de everything,
like iron and sulphur.

E. C. B.

LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

Madame Gervaisais. By Edmond and Jules de Goncourt. New
Edition. Paris.

This is in many respects a remarkable book. It shows unusual talent and
thought--skill in the morbid anatomy of the soul. It is out of the
common line in having but one character, the heroine, and not a word
about love. It is, in fact, the biography of a woman during her
conversion to Roman Catholicism: the incidents are merely the successive
steps by which she is brought within the pale. The interest lies in the
mental and moral fluctuations through which she passes while under the
influence to which she is subjected, and which in one way or another
does not cease to act upon her for an instant. The book is a complement
to Madame Craven's pictures of conversion and the devout life, but
differs from them in the point of view.

Madame Gervaisais is the widow of a man who filled for years an
important office under the government by dint of small gifts of
precision and punctuality, being in himself an insignificant person. His
position and wealth, and the beauty and superior endowments of his wife,
attracted men of mark to the house, and her _salon_ was long one of the
most sought in Paris. Her marriage had not been a happy one: the
intellectual resources in which she has sought compensation have been
insufficient, although she has never tried more exciting distractions,
and at thirty-seven she finds herself free, rich, still handsome, with
one child, delicate and slow of development, born after ten years of
wedlock, the spring of her heart and hopes broken from the long pressure
of conjugal despotism and unkindness, her health enfeebled to a degree
which makes it advisable for her to spend a winter in Rome. This is the
_status quo_ at the opening of the history. Her life in Rome is told
almost day by day, affording opportunity for the most detailed
descriptions of places and customs, times and seasons, festivals and
ceremonies: these are given with extreme, scrupulous fidelity and an
accurate choice of words, but they have not the magic touch which brings
unvisited scenes before you or revives half-forgotten ones with the
freshness of things seen yesterday. This is strange, as the impressions,
the sensations of mind and body, produced upon a stranger by Rome are
wonderfully conveyed. "She was astonis