This national mood explains how it was possible for such poetry as Lamartine's _Les Méditations_ to become the favourite literature of the day. No book since Chateaubriand's _Génie du Christianisme_ had made such a sensation as did the First Part of this work; 45,000 copies of it were sold in four years. Strange as it may seem to us now, the Restoration period found in Lamartine's poetry an interpretation of its feelings and of all that moved its inmost heart--a picture of its ideal longings, painted in the clearest, loveliest dream-colours. It was poetry that resembled the music of an Æolian harp, but the wind that played upon the strings was the spirit of the age. The poems were not so much songs as reflections, not so much heart as spirit harmonies; but in real life there had for long been enough, and more than enough, of the positive--definite forms, decided characters, solid substance, silent acceptance of the strokes of fate. It was by no means considered a fault that there was no strong passion in the poems, no tendency to see the dark and dreadful sides of life, or, in fact, life as it is. There had been enough of all this in reality. After a period during which so many instincts had been forcibly suppressed, men rejoiced in this purely poetic instinct, in this most melodious poet, who had, as he himself said, a chord for every feeling and mood. They longed for just such lyric restfulness after philosophy, revolution, and wars without end. The poem _Le Lac_ was read with delight by the whole French-speaking world, just because it was so long since men had felt in sympathy with nature, so long since they had looked at the face of the earth from any point of view but the tactical one. It was not only, however, as the poet of feeling that Lamartine represented the spirit of the day; he also represented it in his character of orthodox Christian. The leading note in his poetry was the note of Christian royalism, and devotion to the Bourbon family in particular.
To us, who are acquainted with a Lamartine in whom the Revolution of 1848 seemed to find its incarnation, a Lamartine who was universally regarded as a prophet of humanism, it is of interest to examine the poet's spiritual starting-point.