vice, but exalt to virtue ?-which open to the longer be delayed. Our wealth is so great, n peasant, equally with the prince, that pure has come on us so suddenly, it will corrupt if gratification which arises to all alike from the it does not refine; if not directed to the arts contemplation of the grand and the beautiful which raised Athens to immortality, it wi in Art and in Nature? We have now reached sink us to those which hurled Babylon to per that point where such an election can no|dition. LAMARTINE.* and though numerous and valuable books of travels, as works of reference, load the shelves of our libraries, there are surprisingly few which are fitted, from the interest and vivacity of the style in which they are written, to pos Ir is remarkable, that although England is the country in the world which has sent forth the greatest number of ardent and intrepid travellers to explore the distant parts of the earth, yet it can by no means furnish an array of writers of travels which will bear a compa-sess permanent attractions for mankind. rison with those whom France can boast. In One great cause of this remarkable peculi skilful navigation, daring adventure, and heroic arity is without doubt to be found in the widely perseverance, indeed, the country of Cook and different education of the students in our uniDavis, of Bruce and Park, of Mackenzie and versities, and our practical men. In the forBuckingham, of Burckhardt and Byron, of Par-mer, classical attainments are in literature the ry and Franklin, may well claim the pre-emi-chief, if not exclusive, objects of ambition; nence of all others in the world. An English- and in consequence, the young aspirants for man first circumnavigated the globe; an fame, who issue from these learned retreats, Englishman alone has seen the fountains of have their minds filled with the charms and the Nile; and, five years after the ardent spi-associations of antiquity, to the almost entire rit of Columbus had led his fearful crews exclusion of objects of present interest and imacross the Atlantic, Sebastian Cabot dis-portance. The vigorous practical men, again, covered the shores of Newfoundland, and planted the British standard in the regions destined to be peopled with the overflowing multitudes of the Anglo-Saxon race. who are propelled by the enterprise and exertions of our commercial towns, are sagacious and valuable observers; but they have seldom the cultivated minds, pictorial eye, or powers But if we come to the literary works which of description, requisite to convey vivid or inhave followed these ardent and energetic ef- teresting impressions to others. Thus our forts, and which are destined to perpetuate scholars give us little more than treatises on their memory to future times-the interesting inscriptions, and disquisitions on the sites of discoveries which have so much extended our ancient towns; while the accounts of our acknowledge and enlarged our resources-the tive men are chiefly occupied with commercial contemplation is by no means, to an inhabitant inquiries, or subjects connected with trade and of these islands, equally satisfactory. The navigation. The cultivated and enlightened traBritish traveller is essentially a man of en-veller, whose mind is alike open to the charm ergy and action, but rarely of contemplation of ancient story and the interest of modern or eloquence. He is seldom possessed of the achievement-who is classical without being scientific acquirements requisite to turn to the pedantic, graphic and yet faithful, enthusiastic best account the vast stores of new and original and yet accurate, discursive and at the same information which are placed within his reach. time imaginative, is almost unknown amongst He often observes and collects facts; but it is us. It will continue to be so as long as eduas a practical man, or for professional pur- cation in our universities is exclusively devotposes, rather than as a philosopher. The ge-ed to Greek and Latin verses, or the higher manius of the Anglo-Saxon race-bold, sagacious, thematics; and in academies, to book-keeping and enterprising, rather than contemplative and the rule of three; while so broad and sul and scientific-nowhere appears more strongly len a line as heretofore is drawn between the than in the accounts of the numerous and in-studies of our scholars and the pursuits of our trepid travellers whom they are continually practical citizens. To travel to good purpose sending forth into every part of the earth. We admire their vigour, we are moved by their hardships, we are enriched by their discoveries; but if we turn to our libraries for works to convey to future ages an adequate and interesting account of these fascinating adventures, we shall, in general, experience nothing but disappointment. Few of them are written with the practised hand, the graphic eye, necessary to convey vivid pictures to future times; * Blackwood's Magazine, Nov. 1844. requires a mind stored with much and varied information, in science, statistics, geography, literature, history, and poetry. To describe