to love her and to see in her the incarnation of that St. Cecily whom,
with mystic and almost mediaeval passion, he had before adored. But a
priest separates them, and Melchior goes mad. An old doctor, who makes a
study of insanity, determines to try and cure him, and induces the girl
to appear to him, disguised as St. Cecily herself, while he sits brooding
at the organ. Thinking her at first to be indeed the Saint he had
worshipped, Melchior falls in ecstasy at her feet, but soon discovering
the trick kills her in a sudden paroxysm of madness. The horror of the
act restores his reason; but, with the return of sanity, the dreams and
visions of the artist's nature begin to vanish; the musician sees the
world not through a glass but face to face, and he dies just as the world
is awakening to his music.

The character of Melchior, who inherits his music from his father, and
from his mother his mysticism, is extremely fascinating as a
psychological study. Mr. Wills has made a most artistic use of that
scientific law of heredity which has already strongly influenced the
literature of this century, and to which we owe Dr. Holmes's fantastic
Elsie Venner, Daniel Deronda--that dullest of masterpieces--and the
dreadful Rougon-Macquart family with whose misdeeds M. Zola is never
weary of troubling us.

Blanca, the girl, is a somewhat slight sketch, but then, like Ophelia,
she is merely the occasion of a tragedy and not its heroine. The rest of
the characters are most powerfully drawn and create themselves simply and
swiftly before us as the story proceeds, the method of the practised
dramatist being here of great value.

As regards the style, we notice some accidental assonances of rhyme which
in an unrhymed poem are never pleasing; and the unfinished short line of