writen, it is difficult for any man to be all three with impunity, and to succeed equally well in all. Some poetical lines of his furnished matter for the daily gaiety of the newspaper press in Provincial France, as well as in the Metropolis. One of these is—
'Assis sur le penchant des coteaux modérés.'
Now 'coteaux modérés' may be ridiculous enough,—but an unfortunate couplet on which his malignant critics fastened and to which they clung for a long time throws the 'coteaux modérés' quite into shade.
'Pour trois ans seulement, oh que je puisse avoir
Sur ma table un lait pur, dans mon lit un œil noir.'
We doubt if the oft-quoted
'Let laws and learning, trade and commerce die,
But give us still our old nobility,'
of the English poet and statesman has run the gauntlet of so much sarcastic and contemptuous criticism, as 'la table an lait pur' and 'le lit à l'œil noir.' Still, it must not be supposed that M. Sainte-Beuve is a bad or even a mediocre poet. Though he does not belong to the first class, and has no title to be ranked with the Hugos and the Lamartines, he takes a high place in the second. His first poetical work was 'Joseph Delorme.' And who and what was Joseph Delorme? 'He did not,' says a critic, M. Hyppolite Babou (whom we may almost hail as a countryman, for he is not a Baboo?), 'announce himself as a darling of the Muses, an archangel of genius fallen from heaven, or a poet volcano burst out from Pandemonium. He was an invalid, and he had died. His interrupted chants were but the vague echoes of a voice beyond the tomb; he had lived in obscurity, in poverty, in doubt,—he had died in isolation and despair. A friend had collected the sad relics of this unfortunate son of René, of this brother or cousin of Werther, Adolphe Oberman, and he offered them timidly to the faithful, not surrounded by the triumphal laurel, but protected and consecrated by the palm of the martyr. Yes, Joseph Delorme was a martyr of Life and of Poesy! But when people were chanting the 'De Profundis' over the open grave, the coffin was perceived to be empty, the dead had risen and not only risen, but was present at his own funeral, and had even contributed largely to its expenses. A modest and proud talent had played at the moribund to conquer without danger the means to live.' Joseph Delorme was no other than Sainte-Beuve himself. His other works are 'Consolations' and 'Pensées d'Août.' There is considerable talent in all. The sonnet was a powerful and a delicate instrument in his hands, and he translated some of Wordsworth's best, worthily. His verses on 'rhyme' are very pretty—yes pretty is the word—but inferior to those of Amédée Pommier on the same subject. There is considerable similarity in the two pieces, though the measure is very different, and the greatest credit must attach to the poet who wrote first, but on this point we have no information. The familiar acquaintance of M. Sainte-Beuve with English literature gives a tone to his poems which would make them more liked and appreciated in England than the works of much greater poets of France. Sainte-Beuve died in 1869.