what the traveller has seen, requires, in addı tion to this, the eye of a painter, the soul of a poet, and the hand of a practised composer. Probably it will be deemed no easy matter to find such a combination in any country or in any age; and most certainly the system of education, neither at our learned universities nor our commercial academies, is fitted to produce it. It is from inattention to the vast store a previous information requisite to make an ac-| works have been given to the world. Four complished traveller, and still more a writer among these stand pre-eminent, whose works, of interesting travels, that failures in this in very different styles, are at the head of Eubranch of literature are so glaring and so fre- ropeon literature in this interesting department quent. In other departments of knowledge, Humboldt, Chateaubriand, Michaud, and Laà certain degree of information is felt to be martine. Their styles are so various, and the requisite before a man can presume to write impressions produced by reading them so disa book. He cannot produce a treatise on ma- tinct, that it is difficult to believe that they have thematics without knowing at least Euclid, arisen in the same nation and age of the world. nor a work on history without having read Humboldt is, in many respects, and perhaps Hume, nor on political economy without upon the whole, at the head of the list; and to having acquired a smattering of Adam Smith. his profound and varied works we hope to be But in regard to travels, no previous informa- able to devote a future paper. He unites, in tion is thought to be requisite. If the person a degree that perhaps has never before been who sets out on a tour has only money in his witnessed, the most various qualities, and pocket, and health to get to his journey's end, he which, from the opposite characters of mind is deemed sufficiently qualified to come out which they require, are rarely found in unison. with his two or three post octavos. If he is A profound philosopher, an accurate observer an Honourable, or known at Almack's, so much of nature, an unwearied statist, he is at the the better; that will ensure the sale of the first same time an eloquent writer, an incomparaedition. If he can do nothing else, he can at ble describer, and an ardent friend of social least tell the dishes which he got to dinner at improvement. Science owes to his indefatithe inns, and the hotels where comfortable gable industry many of her most valuable acbeds are to be found. This valuable informa- quisitions; geography, to his intrepid persetion, interspersed with a few descriptions of verance, many of its most important discovescenes, copied from guide-books, and anecdotes ries; the arts, to his poetic eye and fervid elopicked up at tables-d'hôte or on board steam-quence, many of their brightest pictures. He boats, constitute the stock in trade of many an adventurer who embarks in the speculation of paying by publication the expenses of his travels. We have no individuals in view in these remarks; we speak of things in general, as they are, or rather have been; for we believe these ephemeral travels, like other ephemerals, have had their day, and are fast dying out. The market has become so glutted with them that they are, in a great many instances, unsaleable. unites the austere grandeur of the exact sciences to the bewitching charm of the fine arts. It is this very combination which prevents his works from being generally popular. The riches of his knowledge, the magnitude of his contributions to scientific discovery, the fervour of his descriptions of nature, alternately awaken our admiration and excite our surprise; but they oppress the mind. To be rightly apprehended, they require a reader in some degree familiar with all these subjects, and how many of these are to be met with? The man who takes an interest in his scientific observations will seldom be transported by his pictures of scenery; the social observer, who extracts the rich collection of facts which he has accumulated regarding the people whom he visited, will be indifferent to his geographical discoveries. There are few Humboldts either in the reading or thinking world. The classical avellers of England, from Addison to Eustace and Clarke, constitute an important and valuable body of writers in this branch of literature, infinitely superior to the fashionable tours which rise up and disappear like bubbles on the surface of society. It is impossible to read these elegant productions without feeling the mind overspread with the charm which arises from the exquisite remains and heart-stirring associations with which they Chateaubriand is a traveller of a wholly are filled. But their interest is almost exclu- different character. He lived entirely in antisively classical; they are invaluable to the ac-quity; but it is not the antiquity of Greece complished scholar, but they speak in an un- and Rome which has alone fixed his regards, known tongue to the great mass of men. They as it has done those of Clarke and Eustace-it is see nature only