But when he sings for the love of singing, with no memory of the outer world and its terrible problems, the solving of which lay heavy on his heart and brain, then he is all sweetness, melody and harmony, and gives us not only the delight of his exquisite verses, but that other joy that comes from the sense of breathing an atmosphere of devotion, purity, and genial sweetness. Les Pleiades. Par le comte de Gobineau. Stockholm and Paris. The author of this book has traveled extensively, and has been a keen observer of men and manners, as well as a diligent student of history and ethnography. He has represented his government in countries so remote and contrasted as Persia and Sweden, has made antiquarian researches in the islands of the Mediterranean, has visited parts of America, and has won reputation as a scholar and writer by a number of works on such abstruse questions as Oriental philosophy and religion, the cuneiform inscriptions and the distinctions of race. The present book is merely a novel, yet it was clearly intended to embody the deepest and maturest thoughts of the author in regard to "the proper study of mankind," both individually and collectively. The nature of man, how it is affected by diversity of circumstances, by nationality, descent, rank and occupation, by the relations of class to class, of society to the individual, of personal will to a controlling destiny,--this may be said to form the _motive_ of the volume; and though such action as there is in it takes place chiefly at the court of one of the minor states of Germany, this narrow field was evidently selected on a similar principle to that of the Greek drama, with its "unities" of time and place and the narratives and explanations of the Chorus. The discussions in the book embrace all the problems of history, the characters are of different nationalities, and are all enriched by the fruits of culture and travel, and the story is a series of crucial tests by which, as we are to infer, the author's theories are verified. This plan is not absolutely novel. Goethe had adopted a still slighter though far happier framework for his ripest thoughts and profoundest observations. Yet even Goethe's exquisite art was at fault when he sought to extend the original design; and if the first part of _Wilhelm Meister_ is the most perfectly constructed work in the whole range of literature, the second is merely a heap of precious materials, with here and there such groupings and dispositions as indicate how details had been conceived, while the general plan refused to shape itself in the master's mind. Count Gobineau's failure is of a different kind. His story is not only grotesque in construction, but inartistic in all its parts. In every group of incidents there is the same lack of harmony and completeness as in the adaptation and subordination of each to the whole. Nor, with all the author's knowledge of life and of men,