the Christian universe; and as he wrote what she dictated, the verses of his poem were musical even to the Muses.  Dante, Beatrice, and the “Divine Comedy,” with a Gothic church as a make-weight, were balanced in Muses’ minds in comparison with the “Iliad” and the age of Pericles; and again they put on the rapt look of mystery, but a smile also, and their admiration and applause were more and more.  To England they soon turned, and contemplated the round, many-colored globe of Shakspeare’s works.  As playful swallows sometimes dart round and round a lithe and wondering wingless animal, so they, admiringly and timidly, attracted, yet hesitating, delighting in his alertness, but not quite understanding it, flitted like a troubled and beautiful flock around the great magician of modern civilization.  Their glance became lighter and less intent, as if they were nearer to knowledge, the pain of perplexity disappeared like a shadow from their countenances, their plaudits were more unreserved, and it seemed likely that the high desert of Shakspeare would win for our new literature a favorable recognition from the aristocratic goddesses of antiquity.  Knowing that Jove had made perfection unattainable by mortals, they yet found in the chart before them epics, dramas, lyrics, histories, and philosophies that were no unworthy companions to the creations of classical genius, and they were jubilant in the triumphs of a period in which they had been rather ignorantly and ironically worshipped.  Their sitting was long, and their review thorough, yet they found but one department of modern literature which was regarded with a distrust that grew to an aversion.  The romances, the tales, the stories, the novels were contemned more and more, from the first of them to the last.  Nothing like them had been known among the glories of Hellenic literary art, and no Muse now stood forth to be their defender and patron.  Calliope declared that they were not epical, Euterpe and Erato that they were not lyrical, Melpomene and Thalia that they were neither tragical nor comical, Clio that they were not historical, Urania that they were not sublime in conception, Polymnia that they had no stately or simple charm in execution, and Terpsichore, who had joined with Melpomene in admiring the opera, found nothing in the novel which she could own and bless.  Fleeting passages, remote and slight fragments, were pleasing to them all, like the oases of a Sahara, or the sites of high civilization on the earth; but the whole world of novels seemed to them a chaos undisciplined by art and unformed to beauty.  The gates of the halls where the classics live in immortal youth were beginning to close against the voluminous prose romances that have sprung from modern thought, when the deliberations of the Muses were suddenly interrupted.  They had disturbed the divine elements of modern society.  Forth from all the recesses of the air came troops of Gothic elves, trolls, fairies, sprites, and all