a catalogue to the public would be speedily assailed by all the
horticultural journalists of England and all the customers of villadom.
For M. Zola avails himself of a poet's license to crowd marvel upon
marvel, to exaggerate nature's forces, to transform the tiniest blooms
into giant examples of efflorescence, and to mingle even the seasons one
with the other. But all this was premeditated; there was a picture
before his mind's eye, and that picture he sought to trace with his pen,
regardless of all possible objections. It is the poet's privilege to do
this and even to be admired for it. It would be easy for some leaned
botanist, some expert zoologist, to demolish Milton from the standpoint
of their respective sciences, but it would be absurd to do so. We ask of
the poet the flowers of his imagination, and the further he carries us
from the sordid realities, the limited possibilities of life, the more
are we grateful to him.

And M. Zola's Paradou is a flight of fancy, even as its mistress, the
fair, loving, guileless Albine, whose smiles and whose tears alike go to
our hearts, is the daughter of imagination. She is a flower--the very
flower of life's youth--in the midst of all the blossoms of her garden.
She unfolds to life and to love even as they unfold; she loves
rapturously even as they do under the sun and the azure; and she dies
with them when the sun's caress is gone and the chill of winter has
fallen. At the thought of her, one instinctively remembers Malherbe's
'Ode A Du Perrier:'

She to this earth belonged, where beauty fast
To direst fate is borne:
A rose, she lasted, as the roses last,
Only for one brief morn.