inhabit words—as light inhabits water or as greenness inhabits grass." Not only does he foresee such a time, but he foreshadows it, heralds it in some of his sketches, "Aileen" for one, by attempting it. Perhaps he has succeeded, perhaps not. To me the attempt is a failure, not, I think, because he is writing for to-morrow, for that age when the spiritual awakening he so often prophesied shall have come, but because he is attempting what cannot be done in any age. If he were seeking only suggestion, well and good. But he seeks more, and fails, I think, to attain more. It seems to me impossible that the suggestions he creates can ever be more than suggestions. They cannot become definite concepts that will mean the same thing to all men. Suggestion, the opening-up of vistas, is a high attribute of the art he follows; but he is not content with suggestion, he would seek more definite expression of what, after all, is not thought but mood. So it is that he is most successful when conveying mood and less successful when conveying esoteric thought. As a critic, of course, on a plane easier for the conveyance of thought, Sharp is definite enough, completely successful in conveying the ideas that he intends to convey.
Often, I fear, when Sharp intends "spiritual history," either in a tale wholly devoted to this purpose, as "The Divine Adventure," or as explanatory to the incidents of some more tangible tale, he is really only playing with words, beautiful words, words sometimes so beautiful that we are apt to forget that words are to be used not alone for beauty's sake. Often, again, I fear, he will introduce beautiful symbols simply for their beauty and not because
