At the reading of this document, Lamartine was for a time unable to restrain his emotions. He leaped down from the bed, he tells us, and in other ways exhibited his delight. He was not content, however, to exult in his actual good fortune, but immediately began to extend his imagination further.
“I experienced what the shackled courser does when the course is opened,” says he. “I had little mind for the glory of verses, but I did have an unbounded passion for political activity. Already I began to look beyond the long years that separated me from the tribune and field of higher statesmanship.
“This was my true and entire vocation, although my friends think and my enemies say otherwise. I felt that mine was not the powerful creative organization that constitutes great poets; all my talent was of the heart only. But I did feel in me an accuracy of view, an effective power of reasoning, an energy of honest principle, which make statesmen. I had somewhat of the quality of Mirabeau in the reserved mental forces of my being. Fortune and France have since decided otherwise. But Nature knows more than Fortune and France; the one is blind, the other is jealous.”
Nevertheless, Lamartine continued to write verses, and his prose publications are more or less interspersed with poetic productions. He praised his friends, he commemorated those whom he loved in poems. Years afterward in his story of his journey to the Holy Land, he made this declaration: “Life for my mind has always been a great poem, as for my heart it has been love. GOD, LOVE and POESIE, are the three words which I shall desire to be engraved alone upon my monument if I ever deserve a monument.”
While he was sitting in a mystic reverie one evening at Florence, he heard a melodious voice murmur in his ear some lines from the _Meditations_, which are rendered as follows:
“Perchance the future may reserve for me A happiness whose hope I now resign: Perchance amid the busy world may be Some soul responsive still to mine.”
He was also a member of the Legation to England and afterward became Secretary to the French Embassy at Naples. In 1824 he was appointed Chargé d’Affaires to Tuscany, and remained in that position five years. He made the acquaintance of Louis Bonaparte, the former King of Holland, who was a scientist and philosopher rather than a statesman. Queen Hortense also attempted to have an interview with him, but this he carefully evaded. His mother, however, was a relative of the wife of Lucien Bonaparte and he met several members of that family under circumstances somewhat romantic. Pierre Bonaparte was with him at Paris in the Revolution of 1848.