Here, as we turn every page, we expect to meet _Rosalind_ and _Jeanie
Deans_, _Tom Jones_ and _Aramis_, _Mr. Micawber_ and _Madame Bovary_,
_Eugenie Grandet_ and _Colonel Newcome_, _Casanova_ and _Casablanca_,
_Consuelo_ and "CAGLIOSTRO," and, if we do not meet them, we encounter
new and more radiant figures, compared with whom the others are as
water to wine.

Here, with its bliss and agony, its cacophony and cachinnation, is
Life, such as you and I know it, not life in absolute _déshabillé_,
but enveloped in the iridescent upholstery of genius, sublimated by
the wizardry of a transcendental polyphony.

Here, soaring high above the cenotaph in which the roses and rapture
of our youth lie entombed in one red burial blent, we see the
shimmering strands of St. Martin's Summer drawn athwart the happenless
days of Autumn, with the dewdrops of cosmic unction sparkling in the
rays of a sunshine never yet seen on land or sea, but reflecting as in
a magic mirror that far off El Dorado, that land where Summer always
is "i-cumen in," for which each and all of us feel a perpetual
nostalgia.

Here, in fine, gentle reader, is a work of such colossal force that
to render justice to its abysmal greatness we have ransacked the
vocabulary of superlative laudation in vain. SWINBURNE, compared to
the needs of the situation, is as a shape of quivering jelly alongside
of the Rock of Gibraltar. And here, O captious critic, is a Wonderwork
which not only disarms but staggers, paralyses and annihilates all
possibilities of animadversion, unless you wish to share the fate
of Marsyas, by pitting your puny strength against the overwhelming