through the medium of anti-the recollections of chivalry, the devout spirit quity; beautiful in their allusion to Greek or Roman remains, eloquent in the descriptions of scenes alluded to in the classical writers, they have dwelt little on the simple scenes of the unhistoric world. To the great moral and social questions which now agitate society, and so strongly move the hearts of the great body of men, they are entire strangers. Their works are the elegant companions of the scholar or the antiquary, not the heart-stirring friends of the cottage on the fireside. of the pilgrim, which chiefly warmed his ardent imagination. He is universally allowed by Frenchmen of all parties to be their first writer; and it may be conceived what brilliant works an author of such powers, and eminently gifted both with the soul of a poet and the eye of a painter, must have produced in describing the historic scenes to which his pilgrimages extended. He went to Greece and the Holy Land with a mind devout rather than enlightened, credulous rather than inquisitive. Inferior to Britain in the energy and achieve- Thirsting for strong emotions, he would be ments of the travellers whom she has sent satisfied; teeming with the recollections and forth, and beyond measure beneath her in the visions of the past, he traversed the places amount of the addition she has made to geo- hallowed by his early affections with the fondgraphical science, France is yet greatly supe-ness of a lover who returns to the home of rior, at least of late years, in the literary and his bliss, of a mature man who revisits the scientific attainments of the wanderers whose scenes of his infancy. He cared not to inquire what was true or what was legendary in these | from either. He has not the devout credulity time-hallowed traditions; he gladly accepted of the first, nor the antiquarian zeal and knowthem as they stood, and studiously averted all ledge of the last; but he is superior to either inquiry into the foundation on which they in the description of nature, and the painting rested. He wandered over the Peloponnesus vivid and interesting scenes on the mind of or Judea with the fond ardour of an English the reader. His work is a moving panorama, scholar who seeks in the Palatine Mount the in which the historic scenes and azure skies, traces of Virgil's enchanting description of and placid seas, and glowing sunsets, of the the hut of Evander, and rejects as sacrilege east, are portrayed in all their native brilevery attempt to shake his faith. liancy, and in richer even than their native colours. His mind is stored with the associations and the ideas of antiquity, and he has thrown over his descriptions of the scenes of Greece, or Holy Writ, all the charms of such "When Science from Creation's face Even in the woods of America, the same rul-recollections; but he has done so in a more ing passion was evinced. In those pathless solitudes, where no human foot had ever trod but that of the wandering savage, and the majesty of nature appeared in undisturbed repose, his thoughts were still of the Old World. It was on the historic lands that his heart was set. A man himself, he dwelt on the scenes which had been signalized by the deeds, the sufferings, the glories of man. general and catholic spirit than either of his predecessors. He embarked for the Holy Land shortly before the revolution of 1830; and his thoughts, amidst all the associations of antiquity, constantly reverted to the land of his fathers-its distractions, its woes, its ceaseless turmoil, its gloomy social prospects. Thu with all his vivid imagination and unrivalled powers of description, the turn of his mind is essentially contemplative. He looks on the past as an emblem of the present; he sees, in the fall of Tyre, and Athens, and Jerusalem, the fate which one day awaits his own country; and mourns less the decay of human things, than the popular passions and national sins which have brought that instability in close proximity to his own times. This sensitive and foreboding disposition was much charming child of fourteen, the companion of his wanderings, the depositary of his thoughts, the darling of his affections-who was snatched away in the spring of life, when in health and joy, by one of the malignant fevers incidental Michaud's mind is akin to that of Chateaubriand, and yet different in many important particulars. The learned and indefatigable historian of the Crusades, he has traversed the shores of the Mediterranean-the scene, as Dr. Johnson observed, of all that can ever interest man-his religion, his knowledge, his arts-with the ardent desire to imprint on his mind the scenes and images which met the eyes of the holy warriors. He seeks to trans-increased by the death of his daughter-a port us to the days of Godfrey of Bouillon and Raymond of Toulouse; he thirsts with the Christian host at Dorislaus, he shares in its anxieties at the siege of Antioch, he participates in its exultation at the storming of Jerusalem. The scenes visited by the vast multi-to the pestilential plains of the