the beauty of its own snows. But I find in it at the same time something a little factitious, a sort of romanesque, not altogether unlike the sentimental romanesque of Novalis; it has not done the impossible, in humanising abstract speculation, in fusing mysticism and the novel. But for the student of Balzac it has extraordinary interest; for it is at once the base and the summit of the Human Comedy. In a letter to Mme. de Hanska, written in 1837, four years after Séraphita had been begun, he writes: "I am not orthodox, and I do not believe in the Roman Church. Swedenborgianism, which is but a repetition, in the Christian sense, of ancient ideas, is my religion, with this addition: that I believe in the incomprehensibility of God." Séraphita is a prose poem in which the most abstract part of that mystical system, which Swedenborg perhaps materialsed too crudely, is presented in a white light, under a single, superhuman image. In Louis Lambert the same fundamental conceptions are worked out in the study of a perfectly human intellect, "an intelligent gulf," as he truly calls it; a sober and concise history of ideas in their
