altogether silent. His delightful vividness on his chosen points is elsewhere unapproached, and his "Voyage en Espagne," his "Constantinople," his "Italia," and his "Voyage en Russie," seem to us his most substantial literary titles. No other compositions of the same kind begin to give us, in our chair, under the lamp, the same sense of standing under new skies, among strange scenes. With Gautier's readers the imagination travels in earnest and makes journeys more profitable in some respects than those we really undertake. He has the broad-eyed, universal, almost innocent gaze at things of a rustic at a fair, and yet he discriminates them with a shrewdness peculiarly his own. We renew over his pages those happiest hours of youth when we have strolled forth into a foreign town, still sprinkled with the dust of travel, and lost ourselves deliciously in the fathomless sense of local difference and mystery. Gautier had a passion for material detail, and he vivifies, illuminates, interprets it, woos it into relief, resolves it into pictures, with a joyous ingenuity which makes him the prince of ciceroni. His "Voyage en Espagne" is, in this respect, a masterpiece and model. It glows, from beginning to end, with an overcharged verisimilitude in which we seem to behold some intenser essence of Spain—of her light and colour and climate, her expression and personality. All this borrows a crowning
