most uncertain good. All this rushes rapidly upon
him, when, on the bosom of a crimson sunset cloud, he perceives a mystic
symbol, unseen save by himself: 'the extended arms are lightning
flashes, the three nails shine like stars--his eyes die out as he gazes
upon it--he falls dead to the earth, crying, in the strange words spoken
by the apostate emperor Julian with his parting breath: '_Vicisti
Galilee_!' Thus this grand and complex drama is really consecrated to
the glory of the Galilean!

The intense melancholy characterizing every page of this drama, has its
root in the character and intensity of the truths therein developed, and
is not manifested in artistic declamation, in highly wrought phrases, or
in glowing rhetorical passages proper for citation. It is as bitter as
life; as gloomy as death and judgment. The style is one of utter, almost
bald, simplicity. The situations are merely indicated, and the
characters are to be understood, as are those of the living, rather from
a few words in close connection with accompanying facts, than from
eloquent utterances, sharp invectives, or bitter complaints. There are
no highly wrought amplifications of imaginative passions to be found in
its condensed pages, but every word is in itself a drop of gall,
reflecting from its sphered surface a world of grief, of agony. The
characters pass before us like shadows thrown from a magic lantern,
showing only their profiles, and but rarely their entire forms. Flitting
rapidly o'er our field of vision, they leave us but a few lines, but so
true to nature, so deeply significant, that we are able to produce from
these shifting and evanescent shadows a complete and rounded image. Thus
we are enabled to form a vivid conception of every character--we know
the history of their past, we divine the part they will play in the
future. We know the friends, the godfather, the priest, in whom we find
an admirable sketch from a decomposed and dying society. He who, in a
proper state of things, would have been the representative of living
spiritual principles, is a mere supernumerary. He makes signs of the
cross, pronounces accustomed formulas, but he never once thinks of
examining into the strange and contradictory relations existing between
the husband, forced by his very being into the Future, and the wife,
fettered by the conventions and chains of the Past. Neither does he
study, with an eye enlightened by philanthropy and spirituality, the
poo