Even in the collection that bears the date of 1822, some years before the future author of Legende des Siecles had taken up romanticism, Alfred de Vigny had already conceived the idea of setting forth, in a series of little epics, the migrations of the human soul throughout the ages.  “One feels,” said he in his Preface, “a keen intellectual delight in transporting one’s self, by mere force of thought, to a period of antiquity; it resembles the pleasure an old man feels in recalling first his early youth, and then the whole course of his life.  In the age of simplicity, poetry was devoted entirely to the beauties of the physical forms of nature and of man; each step in advance that it has made since then toward our own day of civilization and of sadness, seems to have blended it more and more with our arts, and even with the sufferings of our souls.  At present, with all the serious solemnity of Religion and of Destiny, it lends to them their chief beauty.  Never discouraged, Poetry has followed Man in his long journey through the ages, like a sweet and beautiful companion.  I have attempted, in our language, to show some of her beauties, in following her progress toward the present day.”

The arrangement of the poems announced in this Preface is tripartite, like that of the ’Legende des Siecles:  Poemes antiques, poemes judaiques, poemes modernes.—­Livre mystique, livre antique, livre moderne’.  But the name of precursor would be a vain title if all that were necessary to merit it was the fact that one had been the first to perceive a new path to literary glory, to salute it from a distance, yet never attempt to make a nearer approach.

In one direction at least, Alfred de Vigny was a true innovator, in the broadest and most meritorious sense of the word:  he was the creator of philosophic poetry in France.  Until Jocelyn appeared, in 1836, the form of poetic expression was confined chiefly to the ode, the ballad, and the elegy; and no poet, with the exception of the author of ‘Moise’ and ‘Eloa’, ever dreamed that abstract ideas and themes dealing with the moralities could be expressed in the melody of verse.

To this priority, of which he knew the full value, Alfred de Vigny laid insistent claim.  “The only merit,” he says in one of his prefaces, “that any one ever has disputed with me in this sort of composition is the honor of having promulgated in France all works of the kind in which philosophic thought is presented in either epic or dramatic form.”

But it was not alone priority in the sense of time that gave him right of way over his contemporaries; he was the most distinguished representative of poetic philosophy of his generation.  If the phrases of Lamartine seem richer, if his flight is more majestic, De Vigny’s range is surer and more powerful.  While the philosophy of the creator of ‘Les Harmonies’ is uncertain and inconsistent, that of the poet of ‘Les Destinees’ is strong and substantial, for the reason that the former inspires more sentiment than ideas, while the latter, soaring far above the narrow sphere of personal emotion, writes of everything that occupies the intellect of man.