r example, Theophile Gautier reproached him with being too little
impressed with the exigencies of rhyme, his criticism was not well
grounded, for richness of rhyme, though indispensable in works of
descriptive imagination, has no 'raison d'etre' in poems dominated by
sentiment and thought. But, having said that, we must recognize in his
poetry an element, serious, strong, and impressive, characteristic
of itself alone, and admire, in the strophes of 'Mozse', in the
imprecations of 'Samson', and in the 'Destinees', the majestic
simplicity of the most beautiful Hebraic verse.

Moreover, the true originality of De Vigny does not lie in the manner
of composition; it was primarily in the role of precursor that he played
his part on the stage of literature. Let us imagine ourselves at the
period about the beginning of the year 1822. Of the three poets who,
in making their literary debuts, had just published the 'Meditations,
Poemes antiques et modernes, and Odes', only one had, at that time, the
instinct of renewal in the spirit of French poesy, and a sense of
the manner in which this must be accomplished; and that one was not
Lamartine, and certainly it was not Victor Hugo.

Sainte-Beuve has said, with authority, that in Lamartine there is
something suggestive of Millevoye, of Voltaire (he of the charming
epistles), and of Fontanes; and Victor Hugo wrote with very little
variation from the technical form of his predecessors. "But with Alfred
de Vigny," he says, "we seek in vain for a resemblance to any French
poetry preceding his work. For example, where can we find anything
resembling 'Moise, Eloa, Doloeida'? Where did he find his inspiration
for style and composition in these poems? If the poets of the Pleiades
of the Restoration seem to have found their inspiration within
themselves, showing no trace of connection with the literature of the
past, thus throwing into confusion old habits of taste and of routine,
certain it is that among them Alfred de Vigny should be ranked first."

Even in the collection that bears the date of 1822, some years before
the future author of Legende des Siecles had taken up romanticism,
Alfred de Vigny had already conceived the idea of setting forth, in a
series of little epics, the migrations of the human soul throughout the
ages. "One feels," said he in his Preface, "a keen intellectual delight
in transporting one's self, by mere force of thought, to a period of
antiquity; it resembles th