Page:Mexico, picturesque, political, progressive.djvu/143

Rh not bracing. The heroine reminds one somewhat of Octave Feuillet's "Sybilla;" but she lacks that breath of life which stirs in the veins, and animates the action, of the beloved French girl. Nor has the Mexican author more than a hint of the exquisiteness and verve of the Frenchman. He has, however, the cleverness to win popularity, and each of his twenty books runs through two to five editions.

Vicente Riva Palacio, who holds a first place by the elegance and purity of his language, has been also a prolific writer. His prose is imbued with the spirit of poetry. Many of his paragraphs are full of delicate imagery and rhythmic force; with the essence, but without the material form, of the poem. Yet, in an even more marked degree than those of Paz, his books present to a stranger a startling combination of diverse traits. To a loving and tender sympathy with nature, which overflows in descriptive passages of great beauty, and to a spirit of gentle revery, developed with genuine delicacy through a thousand light touches, he adds at times an almost rabid exuberance of melodramatic intensity. These baleful and lurid periods are in strange antithesis to his limpid and