Passing now from Lamartine's poetry, expressly such, we go to his prose, which, however, is scarcely, if at all, less poetical. Poetry, or at least, the presence in power, and in great proportionate excess of power, of imagination, lording it over every thing else, over memory, judgment, taste, good sense, veracity--characterizes all that proceeded from Lamartine's pen. His history is valueless, almost valueless, as history. His travels are utterly untrustworthy as records of fact. Lamartine cannot tell the simple truth. Persons, things, events, suffer a sea-change, always to something rich and strange seen by him looming in the luminous haze of atmosphere with which his imagination perpetually invests them. His men are ennobled, like Ulysses transfigured by Pallas-Athene. His women are beautiful as houris fresh from paradise. The aspects of ocean and shore and wood and stream and mountain and sky, are all, to Lamartine, washed with a light that never was on sea or land or in heaven overhead, the consecration and the poet's dream. This quality in Lamartine's style does not prevent his being very fine. He is very fine; but you feel, Oh, if this all were also true! On the whole, large, splendid, scenic, admirable in instinct for choosing his point of view, as Lamartine is in his histories, brilliant even, and fecund in suggestion, we turn from the ostensibly historical in our author to the ostensibly autobiographical, in order to find our prose specimens of his quality in the "Confidences." Lamartine never perhaps did any thing finer, any thing more characteristic, than in telling his story of "Graziella" in that work. This story is an "episode" where it appears; or rather--for it is hardly so much as let into the continuous warp and woof of the "Confidences"--it is a separable device of ornament embroidered upon the surface of the fabric. It is probably, indeed, to some extent autobiographic; but the imagination had as much part in it as the memory. For instance, the actual girl that is transfigured into the "Graziella" of the story was not a coral-grinder, as she is represented by Lamartine, but an operative in a tobacco factory. The real beauty of the tale is, by a kind of just retribution on the author, inseparably bound up with unconscious revelation on his part of heartless vanity and egotism in his own character. You admire, but while you admire you wonder, you reprobate, you contemn. A man such as this, you instinctively feel, was not worthy to live immortally as an author. You are reconciled to let Lamartine pass.