ar, and nothing made a greater impression on him than the moment
when the stranger made his spectral entry, and the sense of the
propinquity of the hostile Spiritual Principle seized upon every one
present with a sudden terror. This moment came vividly to Ottmar's
mind, and formed the groundwork of his tale."

"But," said Ottmar, "as a single incident is far from being a complete
story--which ought to spring perfect and complete from its author's
brain, like Minerva from the head of Jupiter--my tale is of course not
worth much as a whole, and it is little to my credit, I suppose, that I
took advantage of two or three incidents which really happened, weaving
them--not without some little success perhaps--into a network of the
imaginary."

"Yes," said Lothair, "you are right, my friend. A single striking
incident is far from being a tale, just as one well-imagined theatrical
situation is a long way from constituting a play. This reminds me of
the way in which a certain playwright (who no longer walks this world,
and whose terrible death certainly atoned for any shortcomings of his
during his life, and reconciled his worst enemies to him) used to
construct his pieces. In a company where I was present, he said,
without any concealment, that he selected some one's good dramatic
situation which occurred to him, and then, solely for the sake of that,
hung a canvas round it and painted away upon it 'just whatever came in
his head,' or 'as best he could,' to use his own expressions. This
gave me a complete explanation of, and threw a dazzling flood of light
upon, the whole character and inner being of that writer's pieces,
particularly those of his later period. None of them is without some
very happily devised central situation, but all round this the scenes,
which he made up out of commonplace material, are woven like a loosely
knitted web, although the hand of that weaver, skilled as it is in
_technique_, is never to be mistaken."

"Never, say you?" remarked Theodore. "I have been always waiting and
looking out for the points where that writer would abandon his
commonplaces, and rise into the region of romance and true poetry. The
most striking and melancholy instance of what I mean is the so-called
Romantic Drama, 'Deodata'; a strange nondescript production, on which a
clever composer ought not to have wasted capital music. There can be no
more striking proof of the utter want of infelt poetry, of any
conception of the hi