“I was born a poet,” he pleads. “When young, I had heard the word of Nature, the speech which is formed of images and not of sounds. I had even translated into written language some of those accents that had stirred me, and that had in their turn stirred other souls. But these accents did not now satisfy me.”
“Besides, I was, I had almost always been, a Christian in heart and in imagination; my mother had made me such.” This pilgrimage though not as of the Christian, at least of the man and the poet, would delight her in the celestial abode where he saw her, and she would be to them as a second Providence between them and dangers.
His duty to his country was likewise considered. He had sacrificed to it this dream of his for sixteen years. There was need for heaven to raise up new men; the present politics made man ashamed and angels weep. “Destiny gives an hour in a century for humanity to be regenerated; that hour is a revolution; and men let it pass to tear one another to pieces: thus they give to revenge the hour given by God for their regeneration and progress.”
All was duly made ready for the journey. He set sail from Marseilles, in the brig _Alceste_, on the eleventh of July, 1832, expecting to be absent two years. His wife and daughter and three friends, one of them a physician, composed the party. The voyage was full of incident, and his journal abounds with adventures and predictions. Lamartine was what imaginative persons term a visionary. He was really oriental and tropical in temperament, and ready to catch the spirit of the region to which he was sailing; for Syria, Arabia and Palestine have always been renowned for mystics, seers and prophets.
As the vessel passed the coast of Tunis, he wrote his impressions. He had never loved the Romans nor taken the least interest in behalf of Carthage; but he sympathized with Hannibal. “I love or I abhor, in the physical sense of the word,” says he. “At first sight, in the twinkling of an eye, I have formed my judgment of a man or woman for always.” He adds that “this is the characteristic of individuals with whom instinct is quick, active, instantaneous, inflexible. What, it will be asked, what is instinct? It is to be cognized as the highest reason—the innate reason, the reason that does not argue, the reason such as God has made and not what man finds out. It strikes us like the lightning without which the eye would have difficulty of searching it out. It illuminates everything at the first flash. The inspiration in all the arts, as upon the field of battle, is as this instinct, this reason that divines. Genius also is instinct and not logic and labor.”