east. tude of warriors who, during two hundred years, were precipitated from Europe on Asia, have almost all been visited by him, and described with the accuracy of an antiquary and the enthusiasm of a poet. With the old chronicles in his hand, he treads with veneration the scenes of former generous sacrifice and heroic achievements, and the vast and massy structures erected on either side during those terrible wars-when, for centuries, Europe strove hand to hand with Asia-most of which have undergone very little alteration, enable him to describe them almost exactly as they appeared to the holy warriors. The interest of his pilgrimage in the east, accordingly, is peculiar, but very great; it is not so much a book of travels as a moving chronicle; but, like Sir W. Scott's Minstrelsy of the Borders, it is He embarked at Marseilles, with Madame a chronicle clothed in a very different garb from Lamartine and his little daughter Julia, on the the homely dress of the olden time. It trans- 10th of July, 1830. The following is the picports us back, not only in time but in idea, sixture of the yearnings of his mind on leaving hundred years; but it does so with the grace his native land; and they convey a faithful of modern times-it clothes the profound feel- image of his intellectual temperament:ings, the generous sacrifices, the forgetfulness of self of the twelfth century, with the poetic mind, the cultivated taste, the refined imagery of the nineteenth. Lamartine has traversed the same scenes with Chateaubriand and Michaud, and yet he has done so in a different spirit; and the character of his work is essentially different Though Lamartine's travels are continuous, he does not, like most other wanderers, furnish us with a journal of every day's proceedings. He was too well aware that many, perhaps most, days on a journey are monotonous or uninteresting; and that great part of the details of a traveller's progress are wholly unworthy of being recorded, because they are neither amusing, elevating, nor instructive. He paints, now and then, with all the force of his magical pencil, the more brilliant or characteristic scenes which he visited, and intersperses them with reflections, moral and social; such as would naturally be aroused in a sensitive mind by the sight of the ruins of ancient, and the contemplation of the decay of modern, times. . "I feel it deeply: I am one only of those men, without a distinctive character, of a transitory and fading epoch, whose sighs have found an echo-only because the echo was more poetical than the poet. I belong to another age by my desires: I feel in myself another man: the immense and boundless horizon of philosophy, at once profound, re ligious, and poetical, has opened to my view; | headlands pointed and coloured like the Colibut the punishment of a wasted youth over-seum at Rome, while the other was violet took me; it soon faded from my sight. Adieu, like the flower of the lilac, the image of a vast then, to the dreams of genius, to the aspira- city appeared on the sea. It was an illusion, tions of intellectual enjoyment! It is too late: doubtless; but it had all the appearance of I have not physical strength to accomplish reality. You saw clearly the domes glancing any thing great. I will sketch some scenes- -dazzling lines of palaces-quays flooded by I will murmur some strains; and that is all. a soft and serene light; on the right and the Yet if God would grant my prayers, here is left the waves were seen to sparkle and enthe object for which I would petition-a poem, close it on either side: it was Venice or Malta such as my heart desires, and his greatness reposing in the midst of the waters. The deserves a faithful, breathing image of his illusion was produced by the reflection of the creation of the boundless world, visible and moon, when her rays fell perpendicularly on invisible! That would indeed be a worthy the waters; nearer the eye, the radiance spread inheritance to leave to an era of darkness, of and expanded in a stream of gold and silver doubt, and of sadness!-an inheritance which between two shores of azure. On the left, the would nourish the present age, and cause the gulf extended to the summit of a long and obnext to spring with renovated youth."-(Voy- scure range of serrated mountains; on the ages en Orient, I. 49, 50.)* right opened a narrow and deep valley, where a fountain gushed forth beneath the shade of aged trees; behind, rose a hill, clothed to the top with olives, which in the night appeared dark, from its summit to its base-a line of Gothic towers and white houses broke the obscurity of the wood, and drew the thoughts to the abodes, the joys, and the sufferings of man. Further off, in the extremity of the gulf, three enormous rocks rose, like pillars without base, from the surface of the waters-their forms were fantastic, their surface polished like flints by the action of the waves; but those flints were mountains-the remains, doubtless, of that primeval ocean which once overspread the earth, and of which our seas are but a feeble image."