THE rare atmosphere of early California days is in this novel in which love as a pure passion has been treated so delicately, so vibrantly. "Rezanov is a classic, or I miss my guess," says William Marion Reedy in his introduction to this story of that spirited, yet dreamy life of manly adventure with its accompaniment of sparkling eyes and clicking castanets.

This tale throbs with exultations, agonies, adventures and more powerful than the divining fatalism of the lovers it celebrates are the Castilian roses whose aroma pervades the pages—roses that "perfume one's memories of this pair, puissant in faith, in this novel that is a poem and a shrine of that love which lives when death itself is dead."