Lamartine's political faith. It
is not without its poetry and its Utopian visions; but it is full of
thought and valuable reflections, and breathes throughout the loftiest
and most noble sentiments. Lamartine, in that history, becomes the
panegyrist and the censor of the French Revolution. He vindicates with
a powerful hand the ideas which it evolved; while he castigates, and
depicts with poetic melancholy its mournful errors and its tragic
character. He makes Vergniaud, the chief of the Girondists, say before
his execution--"In grafting the tree, my friend, we have killed it. It
was too old. Robespierrie cuts it. Will he be more successful than
ourselves? No. This soil is too unsteady to nourish the roots of civil
liberty; this people is too childish to handle its laws without
wounding itself. It will come back to its kings as children come back
to their rattle. We made a mistake in our births, in being born and
dying for the liberty of the world. We imagined that we were in Rome,
and we were in Paris. But revolutions are like those crises which, in
a single night, turn men's hair gray. They ripen the people fast. The
blood in our veins is warm enough to fecundate the soil of the
Republic. Let us not take with us the future, and let us bequeath to
the people our hope in return for the death which it gives us."[12]

It is impossible that Lamartine should not have felt as a poet what he
expressed as a historian, and his character is too sincere to prevent
him from acting out his conviction. In describing the death of the
founders of the first French Republic, Lamartine employs the whole
pathos of his poetic inspiration.

"They (the Girondists) possessed three virtues which in the eyes of
posterity atone for many faults. They worshiped liberty; they founded
the Republic--this precautions truth of future governments;--at last,
they died, because they refused blood to the people. Their time has
condemned them to death, the future has judged them to glory and
pardon. They died because they did not allow Liberty to soil itself,
and posterity will yet engrave on their memory the inscription which
Vergniaud, their oracle, has, with his own hand, engraved on the wall
of his dungeon: 'Rather death than crime!' '_Potius mori quam
foedari!_'"

[Footnote 12: This and the following versions of Lamartine are our
own; for we have not as yet had time to look into the published
translation. We mention this to prevent our own mistakes