-(I. 66.) One of his first nocturnal reveries at sea, portrays the tender and profoundly religious impressions of his mind: "I walked for an hour on the deck of the vessel alone, and immersed alternately in sad or consoling reflections. I repeated in my heart all the prayers which I learned in infancy from my mother; the verses, the fragments of the Psalms, which I had so often heard her repeat to herself, when walking in the evening in the garden of Milly. I experienced a melancholy pleasure in thus scattering them, in my turn, to the waves, to the winds, to that Ear which is ever open to every real movement of the heart, though not yet uttered by the lips. The prayer which we have heard repeated by one we have loved, and who is no more, is doubly sacred. Who among us would not prefer a few words of prayer taught us by our mother, to the most eloquent supplication composed by ourselves? Thence it is that whatever religious creed we may adopt at the age of reason, the Christian prayer will be ever the prayer of the human race. I prayed in the prayer of the church for the evening at sea; also for that dear being, who never thought of danger to accompany her husband, and that lovely child, who played at the moment on the poop with the goat which was to give it milk on board, and with the little kids which licked her snow-white hands, and sported with her long and fair ringlets."-(I. 57.) A night-scene on the coast of Provence gives a specimen of his descriptive powers. "It was night-that is, what they call night in those climates; but how many days have I seen less brilliant on the banks of the Thames, the Seine, the Saone, or the Lake of Geneva! A full moon shone in the firmament, and cast into the shade our vessel, which lay motionless on the water at a little distance from the quay. The moon, in her progress through the heavens, had left a path marked as if with red sand, with which she had besprinkled the half of the sky: the remainder was clear deep blue, which melted into white as she advanced. On the horizon, at the distance of two miles, between two little isles, of which the one had * We have translated all the passages ourselves: the versions hitherto published in this country give, as most English translations of French works do, a most imperfect idea of the original. A rocky bay on the same romantic coast, now rendered accessible to travellers by the magnificent road of the Corniché, projected, and in part executed by Napoleon, furnishes another subject for this exquisite pencil : "A mile to the eastward on the coast, the mountains, which there dip into the sea, are broken as if by the strokes of enormous clubs huge fragments have fallen, and are strewed in wild confusion at the foot of the cliffs, or amidst the blue and green waves of the sea, which incessantly laves them. The waves break on these huge masses without inter mission, with a hollow and alternating roar, or rise up in sheets of foam, which besprinkle their hoary fronts. These masses of mountains-for they are too large to be called rocks -are piled and heaped together in such numbers, that they form an innumerable number of narrow havens, of profound caverns, of sounding grottoes, of gloomy fissures-of which the children of some of the neighbouring fishermen alone know the windings and the issues. One of these caverns, into which you enter by a natural arch, the summit of which is formed by an enormous block of granite, lets in the sea, through which it flows into a dark and narrow valley, which the waters fill entirely, with a surface as limpid and smooth as the firmament which they reflect. The sea preserves in this sequestered nook that beautiful tint of bright green, of which marine painters so strongly feel the value, but which they can never transfer exactly to their canvas; for the eye sees much which the hand strives in vain to imitate. "On the two sides of that marine valley rise | writers down to the close of the eighteenth two prodigious walls of perpendicular rock, century, are lost in vague generalities. Like of an uniform and sombre hue, similar to that almost all descriptions of battles in modern of iron ore, after it has issued and cooled from times, before Napier, they are so like each the furnace. Not a plant, not a moss can find other that you cannot distinguish one from the a slope or a crevice wherein to insert its roots other. Scott and Chateaubriand, when they or cover the rocks with those waving garlands did apply their great powers to the delineation which so often in Savoy clothe the cliffs, where of nature, were incomparably faithful, as well they flower to God alone. Black, naked, per- as powerfully imaginative; but such descrippendicular, repelling the eye by their awful tions were, for the most part, but a secondary aspect-they seem to have been placed there object with them. The human heart was their for no other purpose but to protect from the great study; the vicissitudes of life, the inexsea-breezes the hills of olives and vines, which haustible theme of their genius. With Labloom under their shelter; an image