visionary and delusive as all else? What if his art, for the sake of which he had given up his life, his youth, and happiness, and love, should have abandoned him on the very edge of the grave?

"The Shadow is enveloping me," he says, as he realises that the end is at hand. This exclamation is as the cry of eternal anguish uttered before his death by another artist, Michael Angelo, the brother of Flaubert in his ideals and aims and genius:

Death struck him down at his work-table, quite suddenly, like a thunder-bolt. Dropping his pen from his hand, he sank down lifeless, killed by his one great, single passion, the love of his art.

Plato in one of his myths relates how the souls of men travel in chariots on winged steeds along the heavenly way; to some of whom it is given after a short time to approach that spot whence is visible the domain of Ideas; with yearning do they gaze aloft, and a few stray rays of light fall deep down among them. Then, when these souls are re-incarnated, to return and suffer on earth, all that is best in the human heart appeals to them and touches them, as a reflection of some eternal light, as a confused remembrance of another world, into which it was granted them to peep for the space of a single moment.

Surely there must have fallen upon the soul of Flaubert in the glorious sphere of the imagination a ray of beauty that was perhaps too bright.