in philosophy, in history, in all the height and depth and richness of the complete human intellect. It is as though the romantic period, being about to die, was moved by some hand of Providence to go to Avon, that its dramatis persone might be pictured. before they should move along the path of no return. Thither all that moving throng which had adorned, amused and disgraced every hill and vale between the Mediterranean and the lakes of Scotland repaired, that the great artist of the North might paint the portrait of each one, from king to clown, and might as a matchless orator express all the thoughts and feelings which had been uttered in the past days of agony or ecstacy. What a procession toward the studio of our Shakespeare! He was the combined Angelo and Raphael for those forms and faces. The kings and queens went on their thrones, the assassin wore his black cloak, his hand holding the stiletto; thither went Lear with his daughters; thither ran, or walked, or rode all the eminent ones of a long past. The artist was worthy of the long journey from any Verona or Venice, for there was not a tear or a smile he could not throw upon his canvas. But of all the faces which the Avon artist gave to immortality no two were sadder than those of Romeo and his Juliet. A True Love Story. AUTHOR'S PREFACE. While I sympathize with the Chicago Literary Club in its desire to find if possible in its ranks some man who as a novelist might rank with Mason as a historian, and with Thompson as a poet, and while I confess the right of the club to experiment with its members for the purpose of discovering what ones may conceal some signal ability for finding the most of invention and the least of fact, yet I cannot but feel that it was almost an insult to a clergyman to ask him to give a specimen of "sheer fabrication" to a society composed almost wholly of members of the legal fraternity. CHAPTER I. The name of Linda Mellet carries the mind far back in time and far away in space, and asks the heart to transfer itself |