Leconte de Lisle, CHARLES MARIE, a great French poet, was born on the island of Réunion, October 23, 1818. He was carefully educated, and after some years of travel settled to a literary life in Paris. His early enthusiasm for Fourier's dreams soon disappeared before the wisdom learned of experience, but his ardent temperament found a more lasting poetic impulse in Greek ideals and in the sympathetic study of oriental pantheism. He succeeded to Victor Hugo's chair at the Academy in 1886. Besides his original poems he translated Theocritus, Anacreon, the Iliad and Odyssey, Hesiod, the Orphic Hymns, Æschylus, Horace, Sophocles, and Euripides. His Poèmes
Antiques (1852) and Poésies Nouvelles (1854) he collected as Poésies Complètes (1858). Other volumes are Poèmes Barbares (1862), Poèmes Tragiques (1884), Derniers Poèmes (1895). He died 17th July 1894. He exercised a profound influence on all the younger poets of his time, and was head of a school called, from their organ, 'Les Parnassiens.' He has a great power of sympathy with the dumb emotion in the life of nature, the vaster aspects of which—the virgin forest, the immense sea, the profound sky—the reader ever feels the presence of, like the ground-plan on which his poetic fantasies are built. He stands aloof from, yet comprehends, the hot emotions that perplex the heart of man, and surveys the drama of the ages not with the eye of a Michelet or a Hugo, but with the calm, unimpassioned intuition of pure intellect. His versification is marked by classic regularity and by serene faultlessness of form.
See the admirable essays by Paul Bourget in Nouveaux Essais de Psychologie Contemporaine, and Jules Lemaitre in the first series of Les Contemporains.