vely
narrative or indignant protest. The letters from Genoa and Lausanne are
especially copious and entertaining, and form, we think, the most
interesting portion of the book. The later chapters, giving the final
year of his residence in Devonshire Terrace, are less satisfactory. We
would fain have had a picture of that circle of which Dickens was one of
the most prominent figures; but though his own personality is revealed
in the fullest light, the group in the background is left indistinct,
most of its members being barely visible, and none of them adequately
portrayed.

* * * * *

Emaux et Camees. Par Theophile Gautier. Nombre definitif. Paris:
Charpentier; New York: F.W. Christern.

Gautier was polishing and adding to his literary jewelry almost to the
day of his death, and the final edition which he published among the
last of his works about doubles the number of poems first issued. These
verses are like nothing we have in English. Their imagery is strongly
sophisticated, tortured, brought from vast distances, and then chilled
into form. Yet they are the most sincere utterances of a soul fed
perpetually among cabinets and picture-galleries, to whom their compact
method of utterance is, so to speak, secondarily natural. That they are
precious and beauteous no one can deny. How sparkling are the successive
descriptions of women--blonde, brune, Spanish, contralto-voiced,
coquettish, etc.--whom the poet, like some capricious artist, invites
into his atelier, drapes hastily with old Moorish or Venetian or
diaphanous costumes, and then reflects in a diminishing mirror, changing
the model into a fine statuette of ivory and enamel! More virile and
thoughtful images are intermixed: such are the figures of the old
Invalides seen at the Column Vendome in a December fog, and for whom he
pleads: "Mock not those men whom the street urchin follows, laughing:
they were the Day of which we are the twilight--maybe the night!" Not
less fresh are the two "Homesick Obelisks"--that in the Place de la
Concorde, wearying its stony heart out for Egypt, and that at Luxor,
equally tired, and longing to be planted at Paris, among a living crowd.
But Gautier is a colorist, an artist with words, and he is at his best
when he works without much outline, celebrating draperies, bouquets and
laces, to all of which he can give a meaning quite other than the
milliner's, as where he asserts that the plaits of a rose-