figure which he means to set before us, a cover. It is a puzzle upon which the inbeing superior to the common rules of genuity of some critic at leisure might humanity, a saint and martyr, the very occupy itself, were the question worth the emblem and impersonation of poetical trouble. The story is, however, solemnly self-sacrifice. We cannot find a line to introduced to us as coming from the lips show that the poet himself felt anything to of a prophet-hermit of Lebanon, who dies be wanting in the type he chooses of per- as soon as he has accomplished the refect love and suffering; and though the cital. The angel whose fall is the subject reader is more impatient than sympathetic, of the tale belongs to those primitive times the writer has always the air of being per- when the sons of God made alliances with fectly satisfied with his own creation, and the daughters of men, at the curious cost, convinced that he has set forth in it a high according to Lamartine, of living nine and most attractive ideal. Laurence is lives (an unlucky number) upon earth bestill more shadowy than her priest-lover; fore they could once more attain their and but for the intense happiness which native heaven. The treatment of the we are told she is capable of conferring fallen angel is original at least, if nothing by her presence, her looks, and her caress- more. When he drops suddenly into es, is the mere symbol of a woman without manhood, moved by the hot and generous any character at all. In short, the reader purpose of saving his human love (who feels that this ideal pair are very badly knows nothing of him) from the hands of used by their Maker, who makes them giants, he brings with him no reminissuffer an infinity of vague torture without any compensation for it, any sense of duty to support them, any nobility of resignation to reconcile their lives to ordinary existence. What is called self-renunciation thus becomes a mere forced and involuntary endurance, against which they struggle all their lives: while the happiness to which they aspire is degraded into a monotonous rapture of touch and clasp and caress; not passion, but maudlin fondness; not despair, but maudiin lamentations over what they would but cannot possess. The second poem which the author, with some vague plan in his head, of which he does not reveal the fin mot, meant to form part of a series of which "Jocelyn" was the first-also finds its centre of interest in the same blazing, hot love which is the only power worth noticing in the universe, according to Lamartine. We do not pretend to say what the connection between the two may be. At first glance we might suppose that one of them represents that "love which never had an earthly close," which is always so captivating to the imagination - and the other, love satisfied and triumphant forcing its way through all obstacles. This transparent contrast and connection, however, is destroyed by the fact that the "Chute d'un Ange" closes in still more dismal despair and misery than anything that happens to Jocelyn; and that the muddle of torture, like the muddle of bliss, comes about apparently without any moral cause whatever, from circumstances over which neither the poet nor his hero has any control. What moral meaning there is in it, or rather is intended to be in it, is beyond our power to disVOL. XIV. 678 LIVING AGE. cences of his better state, no traditions of heaven or heavenly knowledge, but becomes a salvage man, without even the power of speech, knowing nothing about himself, and unable to communicate with the primitive people about him. This transformation is so complete, that even when taught by Daïdha, the object of his affections, to speak, and raised by his love for her to a certain humanity, no sort of recollection ever seems to come back to him; and the only purpose for which he is brought upon this earth seems again to be mere billing and cooing, accomplished under the most tragic risks, and with hideous interruptions of suffering, over which the couple, increased by the addition of twin babies of portentous appetite, have many extraordinary triumphs, emerging again constantly on the other side of the cloud into a sickly paradise of embraces, sucklings, and such-like conjugal and nursery blisses. What is meant by the very earthly Olympus of primeval giant gods into which they are carried, or by the final mysterious conclusion in the desert, when Daïdha dies cursing, for the death of her children, the husband who has resigned heaven for her, we are unable to tell; neither can we feel that this climax demonstrates the emptiness of human good as shown in the desolate ending as much of the happy and fortunate as of the disappointed lover, though probably this is what the poet meant. The angel-father breaks into blasphemy when he sees his edifice of happiness fall to pieces around him, and makes a last pyrotechnic effort to consume himself along with his dead wife and children; but even when he comes to this conclusion, nothing beyond rent By sudden lightning from its gloom has sent sustain ; Clear the choked runlet from its sandy stain. Then tend the poor, who, stretching empty hands, Asking for