THE CONGRESS OE WOMEN.

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afterward, on the safe side of the abyss, it wore a gruesome look to his cool blood. A year after, Diana and Percy are friends again. How she betrays a political secret; how cruel, yet how comprehensible, is Dacier’s conduct, the reader will learn in chap­ters full of charm. The last is called the “ nuptial chapter,” and relates how a balrely willing woman was led to bloom with the nuptial sentiment.

Meredith portrays the modern villain unsparingly, “ men who are not free from the common masculine craze to scale fortresses for the sake of lowering flags.” He gives some noted and titled examples, and in treatment of such characters we find these words: “ Men appear to be capable of friendship with women only for as long as we keep out of pulling distance of that line where friendship ceases. They may step on it; we must hold back a league.”

“The Ordeal of Richard Feverei” I do not advise many women to read, as it is likely to produce a sense of helplessness, with which will come hopelessness, which we must avoid. Rut in the main, from reading Meredith’s sermon-novels, there comes the wish not to leave the world, but to set it straight. The light of every soul burns upward. Of course, most of them are candles in the wind; and then Meredith says: “The less ignorant I become, the more considerate I am for the ignorance of others. I love them for it;” which speech is the essence of the charity “that suffereth long and is kind,” the pity which is akin to love. The author who wrote, “The something sovereignly characteristic that aspires in Diana enchained him. With her, or, rather, with his thought of her soul, he understood the right union of woman and man, from the roots to the flowering heights of that rare graft. She gave him comprehension of the meaning of love, a word in many mouths not often explained. With her wound in his idea of her, he perceived it to signify a new start in our existence, a finer shoot of the tree planted in good, gross earth, the senses running their live sap, and the minds companioned, and the spirits made one by the whole-natured conjunction,” must of necessity be able to write a love-passage with tenderness and grace, so I quote the following: “ It was not in him to stop or to moderate the force of his eyes. She *met them with the slender unbendingness that was her own, a feminine of inspirited manhood. There was no soft expression, only the direct shot of light on both sides, conveying as much as is borne from sun to earth, from earth to sun.” Passages such as these lend interest to the life-loves of Evan Harrington and Rose Joselyn, Beau­champ and Renee, Richard Feverel and Lucy, Rhoda Flemming and Robert Eccles.

There is such painting of nature in Meredith’s novels that we behold the scenes he describes instead of dimly imagining them, and the metaphors he employs have always a quaint conceit, which makes his style so peculiarly his own. This picture of a sunrise from “One of Our Conquerors:” “Now was the cloak of night, worn thread­bare and gray, astir for the heraldingof golden day visibly ready to show its warmer throbs. The gentle waves were just a stronger gray than the sky, perforce of an inter­fusion that shifted gradations; they were silken, in places oily gray,” maybe fitly hung beside the sunset picture in “Diana of the Crossways:” “The sunset began to deepen. Emma gazed into the depths of the waves of crimson, where brilliancy of color came out of central heaven, preternaturally near our earth, till one shade less brilliant seemed an ebbing away to boundless remoteness.”

In “The Egotist,” Sir Willoughby is the central figure, who, in his lofty conceit, rejoices in the knowledge that Laetitia Dale pines for love of him. The vicissitudes of his love affairs make a charming book, in which wit is ever sparkling, and although the keynote of woman’s subjection is sounded, there is no undertone of tragedy. “One of Our Conquerors” is remarkable for its complete presentation of the Mere- dithan style, and the lessons to be learned from the characters are profound; existing relations between men and women are diagnosed thoroughly, and one comes from the reading with a longing to leave the world a little better than he found it. Metaphors, similes, analysis, all the fraternity of old lamps for lighting our abysmal darkness, are scattered through the pages of this book. I shall close this paper, so unworthy of this interesting subject, with Meredith’s own words: “The banished of Eden had to put