'The slight acquaintance I had with Hugo, and company, did not
dispel these impressions. And I thought Chateaubriand (far too
French for my taste also,) belonged to _l'ancien regime_, and
that Beranger and Courier stood apart. Nodier, Paul de Kock,
Sue, Jules Janin, I did not know, except through the absurd
reports of English reviewers; Le Maistre and Lamennais, as
little.
'But I have now got a peep at this galaxy. I begin to divine
the meaning of St. Simonianism, Cousinism, and the movement
which the same causes have produced in belles-lettres. I
perceive that _la jeune France_ is the legitimate, though far
younger sister of Germany; taught by her, but not born of her,
but of a common mother. I see, at least begin to see, what
she has learned from England, and what the bloody rain of
the revolution has done to fertilize her soil, naturally too
light.
'Blessed be the early days when I sat at the feet of Rousseau,
prophet sad and stately as any of Jewry! Every onward movement
of the age, every downward step into the solemn depths of my
own soul, recalls thy oracles, O Jean Jacques! But as these
things only glimmer upon me at present, clouds of rose and
amber, in the perspective of a long, dim woodland glade, which
I must traverse if I would get a fair look at them from the
hill-top,--as I cannot, to say sooth, get the works of these
always working geniuses, but by slow degrees, in a country
that has no heed of them till her railroads and canals are
finished,--I need not jot down my petty impressions of the
movement writers.
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