se
and now chilled by the night dews, is in the throes of death. The
incidents of the closing scene are simple, but they are heart-breaking
in their pathos and awful in their desolation. The fugitive Houseman
finds Aram here, and spurns him as a whimpering lunatic. Then, in this
midnight hour and this appalling place, alone in the presence of God,
the murderer lifts his hands toward heaven, confesses his crime, and
falls at the foot of the cross. Here Ruth finds him, and to her, with
dying lips, he tells the story of the murder and of all that he has
since endured. And just as his voice falters into silence and his heart
ceases to beat, the diamond light of morning gleams in the eastern sky
and the glad music of an anthem floats softly from the neighbouring
church. Upon that beautifully significant picture the final curtain
fell.

Wills's literary framework for the display of character and experience
is scarcely to be considered a perfect play. It begins by assuming on
the part of its auditor a knowledge of the mystery upon which it is
based. Such a knowledge the auditor ought certainly to have, but in
presence of an exact drama he derives it from what he sees and not from
remembrance of what he has read. The piece is, perhaps, somewhat
irrational in making Aram a resident, under his own name, of the actual
neighbourhood of his crime. It lowers the assumed nobility of his
character, furthermore, by making this remorseful and constantly
apprehensive murderer willing to yoke a sweet, innocent, and idolised
woman to misery and shame by making her his wife. And it mars its most
pathetic scene--the awful scene of the midnight confession in the
churchyard--by making Eugene Aram declare, to the woman of his love, the
one human being who comforts and sustains him on the brink of eternity,
that he has loved another woman for whose sake he did the murder. Since
the whole story was to be treated in a fanciful manner, a still wider
license in the play of fancy would, perhaps, have had a more entirely
gracious and satisfying effect. The language is partly blank verse and
partly prose; and, while its tissue is rightly and skilfully diversified
by judicious allowance for the effect of each character upon the garment
of individual diction, and while its strain, here and there, rises to
eloquence of feeling and beauty of imagery, there is a certain lack of
firmness in its verbal fibre. The confession speech that has to be
spoken by Ara