'"Qu'il est doux, qu'il est doux d'ecouter les histoires
Des histoires du temps passe
Quand les branches des arbres sont noires,
Quand la neige est essaisse, et charge un sol glacé,
Quand seul dans un ciel pâle un peuplier s'élance,
Quand sous le manteau blanc qui vient de le cacher
L'immobile corbeau sur l'arbre se balance
Comme la girouette au bout du long clocher."
'These poems generally are only interesting as the leisure
hours of an interesting man.
'De Vigny writes in an excellent style; soft, fresh,
deliberately graceful. Such a style is like fine manners;
you think of the words select, appropriate, rather than
distinguished, or beautiful. De Vigny is a perfect gentleman;
and his refinement is rather that of the gentleman than that
of the poets whom he is so full of. In character, he looks
naturally at those things which interest the man of honor
and the man of taste. But for literature, he would have
known nothing about the poets. He should be the elegant
and instructive companion of social, not the priest or the
minstrel of solitary hours.
'Neither has he logic or grasp with his reasoning powers,
though of this, also, he is ambitious. Observation is his
forte. To see, and to tell with grace, often with dignity and
pathos, what he sees, is his proper vocation. Yet, where he
fails, he has too much tact and modesty to be despised; and
we cannot enough admire the absence of faults in a man whose
ambition soared so much beyond his powers, and in an age and
a country so full of false taste. He is never seduced into
sentimentality, paradox, violent contrast, and, above all,
never makes the mistake of confounding the horrible with the
sublime. Above all, he never falls into the error, common
to merely elegant minds, of painting leading minds "_en
gigantesque_." His Richelieu and his Bonaparte are treated
with great calmness, and with dignified ease, almost as
beautiful as majestic superiority.
'In this volume is contained all that is on record of the
inner life of a man of forty years. How many suns, how many
rains and dews, to produce a few buds and flowers, some sweet,
but not rich fruit! We cannot help demanding of the man of
talent that he should be like "the orange tree, that busy
plant." But, as Landor says, "He who has any thoughts of any
worth can, and probably will, afford to let the greater part
lie fallow."
'I have not made a note upon De Vigny's notions of abnegation,
which he repeats as often as Dr. Channing the same watch-word
of self-sacrifice. It is that my views are not yet matured,
and I can have no judgment on the point.'