pence or bread in God's name stands; fears, despair at the loss of his happiness seems | On the heaped carts, before the rain-cloud to enter his mind - he has no consciousness of his voluntary descent into mortality- no apparent knowledge of himself as being more than a man. The whole effect is manqué by this curious failure on the part of the poet even to identify his own conception: he would seem either to have forgotten it altogether, or to have felt himself unable to grasp the idea of a loftier nature than that of humanity, or to think of an angel as anything beyond the handsome youth with flowing hair which painters have taken as the type of heavenly Or widow, who, from souls untouched by existence. Thus, once more, everything Alms of the heart, asks tears to swell her that is desirable in life comes to be represented by kisses and languishing looks, by the mutual self-absorption of two beings, who find a somewhat monotonous heaven in each other's arms, and around whom the world may tremble or be convulsed, and all the race of man disappear, without even awakening them from their private raptures. All this, however, let the reader remember, is combined with the most perfect virtue. It is connubiality rendered improper, and domesticity made indecent; but there is no idea of evil in the whole matter; it is virtue, only too sweet, too fond, too loving-maudlin and nasty if you please, but virtue all the same. We are glad to be able to retire out of this sickly sweetness to the better atmosphere of the fugitive poems, those meditations and harmonies, which, if never reaching the highest level of poetry, are still expressive of many of the gentler feelings of the heart, its languors and sadness, its tender recollections, and that vague melancholy which, there can be little doubt, gives so much of its charm to nature. In this point of view, as a reflective and descriptive poet, giving a harmonious medium of expression to many a gentle, voiceless soul, Lamartine will probably long retain his place in the estimation of his countrymen. His longer poems are, we trust, as dead by this time as they deserve to be, and we feel a personal necessity to remove the sickly odour which they leave behind them by one more return to the native soil which gave him strength, and filled him with an inspiration more wholesome and sweet than sen timent. Here is Milly once more, the be- Then come in turn the many cares of day- tears; Or hopeful counsel on the unthrifty shed, Masters and servants, talking in the shade Or numbers, finger-counted o'er and o'er ; Or weave their garments from the thread they pass; wood The herdsman leading back from field and The beggar passing bowed beneath his load. And as his great round, dropping, drowned in Broideries of gold or sombre furrows made, We think of friends whose eyes have long | Lamartine. His longer poems are monot foregone With heavy burden hum the chant divine, This is finely touched, and with real tenderness of feeling. It is part of the poem entitled “ Bénédiction de Dieu dans la Solitude," and was suggested, the poet tells us, by a pretty group formed of his mother, his young wife, her mother and her child, seated in a summer landscape close to the old house which had sheltered his infancy. In this kind of gentle strain, whether it be prose or poetry, he is beyond rivalry. When all other inspiration fails, the inspiration of home never fails him. Whatever he may be else where, at Milly he is ever a true poet. This is the highest praise we can give to onous and cloying; his poetical romances of a mawkish and unwholesome sweetness. But on his native soil, in the homequalities disappear. He loves the skies ly house of his mother, all objectionable which overarch that dear bit of country; he loves the hills and the fields because they surround that centre of all associa tions; and in his companionship with nature he is always tender and natural, seldom exaggerated, and scarcely ever morbid. His shorter strains are full of the fresh atmosphere of the country he loved; and the sentiment of pensive evenings and and darkness, is to be found everywhere still nights, soft-breathing, full of stars in the gentle melodious verse; not lofty or all-absorbing like the nature-worship of Wordsworth, but more within the range of the ordinary mind, and quite as genuine and true. Had he been content with this, and not aspired to represent passion of which he knew nothing, his fame would have been more real and more lasting. He was such a poet as the quieter He could not touch the greater springs of intellectualist, the pensive thinker loves. human feeling; but he could so play upon the milder stops of that great instinct as to fill his audience with a soft enthusiasm. Some of his prose works reach to a profounder influence; and those readers who remember, when it came out, the "History of the Girondists," will not refuse to the poet a certain power of moving and exciting the mind: but this work and the many others which preceded and followed it, have little to do with our argument. They are poetical and exaggerated prose, and have no claim to the higher title of poetry. In the midst of his manifold