Mrs. Stuart’s imagination and poetry, like her beloved river, sometimes overflow unhappily, as may be noted in some of the talk between Uncle Israel and Mammy Hannah, where instead of the flash of poetic imagery so characteristic of the negro, Mrs. Stuart gives us sustained and elaborate rhetoric and sentiment. To our perception, too, the story should have ended with the death of the old negro couple, and what follows seems a decline to an anti-climax.
Mrs. Stuart is fully imbued with the traditions of the lordly, lavish life of the old Creole days, and she knows and loves the land of the Lower Mississippi. The result has been seen in some charming and vivid sketches of which “The River’s Children” ranks among her best.
Return: a Story of the Sea Islanders in 1739. By Alice MacGowan and Grace MacGowan Cooke. L. C. Page and Company, Boston. Price, $1.50.
This is an extremely hollow piece of literary labor, with seemingly no other inspiration than Mary Johnson’s romances. There is no atmosphere wherefrom incident or characters could draw any vital semblance, and the style is the thinnest and stalest decoction of Miss Johnson’s manner and diction. It is to be hoped that the writers will once for all forswear the field of colonial history and romance, and return to their own—the life they know and can describe so well in Texas and Tennessee.
THE FIDDLE AND THE BOW.
By Robert L. Taylor.
PART SECOND.
What is this life but a whirling tide of pleasure and pain—glowing with gladness, darkening with grief, leaping with rapture, eddying with tears, now kissing the smiling cliffs of hope, now dashing against the frowning crags of fear and then vanishing in the darkness! What would it all be worth to us unblessed by love and mercy and the milk of human kindness? What would it all be worth to us bereft of music, that noblest gift of the soul?
The spirit of music, like an archangel, presides over mankind and the visible creation. Her afflatus, divinely sweet, divinely powerful, is breathed on every heart and inspires every soul to some higher thought, some grander sentiment.
I heard a great master play on his wondrous violin. His bow quivered like the wing of a bird. In every quiver there was a melody, and every melody breathed a thought in language sweeter than was ever uttered by human tongue. I was conjured, I was mesmerized by his music. I thought I fell asleep under its power and was rapt into the realms of visions and dreams. The enchanted violin broke out in tumult, and in its music I thought I heard the rustle of a thousand joyous wings and the burst of song from a thousand joyous throats; mocking-birds and linnets thrilled the glad air with warblings; goldfinches, thrushes and bobolinks trilled their happiest tunes and the oriole sang a lullaby to her hanging cradle that rocked in the wind. I heard the twitter of skimming swallows, the scattered coveys’ piping call. I heard the robin’s gay whistle, the cawing of crows, the scolding of blue-jays and the melancholy cooing of a dove. The swaying tree tops seemed vocal with bird song while he played, and the labyrinths of leafy shade echoed back the chorus.