Alps; who has seen the distant ranges of the mountains alternately obscured by cloud and blazing with the concentrated brightness of the sinking sun, while drifting scuds of hail and rain, tawny with sunlight, glistening with broken rainbows, clothe peak and precipice and forest in the golden veil of flameirradiated vapor, who has heard the thunder billow in the thwarting folds of hills, and watched the lightning, like a snake's tongue, flicker at intervals amid gloom and glory, knows in Nature's language what Pindar teaches with the voice of art." Of the "Trilogy" of Eschylus, Mr. Symonds speaks in this divining way: "There is, in the 'Agamemnon,' an oppressive sense of multitudinous crimes, of sins gathering and swelling to produce a tempest. The air we breathe. is loaded with them. No escape is possible." In his Italian studies Mr. Symonds makes Petrarcha, Boccaccio, Ariosto, Tasso, Leonardo, Cellini, Michael Angelo, and Leopardi fairly live and speak again. He is an author whose magic wand opens the golden doors to Truth and 'Beauty. Love that asketh love again, Love, exacting nothing back, Mortal, if thou art beloved, Life's offences are removed; And the fateful things that checkt thee, Deeper, painted long ago. What is sorrow? Comfort's prime, And for death! when thou art dying Fear no grief of mortal men. MICHAEL FIELD. THE ROSE OF MORNING. In the East the rose of morning seems as if 't would blossom soon; But it never, never blossoms in this picture, and the moon Never ceases to be crescent, and the June is always June. THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH. HE immortal rose of literature finds its inflorescence in romance, both in dramatic poetry and in the novel which, ideally considered, is hardly second in importance. To contemporary life the novel is what the Miracle Play was to the thirteenth century, at once the embodiment of the Mysteries and of the Moralities. holds, or should hold, the mirror up to nature, as the stage was supposed to do in the time of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and it is a question, too, whether the novel does not exert a more perceptible influence on life than life exerts on the novel. The incalculable power of It an unheralded apparition of genius, such as Scott, George Sand, Balzac, or George Eliot, may be more vividly traced in life than even in literature. Horace has recorded that the heroes who perished before Agamemnon died for want of a poet to celebrate them; but it could hardly be predicated of latter-day life that any type of character has failed to find itself embalmed, after some fashion, in the fiction of the hour; although we must keep in mind that all stories no more exemplify the novel, than all buildings illustrate the art of architecture. Fiction has become as all-pervading as the daily newspaper, and still the great novelists of the world can be counted without unduly taxing the fingers of both hands. "Le sentiment de la vie ideale, qui n'est autre que la vie normale telle que nous sommes appelés a la connaître," is George Sand's expression of the determining motive of her fiction. The ideal life, which is the only normal life. Herein is condensed a truth of ethics as well as of literary art. It is only fair to claim true realism in fiction as the term expressive of the spiritual side of life rather than in its ordinary acceptation, as expressive of that which is evanescent. Thought, |