The poet is sitting at evening on the bare mountain side. Venus rises above the horizon (_Le Soir_). A ray from the star seems to glide across his brow and touch his eyes, and he feels as if the departed one, in whose companionship he had lived here, were hovering near him. He addresses the ray from Venus:
Mon cœur à ta clarté s'enflamme, Je sens des transports inconnus, Je songe à ceux qui ne sont plus: Douce lumière, es-tu leur âme?
Or, sitting on a rock by the lake (_Le Bourget_), where in bygone happy days he had sat by her side, he is painfully affected by the feeling of the mutability of everything human as compared with the unchangeableness of inanimate nature. This is the emotion to which he gives expression in his poem _Le Lac_, which, in spite of its extraordinary popularity, is probably the best he ever wrote. It is an excellent type of his poetry; flowing gently, with no exertion perceptible, not even that exertion which we call art, it is as naturally melodious as the rippling of the lake. The emotion which the poet desires to express is indicated with admirable precision in the metaphor with which the first verse concludes: Is it impossible to cast anchor on the ocean of time even for a single day? The lake is described with its waves breaking upon the rocks as they did a year ago, when the beloved one heard their murmur; and the bereaved lover recalls the words which she spoke in the stillness of night, as their boat floated on the waters--an invocation to time, that happy time, to stay its flight, a prayer to it to hasten for the unhappy and suffering, but to linger with those who love and are beloved. He repeats her concluding cry: Prayer is fruitless; let us love one another and enjoy the passing hour! For man there is no haven, time has no shore; it flows on and we disappear. On this memory of the thoughts of his dead love follows the poet's own invocation to nature. He invokes the lake, the silent rocks, the caves, the dark woods, the things which time spares and those which it re-animates, and beseeches them to preserve the remembrance of that night.
And Lamartine, so spiritual in his expression of the grief and loneliness of the bereaved lover, is almost as spiritual when for once he gives expression to happy love. This he does in _Chant d'amour_, a poem which he himself naïvely describes as a modern Song of Solomon, quieter in tone and less Oriental in colouring than the old, but which in reality has as little resemblance to that song as the chastest spirituality of the West has to the glowing sensuality of the East. Here, as elsewhere, the chord which he touches is the chord of plaintive tenderness, gradually modulating into that of religious devotion.