he has visited
that he has written; to kindle in his reader's mind the train of emotion
and association which their contemplation awakened in his own, that he
has exerted all his powers. He is much more laboured and minute, in
consequence, than either of his predecessors; he records the tints, the
forms, the lights, the transient effects, with all a painter's
enthusiasm and all a poet's power; and succeeds, in any mind at all
familiar with the objects of nature, in conjuring up images as vivid,
sometimes perhaps more beautiful, than the originals which he portrayed.

From the greatness of his powers, however, in this respect, and the
facility with which he commits to paper the whole features of the
splendid phantasmagoria with which his memory is stored, arises the
principal defect of his work; and the circumstance which has hitherto
prevented it, in this country at least, from acquiring general
popularity commensurate to its transcendent merits. He is too rich in
glowing images; his descriptions are redundant in number and beauty. The
mind even of the most imaginative reader is fatigued by the constant
drain upon its admiration--the fancy is exhausted in the perpetual
effort to conceive the scenes which he portrays to the eye. Images of
beauty enough are to be found in his four volumes of _Travels in the
East_, to emblazon, with the brightest colours of the rainbow, forty
volumes of ordinary adventure. We long for some repose amidst the
constant repetition of dazzling objects; monotony, insipidity, ordinary
life, even dulness itself, would often be a relief amidst the ceaseless
flow of rousing images. Sir Walter Scott says, in one of his novels--"Be
assured that whenever I am particularly dull, it is not without an
object;" and Lamartine would sometimes be the better of following the
advice. We generally close one of his volumes with the feeling so well
known to travellers in the Italian cities, "I hope to God there is
nothing more to be seen here." And having given the necessary respite of
unexciting disquisition to rest our readers' minds, we shall again bring
forward one of his glowing pictures:--

"Between the sea and the last heights of Lebanon, which sink
rapidly almost to the water's edge, extends a plain eight
leagues in length by one or two broad; sandy, bare, covered
only with thorny arbutus, browsed by the camels of caravans.
From it darts out into the sea an advanced peninsula, lin