natural frame of things and hate superstition need not fear to accept. It tells how an ageing man acquires an altar in a Roman Catholic church and burns at it candles to his many dead, and by worshipping there keeps so close company with their charity and sweetness that, at his end, the blaze of white lights inspires him to a last supreme act of forgiveness to an enemy; and the beautiful recital makes one's mind no longer fear to admit that the splendour of a Cathedral Mass may, although one's unbelief fly like an arrow through the show and transfix even the Cross itself, fulfil a noble need. Once at least Henry James poured into his crystal goblet the red wine that nourishes the soul. And it held, too, a liberal draught of the least trivial distillation of man's mind, which is tragedy, in _The Wings of the Dove_ (1902). That story is the perfect example of what he had declared in _The Tragic Muse_ the artistic performance should always be: "the application, clear and calculated, crystal-firm, as it were, of the idea conceived in the glow of experience, of suffering, of joy." For Milly Theale, the American heiress, "who had arts and idiosyncrasies of which no great account could have been given, but which were a daily grace if you lived with them; such as the art of being almost tragically impatient and yet making it light as air; of being inexplicably sad and yet making it clear as noon; of being unmistakably sad and yet making it soft as dusk," whose hopeful progress through Europe stops suddenly at the dark portal in Harley Street, is but the ghost of Mary Temple, whose death thirty years before had been felt by Henry and William James as the end of their youth. All those years he had held in his heart the memory of that poor girl, "conscious of a great capacity for life, but early stricken and doomed, condemned to die under short respite while also enamoured of the world; aware, moreover, of the condemnation and passionately desiring to 'put in' before extinction as many of the finer vibrations as possible and so achieve, however briefly and brokenly, the sense of having lived"; but with the prescience of the artist he had delayed until he had perfected his art to undertake the heavy task of presenting her tragedy without mitigation and yet making it bearable and beautiful. Then he lavished his technical resources on her history as he might have laid flowers on her grave. There is nothing more miraculous in all his works than the way he contrives that, when her agony becomes too great to be directly represented and has to be suggested by its effect upon others, he yet breaks no link of the intimacy between the reader and his heroine, but provides that her increasing physical absence shall be so compensated for by her spiritual presence that her rare appearances are like long-expected visits from a distant friend. One's knowledge of her glows into love when one sees her holding a