Lamartine conceived that poetry does not consist in the mere sensuousness of verse, but in the ideas, the sentiment, the image. "To change an utterance into music does not perfect it, but materializes it. The simple sentence justly and forcibly expressing the pure thought or naked sentiment without a dream as to the sound or form of phrase, is the genuine style, the expression, the WORD." These conversations naturally drifted to the supreme questions of the time—to politics, philosophy and religion. Dumont was that contradictory character, found so often in many countries—a royalist although a democrat, and opposed to the Revolution, although he detested the ancient régime and actually accepted the very aims and doctrines which the Revolution contemplated. Both he and Lamartine had been "fed with the marrow of Greek and Roman literature." They adored Liberty as a well-sounding term before they came to consider it as a holy thing and as the moral quality in every free man. Dumont was philosophic, like the century in which he was born. In his house there was no token to show that he was a priest—neither breviary, nor crucifix, nor image of a saint, nor priestly garment. All these he relegated to the sacristy. He considered the mystic rites of Christianity which he performed as belonging to the routine of his profession, to be little else than a ritual of no importance, a code of morals illustrated by symbolic dogmas and traditional practices, that did not encroach on his mental independence and reason. He spoke of God to an infantile people, using the dialect of the sanctuary. But when he returned home he discoursed in the language of Plato, Cicero and Rousseau. His mind was incredulous, but his soul, softened by his sad fortune, was religious. His great goodness of heart enabled him to give to this vague piety the form and reality of a precise faith. He constrained his intelligence to bow under the yoke of Catholicism and the dogmas of religion. He read and admired the writings of Chateaubriand and others of the time, but he was not convinced; he did not believe what they taught.