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us with painful frankness into their dressing-rooms, and suffer us to gaze more intimately than is agreeable to us upon the dubious mysteries of their deshabille. Authors who have the gift of continuity disregard with insistent generosity the limits of time and patience. What a noble poem was lost to myriads of readers when "The Ring and the Book" reached its twenty thousandth line! How inexorable is the tyranny of a great and powerful poet who will spare his readers nothing! Authors who are indifferent to the beauties of reserve charge down upon us with a dreadful impetuosity from which there is no escape. The strength that lies in delicacy, the chasteness of style which does not abandon itself to every impulse, are qualities ill-understood by men who subordinate taste to fervor, and whose words, coarse, rank, or unctuous, betray the undisciplined intellect that mistakes passion for power. "The language of poets," says Shelley, "has always effected a certain uniform and harmonious recurrence of sound, without which it were not poetry;" and it is the sustained effort to secure this balanced harmony, this magnificent work within