characters, and yet we have not seen them. Or, to describe our own impression still more correctly, we believe that we have seen them somewhere, and yet are not quite sure — like one greeted by some stranger whose features are not unfamiliar but whose name is forgotten.
There is, therefore, a certain vagueness about the work. But it is an artistic vagueness, like the golden haze of an Indian summer softening outlines and beautifying all it touches. The old streets seemed clouded with a summer mist; the voices of the people speaking in many tongues came to the reader as from a great distance. Yet why not? Is he not looking back and listening to the speaking shadows of another era, when Claiborne first came to Louisiana?
Yet the vagueness is never too vague. Sometimes the scenes are dimmed, but it is when the reader's eyes are dimmed by
