It was natural that the contemporaries of the youthful Lamartine should see in him first and foremost the poet of the throne and the altar. His earliest published poem was a heart-felt expression of gratitude to the Jesuit school which had sheltered him in his boyhood. Such a poem as his Ode was simply the essence of Chateaubriand's _Génie du Christianisme_ versified. His lines on the birth of the Duke of Bordeaux (Comte de Chambord), after the death of his father, the Duc de Berry, with their refrain: "He is born, the miraculous child!" expressed the feelings of the most loyal Catholics. And on every occasion, in almost all of the poems, he lauds and magnifies, justifies and adores God, Providence. At times, as for instance in the poem _La Semaine Sainte_, written during a visit to the young Duc de Rohan, who later in life became an archbishop and a cardinal, his verse is almost like a fervently devotional burning of incense. If he is to be taken at his word when he asserts, in writing of this poem many years afterwards, that he alone, among the young men who gathered round the Duke, had no relish whatever for the church's mystic joys, all we can conclude is that his poetic talent was carried away by the current of the tendency of the day. Most of the purely religious poetry of Lamartine's youthful period is, from its want of simplicity and real feeling, almost unreadable nowadays. It is not lyric; it is not concise; it is reflection without matter, meditation without thoughts, breadth without depth. A good example is the poem dedicated to Byron, entitled _L'Homme_. The French poet's conception of his English contemporary is the traditional, stereotyped, inexpressibly silly one of the day, namely, that he touches only the chords of despair, that his eye, like Satan's, fathoms abysses, &c. To show Byron how the true poet ought to sing, Lamartine strikes up the most servile hymn of praise to a God who, he himself tells us, plagues, tortures, plunders, overwhelms with misfortune and misery, and concludes with the exhortation: Jette un cri vers le ciel, ô chantre des enfers! The notes appended at a later period to this poem betray an astonishing ignorance of Lord Byron's history; almost everything affirmed of him is incorrect. Though Lamartine added a poem to Child Harold, he never so much as learned to spell the name correctly. The same admonitory tone which he here assumes towards Byron he adopted many years later in writing of Alfred de Musset, to whom he also offered pious and moral truisms as medicaments.