Page:Mexico, picturesque, political, progressive.djvu/144

142 earnest utterances. They are like an alarm-fire kindled upon a quiet hillside on a peaceful summer evening. In his "Calvario y Tabor" the reminiscences of the suffering of the people through the years of struggle which culminated in the overthrow of foreign intervention, and the fall of Maximilian, are given with a clear directness that forces them upon the consciousness of the reader as realities. But to this heroic portrayal of suffering and misfortune he attaches so many impossible episodes, and such a climax of romantic and unreal horrors, that the genuine emotion aroused by the simplicity of truth and the touching events of history is in danger of being lost in repulsion. There is something so incongruous in this combination, which can trace the most refined and wholesome impressions, and an imagination which can conceive and revel in a delirium of horrors, that the result is a series of shocks. To a foreigner, at least, it is like touching the two poles of a battery at irregular intervals. The current of admiration and sympathy is being constantly broken up, and as constantly renewed. In the seven hundred pages of this particular book there is a climax of death-scenes which are