'An aged father, whom our image haunts, Howl when they hear my name.'-vol. i. pp. 7, 8. But the strangest misconception or negligence appears in this passage, in which the translator seems totally to have overlooked the allusion to the artificial rules of French rhyme N'attends donc plus de moi ces vers où la pensée, Comme d'un arc sonore avec grâce élancée, Et sur deux mots pareils vibrant à l'unisson, 'From me expect no more the verse, where thought my ear.'-Ibid. Complacent dance to the caprice of sound. Now verse in its cold echo shocks p. 88. We are sorry that Miss Landon should have thus misapplied her talents-but the truth is, however fairly the version of the prose part of the work may be executed, few writers suffer more by translation than M. de Lamartine. His whole mind, his tone of expression, his sentiments, his poetry, even though he may yearn after a richer, a more imaginative, and more picturesque vehicle for his creations than his own tongue, are essentially French. To read him in any other language, at all events in English, gives a kind of forced and unnatural character to sentiments and to expressions, which in the original are sometimes full of beauty and eloquence, at least have nothing to startle or to perplex the reader. There is a sort of idiom of thought and feeling-as of language: generous sentiments, philosophical thoughts, even the social feelings which belong to universal human nature, religion itself has its national tone and characteristic manner of expressing itself. It is not merely that the words, and the form of the sentences, are in one case French, in the other English; there is something which seems to flow more directly from the national mind; an idiosyncracy in the way of seeing, of apprehending external objects, and of developing internal emotions. Our own modern poets have left us little right to charge French writers with the egotistical display of their personal feelings and emotions, but still we feel that there is an indefinite, an indescribable difference between that of Byron, for instance, and of De Lamartine. There is something in the deep and earnest tenderness with which our author dwells on his do mestic relations, his hopes, his joys-we grieve to add-his bitter and unexpected afflictions, which, habituated as we are to be introduced into the privacy, the inmost sanctuary of a poet's home, in English has something glaring, as it were, something of effect and parade, whilst in French it reads like the natural manner in which such emotions would find their vent. In some respects this may be owing to the almost inevitable infidelity of translation; one word, one phrase, too strong, one epithet not tempered down to the precise sense of the original, will give a false and theatrical effect to the whole; yet, even where this is not the case, it is impossible to translate French feeling or French passion into literal English, so as to produce the same impression which it conveys in its original tongue. Of all powerful emotions, religion, though it has a common language, varies most strongly in its peculiar and national dialect. In many respects the French mind-we might almost have written, the mind of Continental Europe, among men of intellect, where it has retained its reverence and its love for the Christian faith-is in very remarkable state. Its creed, its forms, its tastes, its feelings, are Roman Catholic; but the enlightened and instructed mind cannot but perceive how much of human superstition is mingled up with the doctrinal forms, and incorporated with the ceremonial of the church. The latter it receives and, indeed, admires, as the old poetic garb or outward investiture of Christianity,-from the other it escapes into an undefined and general admission of the Christian doctrines. Thus, in many cases, it unites a vague and philosophical rationalism of creed with an ardent and profound devotional spirit; all this, we need not state, is so diametrically opposite to the tone of religious feeling in this country, which still adheres with rigid tenacity, not only to the established theological tenets, but to the reverent simplicity of scriptural phraseology, as not merely to be out of harmony with the religious sentiment, but to be incongruous with the ordinary English language of religion. In French, in a foreign tongue, at least to those who are habituated to a different tone of feeling and thought, this new terminology reads as the natural expression of our common emotions ; English, it is like the introduction of a new religious vocabularyand often revolts more than the ear:-'God, love, and poetry, are the three words which I would wish engraved on my tomb, if ever I merit a tomb' there is something hard and forced in this sentence, though it is a literal translation of Dieu, Amour, et Poésie sont les trois mots que je voudrais seuls graver sur ma pierre, si je mérite jamais une pierre.' The following passage maintains, it is true, much of its religious beauty in the translation, but in the original it is far more vivid, striking, and natural. in 'To To explain to myself why, verging already on the close of my youth-on that period of life when man withdraws from the ideal world to enter into that of material interests, I have quitted a comfortable and peaceful existence at Saint-Point and all the innocent delights of the domestic circle surrounded by a beloved wife and a darling child to explain to myself, I repeat it, why at present I venture on the vast sea, steering my course to shores unknown—I am obliged to go back to the source of all my thoughts, to seek there the causes of my sympathies and my taste for travelling, and find that the imagination had also its wants and its passions! I was born a poet, that is, with more or less intelligence of that beautiful language in which God speaks to all men, but to some more clearly than to others, through the medium of his works. 6 When young, I had heard this logos of nature, this word, formed of images, and not of sounds, in the mountains, in the forests, in the lakes, on the borders of the abysses and the torrents of my country, and of the Alps. I had even translated into written language some of the accents which had moved me, and which in their turn moved other souls; but those accents no longer sufficed to me; I had exhausted the small portion of divine words which the land of Europe furnished to man; I thirsted to hear on other shores accents more sonorous and more brilliant. My imagination was enamoured of the sea, the deserts, the mountains, the manners, and the traces of the Deity in the east. All my life the east had been the waking dream of my darksome days, in the autumnal and winter fogs of my natal valley. My body, like my soul, is the child of the sun : it requires light, it requires that ray of life which the splendid orb darts, not from the shattered bosom of our western clouds, but from the depths of that sky of purple which resembles the mouth of a furnace; those rays which are not merely