e
Reef,--it fills in the interstices with a lighter growth,--it crowns the
summit with the more delicate kinds, that yield to the action of the
tides and are easily crushed into the fine sand that forms the soil,--it
makes a masonry solid, compact, time-defying, such a masonry as was
needed by the great Architect, who meant that these smallest creatures
of His hand should help to build His islands and His continents.

THE AUTHOR OF "CHARLES AUCHESTER."

When Mr. Disraeli congratulated himself that in the "Wondrous Tale of
Alroy" he had invented a new style, he scarcely deemed that he had but
spun the thread which was to vibrate with melody under the hand of
another. For in none of his magical sentences is the spell exactly
complete, and nowhere do they drop into the memory with that long slow
rhythm and sweet delay which mark every distinct utterance of Elizabeth
Sheppard. Yet at his torch she lit her fires, over his stories she
dreamed, his "Contarini Fleming" she declared to be the touchstone of
all romantic truth, and with the great freights of thought argosied
along his pages she enriched herself. "Destiny is our will, and our
will is our nature," he says. Behold the key-note of those strangely
beautiful Romances of Temperament of which for ten years we have been
cutting the leaves!

In "Venetia," hint and example were given of working the great ores that
lie in the fields about us; and when Elizabeth Sheppard in turn took up
the divining-rod, it sought no clods of baser metal, but gold-veined
masses of crystal and the clear currents of pure water-streams;--beneath
her compelling power, Mendelssohn--Beethoven--Shelley--lived again and
forever.

The musician who perhaps inspired a profounder enthusiasm during his
lifetime than any other ever did had been missed among men but a few
years, when a little book was quietly laid upon his shrine, and he
received, as it were, an apotheosis. Half the world broke into acclaim
over this outpouring of fervid worship. But it was private acclaim, and
not to be found in the newspapers. To those who, like the most of us in
America, vainly hunger and thirst after the sweets of sound, the book
was an initiation into the very _penetralia_ of music, we mounted and
rested in that sphere from the distastes of too practical life, long
afterwards we seemed to hear the immortal Song of which it spoke, and
our souls were refreshed. There followed this in a year--inscribed
to Mrs.