"And bells make Catholic the trembling air"; and, "Sad as the twilight, all his clothes ill-girt"; and again "Mournful professor of high drollery." Here is a very good line and a half:-- "The old rain-fretted mountains in their robes Of shadow-broken gray." Here, finally, are three admirable pictures:-- "The stars thin-scattered made the heavens large, Bending in slow procession; in the east, Emergent from the dark waves of the hills, Seeming a little sister of the moon, Glowed Venus all unquenched." "Spring afternoons, when delicate shadows fall Pencilled upon the grass; high summer morns, When white light rains upon the quiet sea, And cornfields flush for ripeness." "Scent the fresh breath of the height-loving herbs, That, trodden by the pretty parted hoofs Of nimble goats, sigh at the innocent bruise, And with a mingled difference exquisite Pour a sweet burden on the buoyant air." But now to reach the real substance of the poem, and to allow the reader to appreciate the author's treatment of human character and passion, I must speak briefly of the story. I shall hardly misrepresent it, when I say that it is a very old one, and that it illustrates that very common occurrence in human affairs,--the conflict of love and duty. Such, at least, is the general impression made by the poem as it stands. It is very possible that the author's primary intention may have had a breadth which has been curtailed in the execution of the work,--that it was her wish to present a struggle between nature and culture, between education and the instinct of race. You can detect in such a theme the stuff of a very good drama,--a somewhat stouter stuff, however, than _The Spanish Gypsy_ is made of. George Eliot, true to that didactic tendency for which she has hitherto been remarkable, has preferred to make her heroine's predicament a problem in morals, and has thereby, I think, given herself hard work to reach a satisfactory solution. She has, indeed, committed herself to a signal error, in a psychological sense,--that of making a Gypsy girl with a conscience. Either Fedalma was a perfect Zincala in temper and instinct,--in which case her adhesion to her father and her race was a blind, passionate, sensuous movement, which is almost expressly contradicted,--or else she was a pure and intelligent Catholic, in which case nothing in the nature of a struggle can be predicated. The character of Fedalma, I may say, comes very near being a failure,--a very beautiful one; but in point of fact it misses it.