was bred had made him think religion as far beyond his mental range as mathematics, or whether Christianity seemed to him just the excuse of the Latin races for building high cool places, very grateful in the heat, and filling them with incense and images of kind, interceding people. But in this melancholy series, and indeed in all his later works--for right on to _The Golden Bowl_ (1905) he presents his characters as being worthy of treatment just because they are in some way or other struggling to preserve some decency from engulfment in the common lot of nastiness--one perceives that he had been born with the grim New England faith like a cold drop in his blood. The earth was a vale of tears, and all one could do was to go on, uninfluenced by weeping or the fear of weeping, to some high goal. This sad belief, accompanied by so intense a consciousness that his particular goal, the art of great writing, was reached by a stonier and longer path than any, might have been expected to provoke him rather to the fury of Landor or the gloomy pomposity of Wordsworth than to the unhurried, unimpassioned production of these wonderful stories, these exquisite vessels that swaggeringly hold and clearly show the contained draught of truth, like tall-stemmed goblets of Venetian glass. But glass is the wrong image; for no hand could ever break these, no critical eye detect a crack. They are so truthfully conceived that one could compare them only to some nobly infrangible substance, so realistic and yet so charged with significance by their fashioning that their likeness must be something which is transparent and yet gives the light a white fire as it passed through. It is of crystal they are made, hard, luminous crystal.