This is the language of a modern Tannhäuser, looking back with longing to his Venusberg. Chateaubriand has evidently forgotten that he had attributed to himself the emotions and aims of a medieval pilgrim. The lady who had given him a rendezvous at the Alhambra was a young Madame de Mouchy, who died insane. Contemporaries represent her as a marvel of beauty, charm, and refinement. Chateaubriand had been married since 1792. His marriage was undoubtedly a rash and foolish one, but, as the ardent champion of Christian morality, he ought to have considered himself bound by it, regardless of circumstances. In his _Mémoires_ he tells how it came about: "The negotiations were entered into without my knowledge. I had not seen Mademoiselle de Lavigne more than three or four times.... I did not feel myself at all fitted to be a husband. All my illusions were still strong; nothing was exhausted in me; the vigour of life had been redoubled in me by my travels. I was constantly tormented by my muse. My sister had a high opinion of Mademoiselle de Lavigne, and saw in this marriage an independent position for me. Arrange it, then, said I. As a public man I am not to be influenced, but in private life I am the prey of any one that chooses to take possession of me; to avoid an hour's annoyance I could let myself be made a slave for half a century." Fortunately, he did not feel himself a slave. In the rôle of the returned pilgrim, then, he wrote his epic. An epic in the nineteenth century! In our days no one believes in the possibility of such a thing. A clearer comprehension than that possessed by any former age of the historical conditions which went to the production of the great national epics of antiquity has convinced us of the vanity of endeavouring in modern times to rival works of the freshness of the _Iliad_ or the naïveté (in spite of a high degree of culture) of the _Odyssey_. Just as little as it would occur to any real poet to-day to imitate the _Vedas_, the _Psalms of David_, or the _Voluspa_, would it occur to him to attempt to compete with the immortal works in which, late in the morning of their days, nations, childlike and yet mature, have told the story of their gods and of their heroes--as the Greeks have done in their national epics, the Germans in the _Nibelungenlied_, and the Finns in _Kalevala_. The epics which, like Virgil's and Tasso's, Camoens', Klopstock's, and Voltaire's, are conscious, laboured imitations of these old popular works, and which have transformed the miraculous element in them into dead epic machinery, have never taken rank with their models; their comparative value depends upon how close, in time and in spirit, they are to these models. The more naïveté they display, the colder they leave us. The epic poems written in modern times which have not been failures--Goethe's _Hermann und Dorothea_, or Mickiewicz's _Herr (Pan) Tadeusz_--have entirely dispensed with the appurtenances of the old epic.