of those martine, again, the description of nature is the ruling men in a stormy epoch, who seem placed primary object. It is to convey a vivid imby Providence to bear the fury of all the tem- pression of the scenes he has visited that he pests of passion and of time, to screen the has written; to kindle in his reader's mind the weaker but happier race of mortals. At the train of emotion and association which their bottom of the bay the sea expands a little, as- contemplation awakened in his own, that he sumes a bluer tint as it comes to reflect more has exerted all his powers. He is much more of the cloudless heavens, and at length its tiny laboured and minute, in consequence, than waves die away on a bed of violets, as closely either of his predecessors; he records the netted together as the sand upon the shore. If tints, the forms, the lights, the transient effects you disembark from the boat, you find in the with all a painter's enthusiasm and all a poet's cleft of a neighbouring ravine a fountain of power; and succeeds, in any mind at all faliving water, which gushes beneath a narrow miliar with the objects of nature, in conjuring path formed by the goats, which leads up from up images as vivid, sometimes perhaps more this sequestered solitude, amidst overshadow- beautiful, than the originals which he por ing fig-trees and oleanders, to the cultivated trayed. abodes of man. Few scenes struck me so much in my long wanderings. Its charm consists in that exquisite union of force and grace which forms the perfection of natural beauty as of the highest class of intellectual beings; it is that mysterious hymen of the land and the sea, surprised, as it were, in their most secret and hidden union. It is the image of perfect calm and inaccessible solitude, close to the theatre of tumultuous tempests, where their near roar is heard with such terror, where their foaming but lessened waves yet break upon the shore. It is one of those numerous chefs-d'œuvre of creation which God has scattered over the earth, as if to sport with contrasts, but which he conceals so frequently on the summit of naked rocks, in the depth of inaccessible ravines, on the unapproachable shores of the ocean, like jewels which he unveils rarely, and that only to simple beings, to children, to shepherds or fishermen, or the devout worshippers of nature.”—(I. 73 ———74.) This style of description of scenery is peculiar to this age, and in it Lamartine may safely be pronounced without a rival in the whole range of literature. It was with Scott and Chateaubriand that the graphic style of description arose in England and France; but he has pushed the art further than either of his great predecessors. Milton and Thomson had long ago, indeed, in poetry, painted nature in the most enchanting, as well as the truest colours; but in prose little was to be found except a general and vague description of a class of objects, as lakes, mountains, and rivers, without any specification of features and details, so as to convey a definite and distinct impression to the mind of the reader. Even the classical mind and refined taste of Addison could not attain this graphic style; his descriptions of scenery, like that of all prose From the greatness of his powers, however, in this respect, and the facility with which he commits to paper the whole features of the splendid phantasmagoria with which his memory is stored, arises the principal defect of his work; and the circumstance which has hitherto prevented it, in this country at least, from acquiring general popularity commensurate to its transcendent merits. He is too rich in glowing images; his descriptions are redundant in number and beauty. The mind even of the most imaginative reader is fatigued by the constant drain upon its admirationthe fancy is exhausted in the perpetual effort to conceive the scenes which he portrays to the eye. Images of beauty enough are to be found in his four volumes of Travels in the East, to emblazon, with the brightest colours of the rainbow, forty volumes of ordinary adventure. We long for some repose amidst the constant repetition of dazzling objects; monotony, in sipidity, ordinary life, even dulness itself, would often be a relief amidst the ceaseless flow of rousing images. Sir Walter Scott says, in one of his novels-"Be assured that whenever I am particularly dull, it is not without an object;" and Lamartine would sometimes be the better of following the advice. We generally close one of his volumes with the feeling so well known to travellers in the Italian cities, "I hope to God there is nothing more to be seen here." And having given the necessary respite of unexciting disquisition to rest our readers' minds, we shall again bring forward one of his glowing pictures "Between the sea and the last heights of Lebanon, which sink rapidly almost to the water's edge, extends a plain eight leagues in length by one or two broad; sandy, bare, covered only with thorny arbutus, browsed by the camels of caravans From it darts out into the sea an advanced peninsula, linked to the |