Domnei A Comedy of Woman-Worship by Cabell, James Branch, 1879-1958

They, the surcharged figures of _Domnei_, move vividly through their stone galleries and closes, in procession, and--a far more difficult accomplishment--alone. The lute of the Bishop of Montors, playing as he rides in scarlet, sounds its Provencal refrain; the old man Theodoret, a king, sits shabbily between a prie-dieu and the tarnished hangings of his bed; Melusine, with the pale frosty hair of a child, spins the melancholy of departed passion; Ahasuerus the Jew buys Melicent for a hundred and two minae and enters her room past midnight for his act of abnegation. And at the end, looking, perhaps, for a mortal woman, Perion finds, in a flesh not unscarred by years, the rose beyond destruction, the high silver flame of immortal happiness.

So much, then, everything in the inner questioning of beings condemned to a glimpse of remote perfection, as though the sky had opened on a city of pure bliss, transpires in _Domnei_; while the fact that it is laid in Poictesme sharpens the thrust of its illusion. It is by that much the easier of entry; it borders--rather than on the clamor of mills--on the reaches men explore, leaving' weariness and dejection for fancy--a geography for lonely sensibilities betrayed by chance into the blind traps, the issueless barrens, of existence.

JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER.

CRITICAL COMMENT

_And Norman_ Nicolas _at hearte meant (Pardie!) some subtle occupation In making of his Tale of Melicent, That stubbornly desired Perion. What perils for to rollen up and down, So long process, so many a sly cautel, For to obtain a silly damosel!_

--THOMAS UPCLIFFE.