an evening party. The mind plays through all the realm of its knowledge
and experience, and sheds sparks from all the torches of thought, as
scenes and topics succeed each other. The pure forms of literature may
be reminiscences present to the imagination, the germs of new truths and
social arrangements may occupy the reason; but the novelist is neither
practical, nor philosophical, nor artistic; he is simply in a dream; and
pictures of the world and fragments of old ideas pass before him, as the
sacred meanings of religion flitted about the populace in a grotesque
mediaeval festival of the Church. Conceive the stars dropped from their
place in the apparent heavens, and playing at shuttlecock with each
other and with boys, and having a heyday of careless joyousness here
below, instead of remaining in sublime dignity to guide and inspire men
who look up to them by night! Even such are the epic, the lyric, the
drama, the history, and the philosophy, as collected together in the
revelries of the novel. To state the degree of excellence possible to
a style as perverse as it is entertaining, to measure the wisdom of
essential folly, is difficult; and yet it may be said that the strength
of the novel is in its lawlessness, which leaves the author of genius
free to introduce his creations just as they occur to him, and the
author of talent free to range through all books and all time and
reproduce brilliant sayings and odd characters,--which, with no other
connecting thread than a story, freaks like a spirit through every
shade of feeling and region of thought, from the domestic hearth to the
ultimate bounds of speculative inquiry,--and which, by its daring
and careless combinations of incongruous elements, exhibits a free
embodiment in prose of the peculiar genius of the romantic.

And some philosophers have styled romance the special glory of
Christianity. It is certainly the characteristic of critical as
distinguished from organic periods,--of the mind acting mystically in
a savage and unknown universe, rather than of the mind that has reduced
the heavens and earth to its arts and sciences. The novel, therefore,
as the wildest organ of romance, is most appropriate to a time of great
intellectual agitation, when intellectual men are but half-conscious of
the tendencies that are setting about them, and consequently cease to
propose to themselves final goals, do not attempt scrupulous art, but
play jubilantly with current fact