Page:Lippincotts Monthly Magazine-40.djvu/272

258 we are glad to pardon, and love while we are doing so. The argument of "Folle-Farine" soon ceases to deal with the sufferings of a child. The poor creature's hopeless love for the cold and unconsciously heedless Arslàn, bitter at the world's indifference to those magnificent gods and goddesses that he still goes on painting in his old granary among water-docks and rushes there by the river-side, is portrayed with unnumbered masterly strokes. And afterward, when Folle-Farine tends him as he lies stricken with fever in a Parisian attic, the evil temptings of the unprincipled Sartorian, as they offer life and fame to Arslàn at a price whose infamy cannot be questioned by her who hears them, cloud this whole narrative with a truly terrible gloom. Folle-Farine's immolation of self to save him whom she worships, and her final self-inflicted death amid the peace of the river-reeds, far away from the loud and gilded Paris that she detests, are the very darkest essence of the most absorbing and desolating tragedy. But the poetry of this whole fervid conception is never once lost sight of. We close the book with a shudder, as if we had been passing through the twilight of some magic forest where the dews are death. But we realize how matchless is the sorcery that can so sombrely enchain us, and long after its woful spell has vanished memory vibrates with the pity and sorrow it roused.

"Ariadne" is another masterpiece, and not unlike the foregoing in the main sources of its excessive melancholy. It is the story of a feminine spirit swayed by an unreciprocated love, as waywardly given as lightly undervalued. The characters are without subtlety, as in all Ouida's prose-poems. They are fascinating or repelling shadows, whom we can name adoration, egotism, fidelity, as we please, but whose eerie juxtapositions, whose pictorial and half-illusory surroundings, may summon sensations not unlike those caused in us by some admirable yet faded fresco. Never was Rome in all her grandeur and desuetude made the more majestic background of a heart's forlorn history. We read of "the silver lines of the snow new-fallen on the mountains against the deep rose of dawn;" of how "shadows of the night steal softly from off the city, releasing, one by one, dome and spire and cupola and roof, till all the wide white wonder of the place ennobles Itself under the broad brightness of full day;" of how one can "go down into the dark cool streets, with the pigeons fluttering in the fountains, and the sounds of the morning chants coming from many a church door and convent window, and little scholars and singing-children going by with white clothes on, or scarlet robes, as though walking forth from the canvas of Botticelli or Garofalo." Sculpture forms what one might call the pervading stimulus of this most impassioned story, its young heroine being a sculptor of inspired powers. In the same way music supplies an