productions, however, there happened to Lamartine such a chance as befalls few poets. He had it in his power once in his life to do something greater than the greatest lyric, more noble than any vers. At the crisis of the Revolution of 1848, chance (to use the word without irreverence) thrust him and no other into the place of master, and held him for one supreme moment alone between France and anarchy - between, we might almost say, the world and a second terrible Revolution. And there the sentimentalist proved himself a man; he confronted raving Paris, and subdued it. The old noble. French blood in his veins rose to the greatness of the crisis. With a pardonable thrill of pride in the position, so strange to a writer and man of thought, into which without any action of his own he found in his fugitive pieces there dwells often himself forced, he describes how he faced the very sweetness of the woods and fields the tremendous mob of Paris for seventy -a homely gentle atmosphere of moral hours, almost without repose, without quiet and beauty. It is for these, and not sleep or food, when there was no other for the exaggerated poetical maundering man in France bold enough or wise of his larger poems, that his name will be enough to take that supreme part; and remembered in the world. ended by guiding that most aimless of revolutions to a peaceful conclusion, for the moment at least. It was not Lamartine's fault that the empire came after him. Long before the day of the empire had come he had fallen from his momentary elevation, and lost all influence over his country. But his downfall cannot efface the fact that he did actually reign, and reign beneficently, subduing and controlling the excited nation, saving men's lives and the balance of society. We know no other poet who has had such a chance afforded him, and few men who have acquitted themselves so well in one of the most difficult and dangerous positions which it is possible for a man to hold. The end of his life, which was spent obscurely, faded away amid many clouds; and it is better that we should not attempt to enter into that record of perpetual debt and shifting impecuniosity. The nation itself came, we think more than once, to the rescue of the poet; and he went on until his very end publishing and republishing, following reminiscence with reminiscence, in a feverish strain for money, which it is painful to contemplate. The causes of this we need not enter into; but, well endowed as his family had left him, sole heir of all the uncles and aunts who had sat heavily upon his early life, he died poor and deprived of almost everything. When a man has to come pitifully before the world and explain how, to retain Milly, he sells another bit of himself, another volume of "Confidences," to the eager bookseller making, one feels, capital of the very sympathy excited the situation is too painful and humbling to be dwelt upon. Lamartine's sun went down amid those clouds. But the man is dead, and his generation are disappearing off the scene, and France has perhaps more debts to him than she has ever been able to pay. He never led her intentionally astray, from one end of his career to the other. If his adoration of love is sometimes sickly, and his sentimentality maudlin, and the ideal world he framed a narrow and poor world, filled with but one monotonous strain of weak passion - it is at the same time a pure love which he idolizes, a virtuous ideal, which, according to his lights, he endeavours to set forth. And From The Cornhill Magazine. LA BELLA SORRENTINA. CHAPTER I. THE district that forms the southern horn of the Bay of Naples, with its orangegroves and vineyards, its aloes, olives and palms, its rocky hills, its white, glittering towns, its deep blue sea, its bare-legged fishermen and graceful, dark-eyed girls, has always been the very paradise of tourists. The faint, heavy scent of the orangeblossoms is wafted to you, as you sit in your balcony above the sea, on warm, moonlight nights; the tinkling of a guitar is heard from the distance, where somebody is singing "Santa Lucia" or "La Bella Sorrentina" before the door of one of the hotels; a long line of smoke is blown from Vesuvius towards the horizon; the lights of Naples wink and glitter on the other side of the bay; and presently (if you are inclined to pay for it) a little company of young men and maidens will come and dance the tarantella for you, till you are weary of watching so much activity in such a slumberous atmosphere. There is no disappointment about this part of Italy. Pictures, poetry, books of travel-all that one has heard, seen, or read of this country-cannot have exaggerated its loveliness or idealized its perfection. The sky and sea are as blue and deep, the mountains as softly purple, and the vegetation as luxuriant as the most fervid imagination can have pictured them; the people are laughing, dancing, singing and chattering from morning till night; even when they work they seem to be only playing at toil, dragging up their nets, or tending their vines, as if only to make a pretty foreground to a picture. Life at Sorrento and Castellamare is, to quote the opinion of an enthusiastic