melted into parklike slopes and dells. A long avenue wound and circled
from the outermost gate through an untrimmed woodland, whence you
glanced at further slopes and glades and copses and bosky recesses--at
everything except the limits of the place. It was as free and wild and
untended as the villa of an Italian prince; and I have never seen the
stern English fact of property put on such an air of innocence. The
weather had just become perfect; it was one of the dozen exquisite
days of the English year--days stamped with a refinement of purity
unknown in more liberal climes. It was as if the mellow brightness, as
tender as that of the primroses which starred the dark waysides like
petals wind-scattered over beds of moss, had been meted out to us by
the cubic foot--tempered, refined, recorded!

II

TURGENEFF'S WORLD[67]

We hold to the good old belief that the presumption, in life, is in
favor of the brighter side, and we deem it, in art, an indispensable
condition of our interest in a deprest observer that he should have at
least tried his best to be cheerful. The truth, we take it, lies for
the pathetic in poetry and romance very much where it lies for the
"immoral." Morbid pathos is reflective pathos; ingenious pathos,
pathos not freshly born of the occasion; noxious immorality is
superficial immorality, immorality without natural roots in the
subject. We value most the "realists" who have an ideal of delicacy
and the elegiasts who have an ideal of joy.

[Footnote 67: From "French Poets and Novelists," published by
Macmillan & Company, of London.]

"Picturesque gloom, possibly," a thick and thin admirer of M.
Turgeneff's may say to us, "at least you will admit that it is
picturesque." This we heartily concede, and, recalled to a sense of
our author's brilliant diversity and ingenuity, we bring our
restrictions to a close. To the broadly generous side of his
imagination it is impossible to pay exaggerated homage, or, indeed,
for that matter, to its simple intensity and fecundity. No romancer
has created a greater number of the figures that breathe and move and
speak, in their habits as they might have lived; none, on the whole,
seems to us to have had such a masterly touch in portraiture, none
has mingled so much ideal beauty with so much unsparing reality. His
sadness has its element of error, but it has also its larger element
of wisdom. Life is, in fact, a battle. On this point optimists and
pessim