The winged life that pausing seems a gem
Cunningly carven on the dark green leaf:
The face of man with hues supremely blent
To difference fine as of a voice 'mid sounds:-
Each lovely light-dipped thing seems to emerge
Flushed gravely from baptismal sacrament.
All beauteous existence rests, yet wakes,
Lies still, yet conscious, with clear open eyes
And gentle breath and mild suffuséd joy.
'T is day, but day that falls like melody
Repeated on a string with graver tones, —
Tones such as linger in a long farewell.

From o'er the roofs And from the shadowed pátios cool, there spreads The breath of flowers and aromatic leaves Soothing the sense with bliss indefinite,

A baseless hope, a glad presentiment,
That curves the lip more softly, fills the eye
With more indulgent beam. And so it soothes,
So gently sways the pulses of the crowd
Who make a zone about the central spot
Chosen by Roldan for his theatre.
Maids with arched eyebrows, delicate - pencilled,
dark,

Fold their round arms below the kerchief full;
Men shoulder little girls; and grandames gray,
But mu.cular still, hold babies on their arms;
While mothers keep the stout-legged boys in front
Against their skirts, as the Greek pictures old
Show the Chief Mother with the Boy divine.
Youths keep the places for themselves, and roll
Large lazy eyes, and call recumbent dogs
(For reasons deep below the reach of thought).
The old men cough with purpose, wish to hint
Wisdom within that cheapens jugglery,
Maintain a neutral air, and knit their brows
In observation. None are quarrelsome,
Noisy, er very merry; for their blood
Moves clowly into fervor, they rejoice
Like those dark birds that sweep with heavy wing,
Cheering their mates with melancholy cries.

The winged sounds exalt the thick-pressed crowd
With a new pulse in common, blending all
The gading life into one larger soul
With dimly widened consciousness: as waves
In heightened movement tell of waves far off.
And the light changes; westward stationed clouds,

The sun's ranged outposts, luminous message spread,
Rousing quiescent things to doff their shade
And show themselves as added audience.
Now Pablo, letting fall the eager bow,
Solicits softer murmurs from the strings.

And still the light is changing: high above
Float soft pink clouds; others with deeper flush
Stretch like flamingoes bending toward the south.
Comes a more solemn brilliance o'er the sky,
A meaning more intense upon the air, —
The inspiration of the dying day."

Good as this is, there is a picture of Juan the poet, with his audience at the inn, which is equally good, with like richness of color, and like felicity of drawing :

"While Juan sang, all round the tavern court
Gathered a constellation of black eyes.
Fat Lola leaned upon the balcony

With arms that might have pillowed Hercules
(Who built, 'tis known, the mightiest Spanish
towns):

Thin Alda's face, sad as a wasted passion,
Leaned o'er the coral-biting baby's; 'twixt the rails
The little Pepe showed his two black beads,
His flat-ringed hair and small Semitic nose
Complete and tiny as a new-born minnow;
Patting his head and holding in her arms
The baby senior, stood Lorenzo's wife
All negligent, her kerchief discomposed
By little clutches, woman's coquetry
Quite turned to mother's cares and sweet content.
These on the balcony, while at the door
Gazed the lank boys and lazy-shouldered men."

It is the sort of people here pictured with whom we think Miss Evans has her only success with character in her poem, and they are true both to the sixteenth century and to human nature, which is not the case with their betters. We desire nothing racier, more individual, than the talk of Blasco, the Arrogonese silversmith, and that new-baptized Christian, the jolly host of the inn, as well as some of their interlocutors, leaving out Juan the poet, who is not much better when he talks than when he sings. We imagine that these characters, so strongly and so distinctively Spanish, as well as the happy local color of the descriptions, are the suggestion of that visit which the author made to Spain after the story of the poem was written. The Middle Ages linger yet in Spain, and the scenes in the plaza and inn, though so enchanting as pictures of the past, must have been in great part painted from life in our own time, and Blasco, Lopez, the Host, Roldan and Roldan's monkey, remodelled if not created from actual knowledge of Spanish men and manners. But admirable as these characters are in themselves and in association, they do nothing to advance the action of the story, and they belong to that promise

of interest which dwindles rapidly after the first books of the poem, and is never wholly fulfilled.

