In Madame Bovary Flaubert never allows anything to go on too long; he can suggest years of boredom in a paragraph, capture the essence of a character in a single conversational exchange, or show us the gulf between his soulful heroine and her dull-witted husband in a sentence (and one that, moreover, presages all Emma's later experience of men). (. . . ) This is one of the summits of prose art, and not to know such a masterpiece is to live a diminished life.
If Heaven a draught of heavenly pleasure spare, One cordial in this melancholy vale, 'T is when a youthful, loving, modest pair In other's arms breathe out the tender tale