Overbrilliant

Lucy was certainly very fresh that morning ; she pawed the gravel, champed her bit, tossed her head, and looked ready for a race indeed. Not being an overbrilliant rider, I firmly refused my uncle’s invitation to mount the mare, and he took her himself. Aileen and Nora sprang into their saddles, and the phaeton, drawn by a couple of sturdy ponies, was left for Biddy, Oona, and myself.

Thanks to the mounting and the libretto of Captain Alfred Thompson, supplementing his own tuneful if not overbrilliant music, Mrs. Lillian Russell Solomon has scored a hit with Pepita, given for the first time at the Union-square theater this evening.

We remained here quietly for an hour, when the stillness was broken by a slight stir in the water above, and looking in the direction we could barely discern two or more figures moving, by the aid of the not overbrilliant starlight.

he central incident would be more significant in a tale of martyrdom than in a love-story. The sanctity of the heroine is hardly as convincing as is her womanly quality; the book, like others of the school, shows small sense of the great spiritual forces at work in the age with which it deals. This story of a saint makes far deeper appeal to sense than to soul. Another book of the class, The Wanton, by Frances Forbes-Robertson, dealing with the Holy Roman Empire under Frederick II, hardly needs mention, except as confirming the point, that, in the hands of these new writers, all history bids fair to come before us as a long succession of amorous moments. This story, which has indeed " a thrill in every line," is written in an overbrilliant style, possessing more glamour than grammar.

No poet since the great Victorians has enjoyed the popularity that has come to him; at its height, it must have resembled the eager reception given Byron’s works. At the present moment, his fame seems undergoing an eclipse; certainly his recently published verse has proved disappointing, and critics seem convinced that he will be remembered by his prose. This implies that the attractiveness of much of the poetry has vanished. The overbrilliant colors have faded; the over-emphasis has ceased to be effective — ‘‘The tumult and the shouting dies.”

The next year his opera “Oprichnik” was accepted by the Petersburg Theatre; and Napravnik, the orchestra leader, asked him to make a few cuts and to alter the orchestration, which, he said, was too heavy and overbrilliant in places, so that it overwhelmed the singers and put them completely in the shade.

As we have seen, color is the most obvious of the plastic means and comes nearest being the raw material of painting, since all the other elements, line, light, etc., may be regarded as modi¬ fications or aspects or results of color. Color has an effect which depends upon its intrinsic quality, independent of all relation to the other constituents in the aesthetic ensemble of the picture. We all know that some colors produce quiet and restful effects, while others produce the exact opposite; and the fact cannot be questioned that the specific sensations of color with which a picture presents us have much to do with its appeal, both imme¬ diate and permanent. In Raphael, for example, the color, simply as sensuous material, is rarely good and if we abstract it from every other quality of the picture, we ordinarily find it either indifferent or displeasing. It is usually like the colors in a cheap rug or fabric — either dull or overbrilliant.