world treacherous with mental quicksands and evasions. This is a valor
not drawn from insensibility, but from the sharpest possible
recognition of all the evil and Cyclopean forces in existence, and a
deliberate engagement of them on their own ground. Nothing more, in
that direction, can be asked of Mr. Cabell, of anyone. While about the
story itself, the soul of Melicent, the form and incidental writing, it
is no longer necessary to speak.

The pages have the rich sparkle of a past like stained glass called to
life: the Confraternity of St. Medard presenting their masque of
Hercules; the claret colored walls adorned with gold cinquefoils of
Demetrios' court; his pavilion with porticoes of Andalusian copper;
Theodoret's capital, Megaris, ruddy with bonfires; the free port of
Narenta with its sails spread for the land of pagans; the
lichen-incrusted glade in the Forest of Columbiers; gardens with the
walks sprinkled with crocus and vermilion and powdered mica ... all are
at once real and bright with unreality, rayed with the splendor of an
antiquity built from webs and films of imagined wonder. The past is, at
its moment, the present, and that lost is valueless. Distilled by time,
only an imperishable romantic conception remains; a vision, where it is
significant, animated by the feelings, the men and women, which only,
at heart, are changeless.

They, the surcharged figures of _Domnei_, move vividly through their
stone galleries and closes, in procession, and--a far more difficult
accomplishment--alone. The lute of the Bishop of Montors, playing as he
rides in scarlet, sounds its Provencal refrain; the old man Theodoret,
a king, sits shabbily between a prie-dieu and the tarnished hangings of
his bed; Melusine, with the pale frosty hair of a child, spins the
melancholy of departed passion; Ahasuerus the Jew buys Melicent for a