Page:The Writings of Prosper Merimee-Volume 1.djvu/62

liv with life itself (whose is?) was infallible where it extended, has taken two noted facts of life, the petty disappointment of great expectations, and the curious "terrors of the night" (for which in French there is an untranslatable word, affres) and has based his story on them. Those who know the facts will prize the story; of those who do not know them, one does not really know whether to say "Lucky fellows!" or "Poor creatures!" Lokis aims higher. I should call it in all but the highest degree imaginative: few can refuse it the epithet of fanciful in all but the highest. In these highly pitched stories, the great difficulty is in the setting of the key at first, no doubt, but still more in the observation of it afterward. To my thinking, Mérimée has here "kept the keeping," restrained his foot from ever stepping out of the enchanted circle, in a way that has never been surpassed. You could not have a better teller of such a story than the matter-of-fact but by no means milksop or merely pedantic hunter of Lithuanian irregular verbs; you could not put the setting better; you could not arrange a heroine more tempting and more provoking, or sketch an impossible-probable hero more convincingly. Every page of the history is a miracle; but the greatest miracles