SOURCE: "On the Poems of Victor Hugo," in Life and Writings of Joseph Mazzini, Volume II, Smith, Elder, and Company, 1890, pp. 257–303.

In the following excerpt, taken from an essay originally published in British and Foreign Review in 1838, Mazzini discusses the faults and limitations of Hugo's poetry, stating that "his words are cold, fleshless, desolate; at times even imbued with a bitterness quite incomprehensible in a poet who has so often been called religious."

I have not leisure here to analyze completely any of Victor Hugo's poems. But let the reader open any one of his collections, Les Feuilles d'Automne excepted, and peruse the first piece that offers. An attentive examination, guided by the notions here thrown out, will show the idea fettered, bound down by the form which it ought to govern,—the mind in some sort absorbed by matter, which matter it ought to seize upon, pervade...