e pleasure an old man feels in recalling first
his early youth, and then the whole course of his life. In the age of
simplicity, poetry was devoted entirely to the beauties of the physical
forms of nature and of man; each step in advance that it has made since
then toward our own day of civilization and of sadness, seems to have
blended it more and more with our arts, and even with the sufferings of
our souls. At present, with all the serious solemnity of Religion and of
Destiny, it lends to them their chief beauty. Never discouraged, Poetry
has followed Man in his long journey through the ages, like a sweet and
beautiful companion. I have attempted, in our language, to show some of
her beauties, in following her progress toward the present day."

The arrangement of the poems announced in this Preface is tripartite,
like that of the 'Legende des Siecles: Poemes antiques, poemes
judaiques, poemes modernes.--Livre mystique, livre antique, livre
moderne'. But the name of precursor would be a vain title if all that
were necessary to merit it was the fact that one had been the first to
perceive a new path to literary glory, to salute it from a distance, yet
never attempt to make a nearer approach.

In one direction at least, Alfred de Vigny was a true innovator, in the
broadest and most meritorious sense of the word: he was the creator of
philosophic poetry in France. Until Jocelyn appeared, in 1836, the form
of poetic expression was confined chiefly to the ode, the ballad, and
the elegy; and no poet, with the exception of the author of 'Moise' and
'Eloa', ever dreamed that abstract ideas and themes dealing with the
moralities could be expressed in the melody of verse.

To this priority, of which he knew the full value, Alfred de Vigny laid
insistent claim. "The only merit," he says in one of his prefaces, "that
any one ever has disputed with me in this sort of composition is the
honor of having promulgated in France all works of the kind in which
philosophic thought is presented in either epic or dramatic form."

But it was not alone priority in the sense of time that gave him
right of way over his contemporaries; he was the most distinguished
representative of poetic philosophy of his generation. If the phrases of
Lamartine seem richer, if his flight is more majestic, De Vigny's range
is surer and more powerful. While the philosophy of the creator of
'Les Harmonies' is uncertain and inconsistent, that of the poet of 'Les