brilliant from the literary aspect, James Delille was despotic: his
earlier efforts have already been attended to. A skilled versifier, but
without fire or many ideas, he made cultured translations from Virgil and
Milton, wrote perennially descriptive poems, such as _The Man in the
Fields_, _The Gardens_, etc., and a witty satirical poem on
_Conversation_, which, in our opinion, was the best thing he wrote.

GREAT POETS: LAMARTINE.--Great poets were to come. Aroused, without
doubt, by the poetic genius of the prose writer Chateaubriand, the first
generation of the romantics was formed by Lamartine, Victor Hugo, and
Alfred de Vigny. Romanticism was the preponderance of imagination and
sensibility over reason and observation. Lamartine rebathed poetry in its
ancient and eternal sources: love, religion, and the sentiment of nature.
In his _Meditations_, his _Harmonies_, and his _Contemplations_, he
reawoke feelings long slumbering, and profoundly moved the hearts of men.
In _Jocelyn_ he widened his scope, and, emerging from himself, narrated,
as he imagined it, the story of the soul of a priest during the
Revolution, and subsequently in the obscurity of a rural parish; in
_The Fall of an Angel_ he reverted to the life of primaeval man as he
conceived it to be when humanity was still barbarous. Apart from his
poetic works, he wrote _The History of the Girondins_, which is a
romanesque history of almost the whole of the Revolution, some novels,
some autobiographic episodes, and a few discourses on literature.

VICTOR HUGO.--Victor Hugo, though less sensitive than Lamartine but more
imaginative, began with lyrical poems which were somewhat reminiscent of
the classical manner, then went on to pictures of the East, thence to
meditations on what happened to himself, and on all subjects (_Autumn
Leaves_, _Lights and Shades_); next, in full possession of his genius, he
dwelt on great philosophical meditations in his _Contemplations_, and in