French lady, as beautiful as a perpetual scene at the opera, and even more agreeable, as being free from the inconvenience of gas. Tourists generally are apt to fall in, in some sort, with this way of thinking. Everything in this charming, perfumed, sensuous land is so full of pleasure, so fairylike and unreal, that it is difficult to believe that the cares and troubles of the world can have any place there, or that the inhabitants can have anything to do but to look picturesque and dance and sing from the cradle to the grave. Nevertheless, the Piano di Sorrento is a country in which people love, hate, weep, struggle, pinch, and suffer in the same way as mortals do in other parts of this planet. Here is the history of a man and a woman, born and bred in Sorrento, to both of whom want and suffering were familiar in their earlier years; while one of them, at least, experienced more of the latter sensation than most people would hold to be the fair share of a lifetime. and excitement and contact with the world; her laughter is perhaps neither so frequent nor so hearty as it used to be; and it is proverbial that wealth does not of necessity confer happiness on its possessor. Good-natured the Vannini has always been, and always will be, one may suppose, till the end of the chapter. The peasants of Sorrento gave her the sobriquet of la bella Sorrentina, after the well-known song that bears that titlewhether from her remarkable beauty or from the fact that Luigi, who played the guitar a little, was fond of trolling out the air at her garden-gate, I do not know. The name was, at all events, a sufficiently appropriate one. Lovers, as has been said, were not wanting to her; but at the age of eighteen she had as yet declined to have anything to say to any of them even to Luigi Ratta, whom perhaps she liked the best of all, and who had been constant to her ever since the time when, as children of ten and eight years old respectively, they had broken a small coin together, each promising to keep a half in sign of eternal fidelity. The name of Annunziata Vannini, the famous prima donna, has become well known to the world, while that of Luigi Ratta will convey no idea to the mind of the reader, and would probably, indeed, never have been heard ten miles from his native village of Sorrento but for a circumstance which shall in due course be related. But everybody has seen and heard the Vannini; and even those who cannot claim to be considered as other than nobodies that is to say, people who Luigi, like herself, was, at the time our look upon a guinea and a half as too long story opens, an orphan. His father had a price to pay for an evening's amusement died about two years before, leaving him must have become familiar with her a small sum of money carefully locked up features from her photographs in the shop- in a cash-box, a share in a good-sized windows, where she has figured in a hun- fishing-boat, a couple of nets, and a little dred different costumes and attitudes any cottage just outside Sorrento. With this time during the last fifteen years. Yet a property Luigi, though not precisely wellvery small proportion of the admiring and to-do, felt himself in a position to support appreciative throngs who have applauded a wife; nor need he have sought long or far her to the echo while bouquets, laurel to find a willing partner, for he was steady, wreaths, and even diamond bracelets upon handsome, hard-working, and as strong as occasion, have been showered down upon an ox. But there was only one girl in the her as she stood smiling and curtsying world that Luigi felt any inclination for; upon the stages of Covent Garden, St. and she, when one spoke to her of love, Petersburg, and Paris, is aware that, not would only laugh; and if one mentioned so very long ago, she was a bare-footed marriage, was apt to retire into the house orphan girl, helping her aunt, old Marta and slam the door in one's face. It was Vannini, at the wash-tub, seldom tasting provoking; but Luigi was of a long-sufmeat, sometimes getting cuffed for care-fering and persevering nature; he doubtlessness, and not unfrequently going hungry to bed. ed not but that, in the end, his hopes would be fulfilled, and in the mean time possessed his soul in patience, and got what comfort he could from long interviews with the girl of his heart, on fine nights after work-hours, at the end of old Marta Vannini's garden, which overlooked the sea. He used to take his guitar, on such occasions, and station himself by the low lava-built wall, singing love-songs till such time as it pleased Annunziata to become aware of his presence, and come In those old days, from which she has become so widely and utterly removed, Annunziata Vannini was a beautiful, laughing, happy, and good-natured girl, whom everybody was fond of, and whom some (notably Luigi Ratta) loved so much that they would fain have taken her, all poor and dowerless as she was, to gladden their homes permanently with her bright presence. Nowadays her beauty has lost something of its freshness, as is but nat-down and talk to him. ural after fifteen years of constant labour Now it chanced that as he was thus em |