we have shed the tears of disappointment and pain -- unmerited, as we have believed.

The artificiality of our boasted civilization, as revealed in that veneered and venerated sham, Society; the impossibility, owing to its false basis, of infusing it with a living and real quality, is portrayed so realistically as to rouse our pity for those worshippers who cover its corpse-like impassiveness with the garlands of devotion and fidelity. All these notes are struck with reiterated persistency throughout the book, and all the chords of which they are capable sound in our ears, their major and minor tones awking haunting echoes within us.

The necessity of equilibrium, of self-poise, through recognition and grasp of our own resources; the just balance of one resource, with its possibilities, against another; the rounded and even development of our natures by conformity to their great and eternal plan, is illustrated by the consequences of excess in any one direction -- the sometime violent reaction which transfers the excess to some other plane.

As the story opens, Raphael is found as a young man of twenty-five in whose face "darkness and light, annihilation and existence, struggled together." The key to his present and future conditions is found in the story of his life up to that age, as he tells it later to a friend.

Leaving school at the age of seventeen, he lives a life of severe discipline, to which he is subjected by