There is no commanding individual imagination in England--nor, to say the truth, does there seem to be any in America. But we have what they have not--a national imaginative tendency. There are no fetters upon our fancy; and, however deeply our real estate may be mortgaged, there is freedom for our ideas. England has not yet appreciated the true inwardness of a favorite phrase of ours,--a new deal. And yet she is tired to death of her own stale stories; and when, by chance, any one of her writers happens to chirp out a note a shade different from the prevailing key, the whole nation pounces down upon him, with a shriek of half-incredulous joy, and buys him up, at the rate of a million copies a year. Our own best writers are more read in England, or, at any rate, more talked about, than their native crop; not so much, perhaps, because they are different as because their difference is felt to be of a significant and typical kind. It has in it a gleam of the new day. They are realistic; but realism, so far as it involves a faithful study of nature, is useful. The illusion of a loftier reality, at which we should aim, must be evolved from adequate knowledge of reality itself. The spontaneous and assured faith, which is the mainspring of sane imagination, must be preceded by the doubt and rejection of what is lifeless and insincere. We desire no resurrection of the Ann Radclyffe type of romance: but the true alternative to this is not such a mixture of the police gazette and the medical reporter as Emile Zola offers us. So far as Zola is conscientious, let him live; but, in so far as he is revolting, let him die. Many things in the world seem ugly and purposeless; but to a deeper intelligence than ours, they are a part of beauty and design. What is ugly and irrelevant, can never enter, as such, into a work of art; because the artist is bound, by a sacred obligation, to show us the complete curve only,--never the undeveloped fragments.