The intense melancholy characterizing every page of this drama, has its root in the character and intensity of the truths therein developed, and is not manifested in artistic declamation, in highly wrought phrases, or in glowing rhetorical passages proper for citation. It is as bitter as life; as gloomy as death and judgment. The style is one of utter, almost bald, simplicity. The situations are merely indicated, and the characters are to be understood, as are those of the living, rather from a few words in close connection with accompanying facts, than from eloquent utterances, sharp invectives, or bitter complaints. There are no highly wrought amplifications of imaginative passions to be found in its condensed pages, but every word is in itself a drop of gall, reflecting from its sphered surface a world of grief, of agony. The characters pass before us like shadows thrown from a magic lantern, showing only their profiles, and but rarely their entire forms. Flitting rapidly o'er our field of vision, they leave us but a few lines, but so true to nature, so deeply significant, that we are able to produce from these shifting and evanescent shadows a complete and rounded image. Thus we are enabled to form a vivid conception of every character--we know the history of their past, we divine the part they will play in the future. We know the friends, the godfather, the priest, in whom we find an admirable sketch from a decomposed and dying society. He who, in a proper state of things, would have been the representative of living spiritual principles, is a mere supernumerary. He makes signs of the cross, pronounces accustomed formulas, but he never once thinks of examining into the strange and contradictory relations existing between the husband, forced by his very being into the Future, and the wife, fettered by the conventions and chains of the Past. Neither does he study, with an eye enlightened by philanthropy and spirituality, the poor infant, whose mental restlessness began in the cradle, although his character and destiny seem to have been comprehended by the father. The priest, however, remains cold and indifferent throughout, never once seeking to render the two beings, whom he had himself united in a sacramental bond, intelligible to each other, nor to save the unfortunate boy brought to him for baptism, the sole fruit of this unhappy marriage.