In the great romantic movement which revolutionized French literature, an immense impetus was given to the mind, and literature thenceforth reflected a wider range of thought and feeling. In few respects does this appear more significantly than in the treatment of childhood. There is a robustness about the sentiment which separates it from the earlier regard of such writers as we have named. Lamartine, who certainly was not devoid of sentiment, passes by his own earliest childhood in Les Confidences with indifference. “I shall not,” he says, “follow the example of J. J. Rousseau in his Confessions. I shall not relate to you the trifling events of my early childhood. Man only dates from the commencement of feeling and thought; until the man is a being, he is not even a child.... Let us leave, then, the cradle to the nurses, and our first smiles, our first tears, and our first lisping accents to the ecstasies of our mothers. I do not wish to inflict on you any but my earliest recollections, embellished by the light of reason.” He gives, accordingly, two scenes of his childhood: one an interior, where his father reads aloud to his mother from Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered; the other an outdoor scene, where he engages in the rural sports of the neighborhood. Each picture is delightfully drawn, with minute detail, with poetic touch, with affectionate recollection. Encouraged, apparently, by the warmth which this memory has inspired, Lamartine continues to dwell upon the images of his childhood, especially as it has to do with the thought of his mother. He paints the simple garden attached to his father’s home, and resting a moment reflects:— “Yes, that is indeed all, and yet that is what sufficed during so many years for the gratification, for the reveries, for the sweet leisures, and for the as sweet labors of a father, a mother, and eight children! Such is what still suffices, even at the present day, for the nourishment of these recollections. Such is the Eden of their childhood, where their most serene thoughts take refuge when they wish to receive a little of that dew of the morning life, a little of that beaming light of early dawn, which shines pure and radiant for man only amid the scenes of his birth. There is not a tree, there is not a carnation, there is not a mossy stone of this garden, which is not entwined in their soul as if it formed part of it. This nook of earth seems to us immense, such a host of objects and of recollections does it contain for us in so narrow a space.”