cessant accompaniment for the glowing words of "Signa." The youth who gives his name to the book is a musician who possesses something more glorious than mere aptitude. Psychologically it is the reverse of "Ariadne," delineating the torment of a man who puts faith in the most shallow and vacant female nature. It is just as plaintive, just as haunting, as its predecessor, but it is simpler, less penetrative and wide-circling, less Dantesque in its mournful dignity and Less astonishing through its scholarship. These three prose-poems—"Folle-Farine," "Ariadne," and "Signa"—are the three high alps of Ouida'a accomplishment thus far. It is not easy to praise them with full justice, because unrestrained panegyric is never that, and yet the lyrical spontaneity of the works themselves—their evidence of having won their splendid vitality by having been poured from the writer's inmost heart, as warm as that heart's blood—would tempt one who had fully felt their strength, originality, and greatness, to dip his pen in exceedingly rosy ink and then shape with it very ardent encomiums. I am far from calling these memorable undertakings "idyls," as Miss Preston terms them, or in any manner agreeing that "Friendship" "marks a distinct intellectual advance."
Here was a woman who had shown us as no one else, living or dead, ever had shown in precisely the same way, that she could make the sweetest and most impressive poetry do service as the medium for telling the sweetest and most impressive of tales. Mixed with their Gothic fantasy there was something Homeric in these three volumes which I have before named. There were no touches that reminded us at all of the modern novel. Each had its separate aesthetic haze clinging about it, and a golden haze this was, in every case. With only a few changes here and there, the atmosphere of each story might have been made Greek, or even Egyptian. The delights or horrors of life were put most strikingly under our vision; but the details of life, the routine of things au jour le jour, the trifling modes and customs of mortality, as it pursues its whims, its vices, its flirtations, its amours, its divorce-suits, all remained remote and unconsidered. The glamour of dream clung to every character and event. The joys and miseries outrolled before us were as abstract and aloof, when viewed with relation to our morning mail or our menaced butcher's-bill, as the loves of Paris and Helen in the Iliad, or of Ulysses and Calypso in the Odyssey. These three enticing stories no more concerned our bread-and-butter-getting existences of prosaic actuality than they concerned the wash of tides at either pole. We turned their glowing leaves to escape from our silent quarrel with realities rather than to meet the monotonous recurrence of them either photographed painstakingly or sketched felici-
