And then follow such paragraphs as the following, which determine the
real value of the work:

"The voice of the God of Poetry sounded so beautiful that it performed
a miracle. Behold! In the Ambrosian night the gold spear standing on
the Acropolis of Athens trembled, and the marble head of the gigantic
statue turned toward the Acropolis in order to hear better.... Heaven
and earth listened to it; the sea stopped roaring and lay peacefully
near the shores; even pale Selene stopped her night wandering in the
sky and stood motionless over Athens."

"And when Apollo had finished, a light wind arose and carried the song
through the whole of Greece, and wherever a child in the cradle heard
only a tone of it, that child grew into a poet."

What poet? Famed by what song? Will he not perhaps be a lyric poet?

The same happens with "Lux in Tenebris." One reads again and again
the description of the fall of the mist and the splashing of the rain
dropping in the gutter, "the cawing of the crows, migrating to the
city for their winter quarters, and, with flapping of wings, roosting
in the trees." One feels that the whole misery of the first ten pages
was necessary in order to form a background for the two pages of
heavenly light, to bring out the brightness of that light. "Those who
have lost their best beloved," writes Sienkiewicz, "must hang
their lives on something; otherwise they could not exist." In such
sentences--and it is not the prettiest, but the shortest that I have
quoted--resounds, however, the quieting wisdom, the noble love of
that art which poor Kamionka "respected deeply and was always sincere
toward." During the long years of his profession he never cheated nor
wronged it, neither for the sake of fame nor money, nor for praise nor
for criticism. He always wrote as he felt. Were I not like Ruth of
the Bible, doomed to pick the ears of corn instead of being myself a
sower--if God had not made me critic and worshipper but artist and
creator--I could not wish for another necrology than those words of
Sienkiewicz regarding the statuary Kamionka.

Quite another thing is the story "At the Source." None of the stories
except "Let Us Follow Him" possess for me so many transcendent
beauties, although we are right to be angry with the author for having
wished, during the reading of several pages, to make us believe an
impossible thing--that he was deceiving us. It is true that he has
done it in a masterly manner--it is