half of the nineteenth century were emphatically poets, as had also
already been Jean Jacques Rousseau and even Buffon. Imagination,
sensibility, and the sentiment for nature were the mistresses of their
faculties. Chateaubriand was the promoter of all the literary movement
of the nineteenth century, alike in prose and poetry. He was a literary
theorist, an epic poet in prose, traveller, polemist, orator. His great
literary theory was in _The Genius of Christianity_, and consisted in
supporting that all true poetic beauties lay in Christianity. His epic
poems in prose are _The Natchez_, a picture of the customs of American
Indians, _The Martyrs_, a panorama of the struggle of paganism at its
close and of Christianity at its beginning; his travels were _The Voyage
in America_ and _The Itinerary from Paris to Jerusalem_. Member of the
parliamentary assemblies, ambassador and minister, he wrote and spoke in
the most brilliant and impassioned manner on the subjects that he took
up. Finally, falling back on himself, as he had never ceased to do more
or less all through his career, he left, in his marvellous _Memoirs from
Beyond the Tomb_, a posthumous work which is, perhaps, his masterpiece.
His infinitely supple and variegated style formed a continuous artistic
miracle, so harmonious and musical was it more musical even than that of
Jean Jacques Rousseau.

MME. DE STAEL.--At the same time, though she died long before him, Mme.
de Stael, by her curious and interesting, though never affecting, novels,
_Delphine_ and _Corinne_, by her dissertations on various serious
subjects, by her work on Germany, which initiated the French into the
habits and literature of neighbours they were ill acquainted with, also
directed the minds of men into new paths, and she was prodigal of ideas
which she had almost always borrowed, but which she thoroughly
understood, profoundly reconsidered, and to which she imparted an
appearance of originality even in the eyes of those who had given them to