From the artistic point of view it is interesting to observe the kind of imagery by means of which Chateaubriand, when he is neither borrowing from the Revelation of St. John nor from Milton, attempts to give an idea of the glories of heaven. When Dante makes the same attempt, he has recourse to visions, to the glories of that mystic rose which the Gothic cathedral builders feebly endeavoured to imitate; but Chateaubriand, the man of modern ideas and of much experience as far as the outward world is concerned, has recourse to impressions of travel. The arcades of heaven are compared to the gardens of Babylon, to the pillars of Palmyra in the sands of the desert. When the blessed spirits are hastening through the created world we are told of the scene that displays itself to them: "Thus present themselves to the eye of the traveller the great plains of India, the fertile valleys of Delhi and Kashmir, shores covered with pearls and fragrant with ambergris, where the tranquil waves lay themselves to rest beneath the blossoming cinnamon trees." Such imagery is somewhat too realistic for the spiritual theme. We shrink from representing all these archangels to ourselves in Indian surroundings. But it is in such ways that nature revenges herself upon the man who believes he can set her aside or can produce something superior to her productions. A later author of this same school, De Vigny, who writes as much under the influence of Ossian as of Milton, compares the ether of the firmament to the mists of the Scottish mountains. The indistinct form of Lucifer descried far off in space by the angel Eloa is compared to the waving plaid of some wandering Scotchwoman, seen through the misty clouds falling on the hill-tops. The conjunction of an angel and a plaid strikes us as a curious one. The scenery which this group of authors considers unquestionably the most beautiful is not the jumbled, potpourri landscape of the German Romanticists; no, what they, in harmony with the spirit of their day, admire is that Paradisaic landscape in which the strictest order prevails--symmetrical, architectural, a sort of dilution of Claude Lorraine. Take, for an example, the commencement of De Vigny's _Le Déluge_: