Page:In the dozy hours, and other papers.djvu/167

 PASTELS: A QUERY.

like to be told by one of the accomplished critics of the day what is—or rather what is not—a pastel? Dictionaries, with their wonted rigidity, define the word as "a colored crayon," ignoring its literary significance, and affording us no clue to its elusive and mutable characteristics. When Mr. Stewart Merrill christened his pretty little volume of translations "Pastels in Prose," he gave us to understand, with the assistance of Mr. Howells' prefatory remarks, that the name was an apt one for those brief bits of unrhymed, unrhythmical, yet highly poetic composition in the execution of which the French have shown such singular felicity and grace. Some of these delicate trifles have the concentrated completeness of a picture, and for them the name is surely not ill-chosen. Sombre, or joyous, or faintly ironical, they bring before our eyes with vivid distinctness every outline of the scene they portray.