marked as vividly as the glorious domes, the pointing pillars, grand gates and arches, proud palaces in inclosures of solemn leafage, the bridges traced like webs of shadow, the stately terraces and dim cathedrals.  Green groves and avenues and vivid gardens interlaced and divided the city within the walls; and without, masses of delicate shrubbery, as perfectly defined, were studded with fair villas of every varied form, melting gradually and peacefully, as it seemed, to a bright champaign embroidered with fence and hedge-row....  A sort of visionary pageant unrolled to him, partly memorial, in part prophetic.  He knew he had seen something like it,—­but when and where?  What planet boasted that star of cities for strength and lustre that must surpass new London and old Thebes?  For Rodomant had the mathematical gift of all the highest harmonists, and his brain could magnify and actualize the elfin-sized images under his eye to their just and proper proportion in the real.”  It must have been like heaven, this city so stilly and so fair,—­for, you see, there were no people there.

Miss Sheppard’s plots are not conspicuous, for her characters make circumstance and are their own fate; still her capacity in that line is finely exhibited by the plot of the opera of “Alarcos.”  In mere filling up, having excepted the incident,—­always original and delightful,—­the lofty imagination, and the descriptions of wind and weather,—­one of her best points will be found to be costume, a minor thing, but then there are few who excel in modern millinery.  “Salome was beautiful.  Her splendid delicate dress, all rosy folds, skirt over skirt of drapery falling softly into each other, made her clear skin dazzle in the midst of them; and the masses of vivid geraniums here and there without their leaves were not too gorgeous for her bearing,—­nor for her hair, in whose rich darkness geraniums also glowed, long wreaths curling down into her neck.”  Rose in white, with wreaths of rubies weighing down her slender arms;—­Adelaida, with her lace robe like woven light on satin like woven moon-beams, and large water-lilies in her golden hair;—­my Lady Barres, whose dress “consisted almost always of levantine, with demi-train and under-petticoat of white brocaded silk peeping through its open front; the hair showing the shape of the head, and confined by a narrow band of black velvet across the brow, fastened in the morning with onyx or agate, in the evening with a brilliant only; she always wore upon her wrists delicate bands of cambric embroidered with seed-pearl so minutely that it seemed a pattern wrought out of the threads of the stuff, and little pearl tassels drooped there scarcely eclipsing her hands in fairness.”