It tells not what the child did or what was done to him, but what he felt, thought, dreamed.

A record of impressions through the dim years of awakening, it reveals a peculiar and subtle type of personality most necessary to understand.

All that Loti is and has been is gathered up and foreshadowed in the child.

Exquisite sensitiveness to impressions whether of body or soul, the egotism of a nature much occupied with its own subjective feelings, a being atune in response to the haunting melody of the sunset, and the vague mystery of the seas, a subtle melancholy that comes from the predominance of feeling over masculine power of action, leading one to drift like Francesca with the winds of emotion, terrible or sweet, rather than to fix the tide of the universe in the centre of the forceful deed--all these qualities are in the dreams of the child as in the life of the man.
And the style ?--dreamy, suggestive, melodious, flowing on and on with its exquisite music, wakening sad reveries, and hinting of gray days of wind and rain, when the gust around the house wails of broken hopes and ideals so long-deferred as to be half forgotten,--the minor sob of his music expresses the spirit of Loti as much as do the moods of the child he describes.
Such a type, like all others, has its strength and its weakness.

Such a type, like all others, is implicitly in us all.