-born that was with her for so
short a while: many and many a time she has taken her daughters to the
grave, in Saint Bride's, where he lies buried; and she wears still at
her neck a little, little lock of gold hair, which she took from the
head of the infant as he lay smiling in his coffin. It has happened to
me to forget the child's birthday, but to her never; and often in the
midst of common talk, comes something that shows she is thinking of the
child still,--some simple allusion that is to me inexpressibly
affecting.

Could words simpler, purer, more touching be found to paint a terrible,
albeit very common sorrow! Not a needless epithet, not a false note,
not a touch over-wrought! And this is the writing of an unknown,
untried youth!

This exquisitely simple, easy, idiomatic, and nervous style marks all
Thackeray's work for his twenty-six years of activity, and is equally
perfect for whatever purpose it is used, and in whatever key he may
choose to compose. It naturally culminates in _Vanity Fair_, written
just in the middle of his literary career. Here not a word is wasted:
the profoundest impressions are made by a quiet sentence or a dozen
plain words that neither Swift nor Defoe could have surpassed. I know
nothing in English literature more powerful than those last lines of
the thirty-second chapter of _Vanity Fair_. For thirty-two chapters we
have been following the loves, sorrows, and anxieties of Amelia Sedley
and George Osborne. For four chapters the story has pictured the scene
in Brussels on the eve of Waterloo. The women and non-combatants are
trembling with excitement, anxiety, fear; the men are in the field,
whilst the cannon roar all day in the distance--Amelia half distracted
with love, jealousy, and foreboding. And the wild alternations of
hope, terror, grief, and agony are suddenly closed in the last
paragraph of Chapter XXXII.

No more firing was heard at Brussels--the pursuit rolled miles away.
Darkness came down on the field and city: and Amelia was praying for
George, who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his
heart.

Take all the great critical scenes in the book, and note how simple,
and yet how full of pathos and of power, is the language in which they
are described. There is the last parting of George and Amelia as the
bugle rings to arms.

George came in and looked at her again, entering still more softly. By
the pale night-lamp he could see her