‘Over a length of the stream the red, round harvest-moon was rising, and the weakened youth was this evening at the mercy of the charm that encircled him. The water curved, and dimpled, and flowed flat, and the whole body of it rushed into the spaces of sad splendour. The clustered trees stood like temples of darkness; their shadows lengthened supernaturally; and a pale gloom crept between them on the sward. He had been thinking some time that Rose would knock at his door and give him her voice, at least; but she did not come; and when he had gazed out on the stream until his eyes ached, he felt that he must go and walk by it. Those little flashes of the hurrying tide spoke to him of a secret rapture and of a joy-seeking impulse--the pouring onward of all the blood of life into one illumined heart, mournful from excess of love.’ In none of his books do such passages abound as in ‘Richard Feverel,’ unless, perhaps, in ‘Harry Richmond.’ These two books, and in a lesser degree ‘Sandra Belloni,’ may best be described as picturesque and melodious. The writer is less a thinker than a poet, and sometimes he sings with a sweetness that troubles our vision and catches us queerly about the throat. But viewing him upon the ground of the simple story-teller, we must admit that this is a ground either foreign to Mr. Meredith’s original genius, or deliberately shunned by him. The good old fashion, so dear to Scott and Thackeray, of bringing everything to a definite conclusion, either for better or worse, and clearing up all doubts as to the ultimate career of even their minor characters, is a fashion that he, with some cruelty and much contempt for the ordinary reader, utterly discards. He cares not a jot for our sympathy, still less for our judgment. He notes that life is chiefly interrogatory and unsatisfactory--an unfinished drama rarely terminating with the rightful wedding-bells or the merited reward; that choice is rarely justified by results, and that good and evil still remain vexed questions to be decided, as far as definite decision is possible, except upon their broadest issues, by temperament and individuality, by race and sex and training, as faith and love are decided. Look at the end of all his stories, and you will find yourself confronted with the unanswerable question which is sure to fix us in the examination of the lives of each one of us. There is the fatal tide, we know, but can we dare to say at what precise turning of the road of life we missed it?