but the heart never throbs with hope nor thrills with terror for the poetic phantasmata whose weeping and wailing fill so many pages of the drama. There are, it is true, some magnificent passages of poetry in the work, notably Lucifer's description of the effect of the curse upon animal creation. Reminding Adam of "when the curse took us in Eden," he says—
Half sheathed in primal woods, and glittering
In spasms of awful sunshine, at that hour
A lion couched—part raised upon his paws,
With his calm, massive face turned full on thine,
And his mane listening. When the ended curse
Left silence in the world—right suddenly
He sprang up rampant, and stood straight and stiff
As if the new reality of death
Were dashed against his eyes—and roared so fierce,
(Such thick carnivorous passion in his throat
Tearing a passage through the wrath and fear)—
And roared so wild, and smote from all the hills
Such fast, keen echoes crumbling down the vales
Precipitately—that the forest beasts,
One after one, did mutter a response
In savage and in sorrowful complaint,
Which trailed along the gorges. Then, at once,
He fell back, and rolled crashing from the height.
This is a magnificent picture most grandiloquently portrayed, but it is the finest passage in the Drama. Its author appears to have felt that there was something wanting in her work, and, therefore, strives to explain away what might be objected to, and to deprecate criticism, by a lengthy Preface.
"The Vision of Poets," the second longest poem in the collection, is referred to by her as an attempt to express her view of the poet's mission, "of the self-abnegation implied in it, of the great work involved in it, of the duty and glory of what Balzac has beau-
