hat they are too short, and even
our excitement at the Mastery of the Event is tamed by a sense that
the show is closing, and that Shibli Bagarag has been too promptly
successful in smiting through the Identical. But perhaps of all gifts
there is none more rare than this of clearing the board and leaving
the reader still hungry.

Who shall say, in dealing with such a book, what passage in it is best
or worst? Either the fancy, carried away utterly captive, follows the
poet whither he will, or the whole conception is a failure. Perhaps,
after the elemental splendour and storm of the final scene, what
clings most to the memory is how Shibli Bagarag, hard beset in the
Cave of Chrysolites, touched the great lion with the broken sapphire
hair of Garraveen; or again, how on the black coast of the enchanted
sea, wandering by moonlight, he found the sacred Lily, and tore it
up, and lo! its bulb was a palpitating heart of human flesh; or how
Bhanavar called the unwilling serpents too often, and failed to win
her beauty back, till, at an awful price she once more, and for the
last time, contrived to call her body-guard of snakes hissing and
screaming around her.

There is surely no modern book so unsullied as this is by the modern
spirit, none in which the desire to teach a lesson, to refer knowingly
to topics of the day, or worst of all, to be incontinently funny,
interferes less with the tender magic of Oriental fancy, or with the
childlike, earnest faith in what is utterly outside the limits of
experience. It belongs to that infancy of the world, when the happy
guileless human being still holds that somewhere there is a flower to
be plucked, a lamp to be rubbed, or a form of words to be spoken which
will reverse the humdrum laws of Nature, call up unwilling spirits
bound to incredible services, and change all this brown life of ours
to scarlet and azure and mother-of-pearl. Little by little, even our
children are losing this happy gift of believing the incredible, and
that class of writing which seems to require less effort than any
other, and to be a mere spinning of gold thread out of the poet's
inner consciousness, is less and less at command, and when executed
gives less and less satisfaction. The gnomes of Pope, the fays and
"trilbys" of Nodier, even the fairy-world of Doyle, are breathed upon
by a race that has grown up habituated to science. But even for such
a race it must be long before the sumptuous glow and rich t