…Wordsworth peu connu, qui des lacs solitaires Sait tòus les bleus reflets, les bruits et les mystères, Et qui, depuis trente ans vivant au même lieu, En contemplation devant le même Dieu, A travers les soupirs de la mousse et de l’onde, Distingue, au soir, des chants venus d’un meilleur monde. The original attempt of Sainte-Beuve (for he was original in his very choice of Wordsworth as a model at a time when Byron engrossed all the admiration of the French poets) has been ably characterised by Théophile Gautier in his “Portraits Contemporains” (pp. 208, 209), an article reprinted from _La Gazette de Paris_, 19 Novembre 1871:-- “(Sainte-Beuve) avait été en poésie un inventeur. Il avait donné une note nouvelle et toute moderne, et de tout le cénacle c’était à coup sûr le plus réellement romantique. Dans cette humble poésie qui rappelle par la sincérité du sentiment et la minutie du détail observé sur nature, les vers de Crabbe, de Wordsworth, et de Cowper, Sainte-Beuve s’est frayé de petits sentiers à mi-côte, bordés d’humbles fleurettes, où nul en France n’a passé avant lui. Sa facture un peu laborieuse et compliquée vient de la difficulté de réduire à la forme métrique des idées et des images non exprimées encore ou dédaignées jusque-là, mais que de morceaux merveilleusement venus où l’effort n’est plus sensible!” Sainte-Beuve’s admiration of Wordsworth is a well-known fact. Less generally known is the influence of this admiration on several poets of that time (_circa_ 1830-40), who, either through Sainte-Beuve’s imitations, or with a direct knowledge of Wordsworth’s poems, to the reading of which they had thus been stimulated, offer great marks of resemblance with Wordsworth. I have quoted a judgment of De Vigny that considers Brizeux and Barbier as having turned _laquistes_ through Sainte-Beuve. I know no other immediate proof of this influence. Perhaps Barbier and Brizeux have consigned it somewhere. Anyhow Brizeux with his glorification of his youthful years and school-time, with his intense love of his native Brittany, his fond attachment to local customs and habits, his lamentations on the death of the poetical poet as embodied in his own province (_Élégie de la Bretagne_), is to all extent and purposes the most thoroughly Wordsworthian of all our poets. There may be more of Wordsworth’s _philosophy_ in Lamartine, but there is more of his _poetry_ proper in Brizeux. The influence of Wordsworth on Maurice de Guérin and Hippolyte de la Morvonnais, is more easily ascertained than the preceding. Here, again, Sainte-Beuve appears to have been the intermediate agent.[582]