In 1829 appeared the collection of _Harmonies Poétiques et Réligieuses_, in which, as in all his poetry up to this time, one of the most characteristic features is his devotion to Legitimacy and the Church. The _renversement_ of 1830 considerably modified his political and ecclesiastical ideas. “I wish,” he declared at this turning-point in his career, “to enter the ranks of the people; to think, speak, act, and struggle with them.” One of the first proofs of his advanced opinions was his pamphlet advocating abolition of “capital” punishment. He failed to obtain a seat in the Chambre des Députés of Louis Philippe, whether in consequence of this advocacy or by reason of his antecedent politics. His enforced leisure he employed in travelling, and in 1832, with his English wife and their young daughter Juliette (whose death at Beyrout caused him inconsolable grief), he set sail for the East in a vessel equipped and armed at his own expense. A narrative of these travels he published in his _Voyage en Orient_ (1835). In the following year appeared his _Jocelyn_, a poem of charming tenderness and eloquence, and, in 1838, _La Chute d’un Ange_ (“The Fall of an Angel”), in which he, for the first time, gives expression to his feeling of revolt from the barbarisms of the Slaughter-House. In this strikingly original poem, one of the most remarkable of its kind in any language, Lamartine discovers to us that he no longer views human institutions, the customs of society, and the consecrated usages of nations through the rose-coloured medium of traditional prejudice. It is penetrated with a deep consciousness of the injustice and falseness of a large proportion of those things which are tolerated, and even approved, under the sanction of religious or social law, and with ardent indignation against cruelty and selfishness. In the frightful representation of the practices of the early tyrants of the world saved from the “universal deluge,” he allows us to see his own feeling. One of more humane race thus addresses his charming heroine Daïdha:-- “Ces hommes, pour apaiser leur faim, N’ont pas assez des fruits que Dieu mit sous leur main. Par un crime envers Dieu dont frémit la Nature, Ils demandent au sang une autre nourriture. Dans leur cité fangeuse il coule par ruisseaux! Les cadavres y sont étalés en monceaux. _Ils traînent par les pieds des fleurs de la prairie, L’innocente brebis que leur main a nourrie, Et sous l’œil de l’agneau l’égorgeant sans remords, Ils savourent ses chairs et vivent de la mort!_ * * * * *