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ideal city of the North; and where is there anything to excel the Picture of Paris, drawn minutely and colored, his prison-prophecy, Paris as it was to be created, rather than restored, by Louis Napoleon? "Then he took from his pocket a strong magnifying-glass, and put it gently into Rodomant's hand. Rodomant grasped it, and through it gazed long and eagerly. And from that hieroglyphic mist there started, sudden and distinct as morn without a cloud, a brilliant bird's-eye view of a superb and stupendous city, a dream of imaginative architecture, almost in itself a poem. Each house of each street, each lamp and fountain, each line of road and pavement, marked as vividly as the glorious domes, the pointing pillars, grand gates and arches, proud palaces in inclosures of solemn leafage, the bridges traced like webs of shadow, the stately terraces and dim cathedrals. Green groves and avenues and vivid gardens interlaced and divided the city within the walls; and without, masses of delicate shrubbery, as perfectly defined, were studded with fair villas of every varied form, melting gradually and peacefully, as it seemed, to a bright champaign embroidered with fence and hedge-row.... A sort of visionary pageant unrolled to him, partly memorial, in part prophetic. He knew he had seen something like it,--but when and where? What planet boasted that star of cities for strength and lustre that must surpass new London and old Thebes? For Rodomant had the mathematical gift of all the highest harmonists, and his brain could magnify and actualize the elfin-sized images under his eye to their just and proper proportion in the real." It must have been like heaven, this city so stilly and so fair,--for, you see, there were no people there.
Miss Sheppard's plots are not conspicuous, for her characters make circumstance and are their own fate; still her capacity in that line is finely exhibited by the plot of the opera of "Alarcos." In mere filling up, having excepted the incident,--always original and delightful,--the loft