When it was once proposed by a staff officer to drive an obnoxious guest from headquarters by a liberal use of burnt brimstone, General Sherman said, “That is high strategy in its way, but it is not war.” “When one goes a turkey-hunting one does not care to be killed by bears,” said an old hunter; and when a seeker after amusement, to be found in a love-story, opens what purports to be a novel, it is shocking to find it a learned treatise on some abstruse subject.
The book before us is another illustration of this defect. It opens with 251 an exquisite picture of Constantinople a hundred years since. In this prologue some wicked conduct is rather hinted at than told. After this the story opens and moves on pleasantly enough, until the fact is developed that the hero and heroine are reproductions of the sinful grandfather and grandmother long since lost to the census-taker of the British empire. What was evil in the ancestors is an innocent love in the descendants; and the fair author exhibits considerable power by preserving the sanity of her characters, to say nothing of that of the reader, in the complications and situations that follow.
The book is of interest to us, not so much for what it accomplishes, as the promise of better things. It exhibits all the qualities necessary to a successful writer of fiction. There is a keen appreciation of character, a love of nature, and a clear, incisive style that make a combination which if properly directed insures success.
THE PASSING OF THE YEAR.
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Like some triumphal Orient pageantry Beheld afar in slow and stately march, Glittering with gold and crimson blazonry, Till lost at length through many a dusky arch— I saw the day’s last clustering spears of light Enter the cloudy portals of the night. The wind, whose brazen clarions had blown Imperious fanfarons before the sun All the brief winter afternoon, died down, And in the hush of twilight, one by one, Like maidens leaning from high balconies, The early stars looked forth with lustrous eyes. Then came the moon like a deserted queen, In blanchèd weed and pensive loneliness; Not as she rises in midsummer green, Hailed by a festal world in gala dress, With thin sweet incense swung from buds and leaves, And strident minstrelsy of August eves; But treading in cold calm the frozen plain, With bare white feet and argent torch aloft, Unheralded through all her drear domain, Save where the cricket sang in sheltered croft, And, faintly heard in fitful monotone, A solitary owl made shuddering moan. |
Charles Lotin Hildreth.