Song of a higher kind had been heard twice or thrice during the Revolution. The lesser Chenier's _Chanson du Depart_ has in it a stirring rhetoric for soldiers of the Republic sent forth to war with the acclaim of mother and wife and maiden, old men and little children. Lebrun-_Pindare_, in his ode _Sur le Vaisseau le Vengeur_, does not quite stifle the sense of heroism under his flowers of classical imagery. Rouget de Lisle's improvised verse and music, _La Marseillaise_ (1792), was an inspiration which equally lent itself to the enthusiasm of victory and the gallantries of despair. The pseudo-epics and the descriptive poetry of the Empire are laboured and lifeless. But Creuze de Lesser, in his _Chevaliers de la Table-Ronde_ (1812) and other poems, and Baour-Lormian, in his _Poesies Ossianiques_, widened the horizons of literature. The _Panhypocrisiade_ of Lemercier, published in 1819, but written several years earlier--an "infernal comedy of the sixteenth century"--is an amazing chaos of extravagance, incompetence, and genius; it bears to Hugo's _Legende des Siecles_ the relation which the megatherium or mastodon may bear to some less monstrous analogues. If we are to look for a presentiment of Lamartine's poetry, we may find it in the harmonious melancholy of Chenedolle, in the grace of Fontanes' stanzas, in the timid elegiac strains of Millevoye. The special character of the poetry of the Empire lies in its combination of the tradition derived from the eighteenth century, with a certain reaching-forth to an ideal, by-and-by to be realised, which it could not attain. Its comparative sterility is not to be explained solely or chiefly by the vigilance of the imperial censure of publications. The preceding century had lost the large feeling for composition, for beauty and severity of form; attention was fixed upon details. If invention ceased to create, it must necessarily trick out what was commonplace in ingenuities of decorative periphrasis. Literature in the eighteenth century had almost ceased to be art, and had become a social and political weapon; under the imperial rule this militant function was withdrawn; what remained for literature but frigid ambitions or petty adornments, until a true sense of art was once again recovered?