oice of admiration,
one thinks he has never heard the words before. And this merit is so
commanding, that, despite faults and imbecilities, it renders the book
almost unique in excellence. Sarona is impossible: thanks for that noble
impossibility! Impossible, he yet embodies more reality, more true
suggestion of human possibility and resource, than a whole swarming
limbo of the ordinary heroes of fiction,--very credible, and the more's
the pity! He is finely _imagined_, and poorly _conceived_,--true, that
is, to the inspiring substance of man, but not true to his limitary
form: for imagination gives the revealing form, conception the form
which limits and conceals.

In spite, therefore, of marked infirmities and extravagances, the book
remains a superior, perhaps a great work. The writer can look at a human
existence with childlike, all-believing, Homeric eyes. That creative
vision which of old peopled Olympus still peoples the world for her,
beholding gods where the skeptic, critical eye sees only a medical
doctor and a sick woman. So is she stamped a true child of the Muse,
descended on the one side from Memory, or superficial fact, but on the
other from Zeus, the _soul_ of fact; and being gifted to discern the
divine halo on the brows of humanity, she rightly obtains the laurel
upon her own.

Goethe, at least, rivals her in this Olympic intelligence, while he
combines it with a practical wisdom far profounder, with a survey and
fulness of knowledge incomparably wider and more various, with a tone
tempered to the last sobriety, for the whole of actual life, which no
man of the world ever surpassed, and no seer ever equalled. And thus I
must abide in my opinion, that he has given us the one prose epic of the
world, up to this date. In other words, he has best reconciled World
with the final vessel of its uses, Man,--and best reconciled actual
civilization and the fixed conditions of man with the uses of that in
which all the meaning of his existence is summed, his seeing and unseen
spirit.

DOCTOR JOHNS.

XXXIV.

Reuben has in many respects vastly improved under his city education. It
would be wrong to say that the good Doctor did not take a very human
pride in his increased alertness of mind, in his vivacity, in his
self-possession,--nay, even in that very air of world-acquaintance which
now covered entirely the old homely manner of the country lad. He
thought within himself, what a glad smile of triump