ible
wars--when, for centuries, Europe strove hand to hand with Asia--most of
which have undergone very little alteration, enable him to describe them
almost exactly as they appeared to the holy warriors. The interest of
his pilgrimage in the East, accordingly, is peculiar, but very great; it
is not so much a book of travels as a moving chronicle; but, like Sir W.
Scott's _Minstrelsy of the Borders_, it is a chronicle clothed in a very
different garb from the homely dress of the olden time. It transports us
back, not only in time but in idea, six hundred years; but it does so
with the grace of modern times--it clothes the profound feelings, the
generous sacrifices, the forgetfulness of self of the twelfth century,
with the poetic mind, the cultivated taste, the refined imagery of the
nineteenth.

Lamartine has traversed the same scenes with Chateaubriand and Michaud,
and yet he has done so in a different spirit; and the character of his
work is essentially different from either. He has not the devout
credulity of the first, nor the antiquarian zeal and knowledge of the
last; but he is superior to either in the description of nature, and the
painting vivid and interesting scenes on the mind of the reader. His
work is a moving panorama, in which the historic scenes and azure skies,
and placid seas and glowing sunsets, of the East, are portrayed in all
their native brilliancy, and in richer even than their native colours.
His mind is stored with the associations and the ideas of antiquity, and
he has thrown over his descriptions of the scenes of Greece or Holy
Writ, all the charms of such recollections; but he has done so in a more
general and catholic spirit than either of his predecessors. He embarked
for the Holy Land shortly before the Revolution of 1830; and his
thoughts, amidst all the associations of antiquity, constantly reverted
to the land of his fathers--its distractions, its woes, its ceaseless
turmoil, its gloomy social prospects. Thus, with all his vivid
imagination and unrivaled powers of description, the turn of his mind is
essentially contemplative. He looks on the past as an emblem of the
present; he sees, in the fall of Tyre and Athens and Jerusalem, the fate
which one day awaits his own country; and mourns less the decay of human
things, than the popular passions and national sins which have brought
that instability in close proximity to his own times. This sensitive and
foreboding disposition was much