Here Balzac draws a wonderful picture. As we read it seems as if every country in the world was represented to us by means of the objects that crowd the rooms; as if all the far-reaching tributaries of this planet had poured their wealth into one receptacle, thus condensing its nature in a great object-lesson illustrative of the whole.

Is it too much to assume that the author has here furnished an illustration of the possibilities of human life waiting the touch of the divine fire of the higher soul that shall infuse them with new vitality, and bring forth order, or harmonious relativity, from the picturesque but chaotic confusion? -- that touch which enables us to look through the confusion, as well as look upon it, and penetrate to that central thread upon which are strung the beads of existence.

Hear him as he says, "This ocean of inventions, fashions, handicrafts, results, and ruins, were to the stranger a poem without an end. Forms, colors, thoughts were resurrected, but nothing complete was offered to the soul. It devolved upon the poet to finish the sketch of the great painter who had prepared this vast palette, where all the accidents of human life were flung in profusion, and as if disdainfully. As we follow Raphael's subsequent life, it seems as if we are finding and following the plan of the "great painter, " and reducing the "disdainful profusion" to