d marvel upon
marvel, to exaggerate nature's forces, to transform the tiniest blooms
into giant examples of efflorescence, and to mingle even the seasons
one with the other. But all this was premeditated; there was a picture
before his mind's eye, and that picture he sought to trace with his pen,
regardless of all possible objections. It is the poet's privilege to
do this and even to be admired for it. It would be easy for some leaned
botanist, some expert zoologist, to demolish Milton from the standpoint
of their respective sciences, but it would be absurd to do so. We ask of
the poet the flowers of his imagination, and the further he carries us
from the sordid realities, the limited possibilities of life, the more
are we grateful to him.

And M. Zola's Paradou is a flight of fancy, even as its mistress, the
fair, loving, guileless Albine, whose smiles and whose tears alike go
to our hearts, is the daughter of imagination. She is a flower--the very
flower of life's youth--in the midst of all the blossoms of her
garden. She unfolds to life and to love even as they unfold; she loves
rapturously even as they do under the sun and the azure; and she dies
with them when the sun's caress is gone and the chill of winter has
fallen. At the thought of her, one instinctively remembers Malherbe's
'Ode A Du Perrier:'

She to this earth belonged, where beauty fast
To direst fate is borne:
A rose, she lasted, as the roses last,
Only for one brief morn.

French painters have made subjects of many episodes in M. Zola's
works, but none has been more popular with them than Albine's pathetic,
perfumed death amidst the flowers. I know several paintings of great
merit which that touching incident has inspired.

Albine, if more or less unreal, a phantasm, the spirit as it were of
Nature incarnate in womanhood, is none the less the most delightful of
M. Zola's heroines. She smiles at us like the vision of perfect beauty
and perfect love which rises before us when our hearts are yet young and
full of illusions. She is the ideal, the very quintessence of woman.

In Serge Mouret, her lover, we find a man who, in more than one respect,
recalls M. Zola's later hero, the Abbe Froment of 'Lourdes' and 'Rome.'
He has the same loving, yearning nature; he is born--absolutely like
Abbe Froment--of an unbelieving father and a mother of mystical mind.
But unlike Froment he cannot shake off the shackles of his priestho