a glimmer, but which descend burning hot-which, in falling, calcine the white rocks and sparkling pinnacles of the mountains, and which tinge the ocean with scarlet as if a fire were kindled in its waves! I felt a strong wish to handle a little of that earth which was the land of our first family, the land of prodigies; to see, to wander over this evangelical scene, whereon was represented the great drama of divine wisdom struggling with error and human perversity; where moral truth suffered martyrdom to fertilize with its blood a more perfect civilization. Besides I was, and had almost always been, a Christian in heart and in imagination: my mother had made me such. Sometimes, indeed, in the less pure days of my early youth, I had ceased to be so; misfortune and love, perfect love, which purifies all that it inflames, had driven me back at a later period into this first asylum of my thoughts, into those consolations demanded alike by memory and hope, when the heart dies away within us; when all the emptiness of life appears, after a passion extinguished, or a death which leaves us nothing to love. This Christianity of sentiment was become the sweet soother of my thoughts; I often asked myself, where is perfect, evident, uncontestable truth to be found?-If it exists anywhere, it is in the heart, it is in conscious evidence against which no reasoning can prevail. But truth in the mind is never complete; it is with God, and not with us; the human eye is too small to absorb a single ray of it: for us all truth is only relative; that which will be the most useful to man will be also the most true. The doctrine the most fertile in divine virtues will therefore also be that which contains the greatest number of divine truths; for what is good is true. This was the sum of my religious logic; my philosophy ascended no higher; it forbade me both doubt and the endless dialogues which reason holds with itself; it left me that religion of the heart which associates so well with all the infinite sentiments of the soul, which resolves nothing, but which soothes all.'-pp. 18-21. Every one must feel that such passages as these are miserably. maltreated by the English translator. While, however, in justice, to M. de Lamartine we strongly urge our readers to peruse the work in the original, we shall not depart from the usual practice of periodical journals like our own, in making our selections in English from the version at hand. M. de Lamartine set sail from Marseilles; his voyage was at first slow; his vessel lingering on the shores of Provence afforded the poet the opportunity of introducing much very pleasing de-, scription of the scenery on that coast, and a great deal of picturesque sea effect; at length he came in view of the African shore, where Giace l'alta Carthago. But Carthage does not waken in him the same deep feeling as in the older Christian poet. I never loved the Romans; I never felt any interest at heart for Carthage, notwithstanding its glory and its misfortunes. Hannibal never appeared to me more than a general of the East India Company, making a campaign of business, a brilliant and heroic commercial operation in the plains of Thrasymene. This people, ungrateful, like all egotists, rewarded him by exile and death! As to his death, it was fine, it was pathetic, it reconciles me to his triumphs.'-p. 55. 'I discovered, at a later period, the secret of my sympathies and antipathies for the memory of certain nations; it lay in the very nature of the institutions and actions of those people. Nations like the Phenicians, Tyre, Sidon, Carthage-commercial societies, exploring the earth for their profit, and measuring the grandeur of their enterprise only by the material and actual utility of the result-I feel towards them like Dante, I glance at them and pass on. "Non ragionam di lor, ma guarda e passa!" Let us forget them-they were rich and prospered, that is all-they laboured only for the present, the future had nothing to do with them. Receperunt mercedem.'-p. 56. We are not the declared advocates of the 'utilitarians' of antiquity, yet Carthage, surely, and the commercial nations of the older older world, have their poetic point of view. What lofty mind can contemplate without admiration the navigators who, in the infancy of the art, first dared to explore the mysteries of the great deep; who, however the motives of their perilous enterprise may have been the base desire of gold, urged their frail barks at least as far as Cape Bojador, on the African coast, if we are to surrender their circumnavigation of Africa to the sceptical geographer, and forced their way through the perilous surf which beats on the western shores of Britain, and even unto the bleak and foggy bosom of the Baltic. Theirs were mighty energies, leading to the eventual elevation of mankind. Our author's criticism on the Dido of Virgil is remarkable, as an illustration of the total revolution in French taste. It is a countryman of Racine animadverting on the cold gallantries' introduced by Virgil. "Virgil, like all poets who wish to surpass truth, history, and nature, has rather spoiled than embellished the image of Dido. The historical Dido, widow of Sicheus, and faithful to the manes of her first husband, caused her funereal pile to be erected on the Cape of Carthage, and ascended it, the sublime and voluntary victim of pure love and fidelity even to death! This is more beautiful, more pathetic, more holy, than the cold gallantries which the Roman poet attributes to her, with his ridiculous and pious Eneas, and her amorous despair, in which the reader cannot sympathize.-But the Anna Soror, and the magnificent adieu, and the immortal imprecation which follows it, will always cause Virgil to be pardoned.'-p. 59. But the ordinary temperament of M. de Lamartine's mind is little inclined to a debasing or disparaging tone of criticism. It is the peculiar charm-it must be acknowledged that it rather causes a distrust of the faithful accuracy-of his descriptions, that he is always inclined to see the brighter and more effective parts of the picture before him: in scenery it is the soft, the luxuriant, the splendid, the awful forms of nature; in human character, it is the lofty and the generous which are congenial to his taste, and awaken his fancy. He gives an imaginative colouring to some of the most ordinary circumstances; and discovers beauty, and even magnificence, in sights which many persons have beheld without emotion. It is amusing to contrast Byron's splenetic description of that 'military hothouse' Malta, with the brother poet's graphic and imposing outline of its architectural effect and the picturesquely mingled character of the inhabitants. His account of the ordinary courtesies of his reception by a gentlemanly governor and his lady, and by the superior class of residents, partakes of the same high tone of colouring. Even the civility of the captain of an English man-of-war in taking his lagging vessel into tow, through parts of the |