内容简介：
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Alphonse de Lamartine. Born in Macon, 1790 . . . Died in Paris, 1869. Alphonse-Marie-Louis de Lamartine is the master of French reflective verse, and his influence on modern poetry has been real and lasting. His early youth was passed in the country-house of Saint-Point, under the wing of a fond mother and with refined sisters; his education was superintended by a romantic priest and completed at the Jesuit seminary of Belley. His youthful faculties were fed on the Bible, on Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, on Rousseau and on Chateaubriand, with some of the older English and Italian poets, and he began early to express his emotions in verse. After a visit to Italy he entered the military household of Louis XVIII in 1814, and soon became a familiar figure in the best royalist salons in Paris. His health had always been somewhat fragile, and his sentimental melancholy led him into many strange experiences of the tender passion in his youth. The publication of the first volume of Mtditations in 1820 caused an unwonted commotion in literary circles. It was the most brilliant success, said Sainte-Beuve, since Chateaubriand's Genie du Christianisme. Lamartine leaped into fame with one bound, and yet, if the circumstances be considered, it is easy to understand the suddencelebrity of his early poems. These glimpses of pure affection, nursed in devotion and faith, and this return to the love of nature refreshed an age which was suffering from weariness after the bloody terrors of the Revolution and the brutal splendours of the Empire. Not only did Lamartine's verses reveal a fine vein of contemplation, which expressed simple thoughts and emotions in a simple way.without recourse to classical allusions and conventional imagery; they came at a time when there were few singers in France...