There is grandeur in the conception of the work. The intention of representing a conflict between national religions and prejudices and personal passions and aspirations, which should interpret the life of a period so marvellous and important as the close of the fifteenth century, was a great one, and Miss Evans has indicated it almost worthily in the prologue of the first book of her poem, recurring to it with something of like strength in the prologues of each succeeding book. In these we are aware of the far-reaching imagination and fine synthetic power which are so notable in the proem to "Romola"; and in those minor characters of the drama which we have mentioned we recognize success not inferior to that which delights in the people of the great romance. But nothing could be in sharper contrast than the distinct impression left upon the mind by the chief ideas and personages of Romola, and by the painfully recollected intent and the figures which develop it in The Spanish Gypsy. In either case the author deals with a distant period, and with people and conditions equally strange to her experience and observation. In either case it is a psychical problem she proposes to solve or at least to consider. In either case the chief characters about which the action revolves appear as human beings, with positive, personal desires and purposes. But while in Romola they retain this personal entity to the last, with the hold which nothing else can keep upon the reader's sympathies, and ineffaceably imprint the lesson of their lives in his memory, in The Spanish Gypsy the personal principle is soon removed, and they all disappear from us, dry, rattling assemblages of moral attributes and inevitable results. It is especially to this effect that poets never work, and Miss Evans docs not attain it by creating new and original characters. On the contrary, she adopts dresses and figures more or less familiar in romance, and evolves allegoric circumstances and actions from a plot smelling curiously of the dust of libraries and the smoke of foot-lights. We have the daughter of a Gypsy chief stolen in earliest childhood by the Spaniards, and bred in ignorance of her origin, who becomes the affianced of a Spanish grandee; we have a monkish inquisitor, fierce with the pride of family and of faith, who hates this Fedalma

both as a new Christian and as the accomplice of his cousin the grandee in the purpose of an ignoble marriage, and who arranges for her seizure by the holy office on the eve of her marriage; then we have Zarca, Fedalma's father, who escapes the same night from Christian captivity, and who, revealing himself to his daughter, persuades her to fly with him, and share his aspirations and labors for the redemption of the Gypsy race. Her lover, desiring to win her back, applies to his friend, a Jewish physician, who knows enough of astrology to doubt it, as a learned and liberal-minded Jew of the Middle Ages naturally would. We are not so clear of any positive part this Hebrew has in the drama, as of the contrast to the inquisitor which he forms; and doubtless the author values the two less as persons than as the opposite principles of liberal science working to truth, and pitiless faith constituting itself a divine purpose. But for this use, Sephardo, whose talk is rather like a criticism and explanation of his attributive character than an expression of character, might with his speculative and philosophical turn be more naturally employed in writing for the reviews.

In Zarca we have a modern reformer a little restricted and corrected at first by costume and tradition, as all his fellowcharacters are, but early declaring himself a principle and not a person, as all his fellow-characters do. He appears as an embodiment of those aspirations for independent national existence, which now more than ever before are stirring the true peoples, but which probably existed in all ages; and if he does not act very wisely, nor discourse very entertainingly, perhaps it is because men of one idea are very apt to be shortsighted and tedious, unless skilfully managed, in fiction as in real life. Morally, Zarca comes to be a theatrical kind of Hollingsworth, though we imagine nothing could be farther from the author's consciousness than such a development. It is doubtful whether a purpose and grandeur such as his are predicable of the Gypsy race in any age; but in his daughter's case we must grant even more to the author with less effect. In Fedalma is portrayed the conflict which would arise in the nature of a woman held to her betrothed by love, and identity of civilization and social custom, and drawn toward her father by the attraction of kindred, and race, and by vague sympathy with a devoted and heroic pur

