Lamartine.

A friend, a great poet, wrote to me in a painful circumstance: “She is ever your companion, invisible, but present; you have lost the woman, but not the soul! Dear friend, let us live in the dead!” [See a Letter from Victor Hugo to Lamartine.] A consoling, salutary thought, which comforts in the struggle and makes one think incessantly of this ascending succession of matter, of this unity in the conception of all that is, of this marvelous and incomparable workman who, for the continuity of progress, binds the Spirit to this matter, spiritualized, in its turn, by the presence of the superior element.

No, my well-beloved, I have not lost your soul, which lived glorious, sparkling with all the brightness of the invisible world. My life is a living protest against the threatening scourge of skepticism, in its multiple forms. No one, more than I, energetically affirmed the divine personality and believed in human personality, defending liberty. If the thought of the infinite was developed in me, if the divine presence palpitates in enthusiastic pages, it is because I was to open my path; it is because I lived from the presence of God, and that source, gushing incessantly, always made me believe in the good, in the beautiful, in rectitude, in devotion, in the honor of the individual and, still more, in the honor of the nation, that condensed individuality. It is because my companion was a nature of the elite, strong and tender. Beside her I understood the nature of the soul and its intimate relations with the statue of flesh, that marvel! For this reason, my studies were spiritualized, consequently fruitful and rapid, turning incessantly toward the forms of the beautiful and the passion of letters. I wedded Science to thought, in order that Philosophy, in me, might make use of these two precious poetic instruments. At times my form was abstract and was not within the reach of all; but the serious thinkers adopted it; all the great spirits of my epoch opened their ranks to me. Catholic orthodoxy looked upon me as a sheep fleeing from the flock of the Roman shepherd, especially when, carried by events, I shared the responsibility of a glorious revolution.

Dragged for a moment by popular aspirations, by that powerful breath of compressed ideas, I was no longer the man of great situations; I had finished my journey, and, for me, there sounded, on the clock of time, the hours of weariness and of discouragement. I saw my calvary, and while Lamartine painfully ascended it, the sons of this so beloved France spat in his face, without respect for his white hair, the outrage, the defiance, the insult.

A solemn trial, gentlemen, in which the soul retempers and corrects itself, because forgetfulness is death, and death on Earth is communion with God, that judicious dispenser of all forces!

I died as a Christian; I had been born in the Church, I depart before it! A year ago, I had a profound intuition. I spoke little, but I traveled ceaselessly through the ethereal plains, where everything is recast under the gaze of the Lord of the worlds; the problem of life unfolded itself majestically, gloriously. I understood the thought of Swedenborg and of the school of the theosophists, of Fourier, of Jean Reynaud, of Henri Martin, of Victor Hugo, and Spiritism, which was familiar to me, although in contradiction with my prejudices and my birth, prepared me for the detachment, for the departure. The transition was not painful; like the pollen of a flower, my Spirit, borne by a whirlwind, found the sister plant. Like you, I call it erraticity; and, to make me love this longed-for sister, my mother, my well-beloved wife, a multitude of friends and of invisible ones surrounded me like a luminous halo. Plunged into that beneficent fluid, my Spirit grew serene, like the body of that traveler of the desert who, after a long journey under a sky of lead and of fire, found a generous bath for the body, a limpid and fresh spring for his burning thirst. Ineffable joys of the limitless heaven, concerts of all harmonies, molecules that reverberate the chords of the divine science, vivifying warmth of its impressions without name that the human tongue could not decipher, new well-being, rebirth, complete elasticity, electric depth of certainties, similitude of laws, calm full of grandeur, spheres that enclose the humanities, oh! be welcome, foreseen emotions, increased indefinitely by radiations of the infinite!

Exchange your ideas, Spiritists, you who believe in us. Study at the ever new sources of our teaching; strengthen yourselves, and let each member of the family be an apostle who speaks, marches, and acts with will, with the certainty that you give nothing to the unknown. Know much, that your intelligence may be elevated. Human science, joined to the science of your invisible, but luminous, helpers, will make you masters of the future. You will drive out the shadow to come to us, that is, to the light, to God.

Alphonse de Lamartine. n [1]

[v. Alphonse de Lamartine.]