and the Gobelins were practical schools, in which every detail of every branch of all those industries which contribute to the furnishing and decoration of houses were brought to perfection; whilst a band of chosen apprentices were trained in the adjoining schools.  To Colbert is due the honour of having foreseen, not only that the interests of the modern State were inseparably bound up with those of industry, but also that the interests of industry could not, without prejudice, be divorced from art.

Mr. Bret Harte has never written anything finer than Cressy.  It is one of his most brilliant and masterly productions, and will take rank with the best of his Californian stories.  Hawthorne re-created for us the America of the past with the incomparable grace of a very perfect artist, but Mr. Bret Harte’s emphasised modernity has, in its own sphere, won equal, or almost equal, triumphs.  Wit, pathos, humour, realism, exaggeration, and romance are in this marvellous story all blended together, and out of the very clash and chaos of these things comes life itself.  And what a curious life it is, half civilised and half barbarous, naive and corrupt, chivalrous and commonplace, real and improbable!  Cressy herself is the most tantalising of heroines.  She is always eluding one’s grasp.  It is difficult to say whether she sacrifices herself on the altar of romance, or is merely a girl with an extraordinary sense of humour.  She is intangible, and the more we know of her, the more incomprehensible she becomes.  It is pleasant to come across a heroine who is not identified with any great cause, and represents no important principle, but is simply a wonderful nymph from American backwoods, who has in her something of Artemis, and not a little of Aphrodite.

* * * * *

It is always a pleasure to come across an American poet who is not national, and who tries to give expression to the literature that he loves rather than to the land in which he lives.  The Muses care so little for geography!  Mr. Richard Day’s Poems have nothing distinctively American about them.  Here and there in his verse one comes across a flower that does not bloom in our meadows, a bird to which our woodlands have never listened.  But the spirit that animates the verse is simple and human, and there is hardly a poem in the volume that English lips might not have uttered.  Sounds of the Temple has much in it that is interesting in metre as well as in matter:—­

   Then sighed a poet from his soul: 
      ’The clouds are blown across the stars,
      And chill have grown my lattice bars;
   I cannot keep my vigil whole
   By the lone candle of my soul.

   ’This reed had once devoutest tongue,
      And sang as if to its small throat
      God listened for a perfect note;
   As charily this lyre was strung: 
   God’s praise is slow and has no tongue.’

But the best poem is undoubtedly the Hymn to the Mountain:—­