pose; and in accounting for her desertion of her lover Don Silva, all is confided to the supposition that these remote instincts and sudden sympathies are stronger than the use of a lifetime. Fedalma is a Gypsy by birth; and it is poctic, if not probable, that, yielding to the wild motions of her ancestral blood, she should wander with her duenna through the streets of Bedmar, and, forgetting the jealous decorums of her station, and the just claims of her lover's pride, should dance in the circle drawn about the mountebank, that lovely evening in the plaza. At any rate, this escapade wins us the fine effect of her encounter with Zarca, her father, before whom she pauses, touched by some mysterious influence, as he passes through the circle with the other captive Gypsies. Yet this scarcely prepares us for her renunciation, at her father's bidding, of Don Silva, Spain, and Christianity; nor is the act sufficiently accounted for by the fact that if she had remained, she would have been seized by the Inquisition, for she did not know this; or by the other fact that, as is afterwards intimated, she never was true Spaniard or quite Christian. True lover she was, and believed in love, and she never believed in the purpose for which she sacrificed love. That she should act as she did was woman's weakness, perhaps, the weakness of Miss Evans. The reader cannot help resenting that the author throws the whole burden of remorse for the ensuing calamities and crimes upon Don

Silva, who is at least faithful to love when he forsakes his command at Bedmar, follows Fedalma to the Gypsy camp, and, to win her from her father, renounces everything, and becomes himself a Gypsy. He is also true at least to Spanish and human nature of the fifteenth century when, tortured by the cruel sight of his slaughtered friends, on re-entering Bedmar with its Gypsy captors, he asks of Zarca the life of his cousin, the Inquisitor, and, being denied it, stabs Zarca to death, — who, remembering his duty to the nineteenth century, commands with his dying breath that Den Silva shall go unharmed. He accordingly goes unharmed-towards Rome, willing to assume any penance which may be laid upon him for his sins; and the poor soul, who never loses our sympathy, has a kind of sublimity in his honest recognition of his crimes and his honest remorse for them; while Fedalma, bidding him adieu in solemn impertinences that betray much doubt and regret, but dim sense of error, is a very unedifying spectacle. As she departs with the Gypsies whom she distrusts, to fulfil a purpose which she never thought possible, her last care is explicitly to state the poem's insufficiency of motive, and to put in the wrong the chief good that was in her by saying to Don Silva:

THERE HERE are two kinds of drunkards, the Regular and the Occasional. Of each of these two classes there are several varieties, and, indeed, there are no two cases precisely alike; but every drunkard in the world is either a person who has lost the power to refrain from drinking a certain large quantity of alcoholic liquor every day, or he is one who has lost the power to refrain from drinking an uncertain enormous quantity now and then.

Few get drunk habitually who can refrain. If they could refrain, they would; for to no creatures is drunkenness so loathsome and temperance so engaging, as to seven tenths of the drunkards. There are a few very coarse men, of heavy, stolid, animal organization, who almost seem formed by nature to absorb alcohol, and in whom there is not enough of manhood to be ashamed of its degradation. These Dr. Albert Day, the superintendent of the New York State Inebriate Asylum, sometimes calls Natural Drunkards. They like strong drink for its own sake; they have a kind of sulky enjoyment of its muddling effect upon such brains as they happen to

have; and when once the habit is fixed, nothing can deliver them except stone walls and iron bars. There are also a few drunkards of very light calibre, trifling persons, incapable of serious reflection or of a serious purpose, their very terrors being trivial and transitory, who do not care for the ruin in which they are involved. Generally speaking, however, drunkards hate the servitude into which they have had the misfortune to fall; they long to escape from it, have often tried to escape, and if they have given up, it is only after having so many times slidden back into the abyss, that they feel it would be of no use to climb again. As Mrs. H. B. Stowe remarks, with that excellent charity of hers, which is but another name for refined justice, "Many a drunkard has expended more virtue in vain endeavors to break his chain than suffices to carry an ordinary Christian to heaven."

The daily life of one of the steady drunkards is like this: upon getting up in the morning, after a heavy, restless, drunkard's sleep, he is miserable beyond expression, and almost helpless. In very bad cases, he will see