On all accounts "Kady" is one of the most remarkable books of the time. Purely American, without one taint of animalism though dealing with the most primitive humanity, true, sweet, and yet masculine in its power, it is a work which will take its place in the literature of the country as a model which cannot be too closely studied or too much admired.
'Twixt Love and Law: A novel, by Annie Jenness Miller (Belford, Clarke & Co.).—Literature which neither refreshes, amuses, nor instructs has no proper place in the world of letters; and assuredly that class of literature which enervates the mind and beckons beyond the noon-mark of propriety has no rights which the critic or the moralist is bound to respect. It is a marked characteristic of that order of recent fiction which takes for text the more or less unlawful relations of the sexes, that the style should be punctuated with shrieks, and the movement be a series of hysterical writhings. A woman with keen feelings does not, at every small anticlimax of her existence, perform a hand-spring and somersault as a means of giving vent to her emotions. Neither does she go about with a nose reddened with weeping, exploding in vociferous adjectives as a means of expressing her grief. "To be always and everywhere starved! starved! starved!" wails Mrs. Miller's heroine, as a sort of footnote to a proposal of marriage which she has just declined. "Oh, how cruel it is!" Thereupon "she shivered in the clutch of her despair, and, moaning, threw herself face downward upon the bosom of Mother Earth," very much to the amaze of the rejected suitor, who promptly picks her up and "holds her against his breast." She is intense, superlatively intense. "Her white bosom tossed and rose and fell; the burnished masses of her hair escaped and rioted on the midnight air. 'Spare me! spare me! Alex! Alex! Alex!' Out of the unyielding density of the night a voice of ecstasy breathed her name." A meeting takes place in this "unyielding density" with "Alex," a married man. The heroine being in love with him and he with her, it follows as a necessary element in this class of fiction that the wife should be all that is mean, evil, shrewish, and generally detestable. In such a state of affairs a wife is a difficult problem, a nuisance, and yet very useful; for if there were no wife to interpose her uncomfortable personality between the lovers, there would be no reason for all these meetings in the "unyielding density," no exclamatory passages, no daring escapades along the very verge of the questionable, and, hence, no novel—which, all things considered, might not be so great a misfortune after all. In the course of this story, which includes much outcry, many combats with tempestuous passion, some sacrifices, a trial for attempted murder, and a divorce, the unpleasant marital impediment is comfortably put out of the way, and the lovers are safely married.
"'Twixt Love and Law" is one of those books, "not wicked, but unwise," which, whatever their ostensible moral may be, add to the perplexity and difficulty of social adjustment. Admitting that our marriage and divorce laws are unjust and ineffectual, still, to bring contempt, open or implied, upon the marriage relation, can only impede, not advance, a rational solution of the question. In nine cases out of ten vanity and loose morals are the primary causes of marital unfaithfulness in desire or act. In writing such a book as "'Twixt Love and Law," clever and often brilliant as it is, the author has not used her graceful pen and clear head to the best interests of her sex.
THE APPEAL.
Cold, bitter cold beneath the wild March moon,
The winter snow lies on my frozen breast;
And o'er my head the cypress branches croon
A sad and ceaseless dirge, and break my rest.
I hear the bell chime in the dark church tower,
The rising wind, a passer's hasty tread;
But no voice wakes the silence, hour by hour,
Among the uncompanionable dead.
Perchance they lie in deep, unconscious calm,
Regretting nothing in the world above;
Alas! for me it has not lost its charm—
There is no peace where thou art not, my love!
Oh! bid me come to thee, and I will rise
From my unquiet couch and steal to thine,
And touch thy cheek, and kiss thy sleeping eyes,
And clasp thee, as of old, till morning shine!
And I will murmur in thy drowsy ears
Sweet utterances of love and olden song,
Till thou shalt half awake in blissful tears,
And cry "My love, why hast thou staid so long?"