IX.

Works of fiction occupied with purely imaginary or supernatural subjects have been comparatively rare. While Byron, Shelley and his wife were living at the Lake of Geneva, a rainy week kept them indoors, and all three occupied themselves with reading or inventing ghost stories. Mrs. Shelley, who was the daughter of Godwin the novelist, and who inherited his intensity of imagination, reproduced the impressions then made upon her mind in the remarkable but disagreeable romance of "Frankenstein." The story is related by a young student, who creates a monstrous being from materials gathered in the tomb and the dissecting-room. When the creature is made complete with bones, muscles, and skin, it acquires life and commits atrocious crimes. It murders a friend of the student, strangles his bride, and finally comes to an end in the Northern seas. While some parts of the story are written with considerable power, the general effect is exceedingly unpleasant. Bulwer Lytton's "Zanoni," a peculiarly fanciful work, unfolds the mysteries of the Rosicrucians. In "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," the freaks and vagaries of the imagination in sleep are vividly traced. The curious mixture of the actual and the unreal, the merging of wholly different ideas in one conception, so frequent in dreams, are described with extraordinary skill and delicacy. The childlike simplicity of Alice's mind is charmingly maintained, and the exquisite vein of humor which runs through the whole book makes it one of the most delightful as well as one of the most remarkable of fictions.