Since we have suffered our author to speak for herself, nobody can accuse us of unfairness, since that captious gentleman, Nobody, is not obliged to think as we do, but can, if he so pleases, pronounce Mrs. Katharine Augusta Ware to be the most modest, unassuming, charming pilgrim, that ever journeyed to the fountain of Helicon, or toiled up the steeps of Parnassus.
We have, in our time, been constrained by our vocation, to spell out a good many pieces of bombast; but we can safely say that, in our serious belief, no rhetorician was ever better furnished with an illustration for that not very rare quality of style, than in the effusion with which we begin to be overwhelmed on page one, under the imposing title “The Power of the Passions.” We had thought of turning the whole into prose, but as we have not the space to spare, and the readers can easily do it for themselves, whenever we shall have occasion to cite a passage, we content ourselves with a cursory description, and no very acute analysis, since the philosophy is quite as incomprehensible as the lines are vapid, and the ideas commonplace. Imprimis, we are favored with the strikingly novel information that there was a time, a good while ago, when man stood in God’s own image communing with angels in a bower,
“When first creation dawned upon his view.”
This fair world, we are next agreeably astonished to learn, was given to man by high Omnipotence. At this interesting period, Creation owned her Lord, and all that moved confessed his reign, and the forest monarch bowed down before him, beside the young lamb; (bah!) moreover, birds hailed the rising day, and there were flowers and trees and fruits cum multis aliis of the sort.
Such was fair Paradise! When Woman smiled,
All Eden brightened with a richer glow!
Led by the hand of Deity, she came
To dwell in kind companionship with man,
A sharer of his pleasures and his toils,
Which nature’s genial bosom richly paid: