticism of the Jacobins, and the love of distinction of the old monarchists. The Chamber of Deputies no longer represented the French people – its love, its hatred, its devotion – the elasticity of its mind, its facility of emotion, its capacity to sacrifice itself for a great idea. The Deputies had become stock-jobbers, partners in large enterprises of internal improvements, and timidly conservative, as are always the representatives of mere property. The Chamber, instead of representing the essence of the nation, represented merely the moneyed classes of society.

Such was the Chamber of Deputies to which Lamartine was chosen by an electoral college, devoted to the Dynastic opposition. He entered it in 1833, not a technical politician or orator as Odillon Barrot, not as a skillful tactitioner like Thiers, not as a man with one idea as the Duke de Broglie, not as the funeral orator of departed grandeur like Berryer, nor as the embodiment of a legal abstraction like Dupin, or a man of the devouring ambition and skill in debate of François Pierre Guillaume Guizot: Lamartine was simply a humanitaire. Goaded by the sarcasm of Cormenin, he declared that he belonged to no party, that he sought for no parliamentary conquest – that he wished to triumph through the force of ideas, and through no power of persuasion. He was the very counterpart of Thiers, the most sterile orator and statesman of France. Lamartine had studied the French Revolution, he saw the anarchical condition of society, and the ineffectual attempt to compress instead of organizing it; and he conceived the noble idea of collecting the scattered fragments, and uniting them into a harmonious edifice. While the extreme left were employed in removing the pressure from above, Lamartine was quietly employed in laying the foundation of a new structure, and called himself un démocrate conservateur.9 He spoke successfully and with great force against the political monopoly of real property, against the prohibitive system of trade, against slavery, and the punishment of death.10 His speeches made him at once a popular character; he did not address himself to the Chamber, he spoke to the French people, in language that sunk deep into the hearts of the masses, without producing a striking effect in the Legislature. At that time already had the king singled him out from the rest of the opposition. He wished to secure his talents for his dynasty; but Lamartine was not in search of a portefeuille, and escaped without effort from the temptation.

In November, 1837, he was re-elected to the Chamber from Bergues and Mâcon, his native town. He decided in favor of the latter, and took his seat as a member for that place. He supported the Molé ministry, not because he had become converted to the new dynasty, but because he despised the Doctrinaires, who, by their union with the Liberals, brought in the new Soult ministry. He was not satisfied with the purity of motives, he also wanted proper means to attain a laudable object. In the Oriental question, which was agitated under Soult, Lamartine was not felt. His opposition was too vague and undefined: instead of pointing to the interests of France, he pointed to the duties of humanity of a great nation; he read Milton in a counting-room, and a commercial Maclaurin asked him "what does it prove?"