Each lovelier shone from mutual light,
As hearts united gentler flow:
Though moon and star in heaven divide
Time brings them ever side by side.
Glorying I spoke, thus may it be!—
For I thought, dear boy, of thee and me.
REVIEW OF NEW BOOKS.
Merry-Mount; A Romance of Massachusetts Colony. Boston: James Monroe & Co. 2 vols. 12mo.
This novel is the production of a New England writer of fine talents and large acquirements, but of talents and acquirements which have not been as bountifully expressed in literature as the Public, that exacting leech of intellects raised above the mass, had a right to demand. The work, with some obvious defects, evinces a range of characterization, and a general opulence of mind, which place it above many novels which can claim more felicity in the evolution of a story and more variety of incident. The scene is laid in the early history of Massachusetts, commencing about eight years after the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, and its peculiarity consists in vividly reproducing to the imagination a period which even the driest annalists have hardly touched. The novel might with propriety be called, “The Cavaliers in Massachusetts,” for its originality, as an American story, consists in bringing together Cavalier and Roundhead on New England ground. The hero, Morton, is a loose, licentious, scheming, good-natured, and good-for-nothing English “gentleman,” engaged in a project to outwit the Puritans, and to obtain the ascendancy in Massachusetts of a different code of principles and a different kind of government from those which the Puritans aimed to establish. Connected with this reckless Cavalier is a deeper plotter, Sir Christopher Gardiner, a villain half after James’s and half after Bulwer’s heart, pursuing schemes of empire and schemes of seduction with equal ingenuity and equal ill-success. These two, with the followers and liege men of Morton—a gang of ferocities, rascalities and un-moralities from the lowest London taverns—constitute the chief carnal ingredients of the novel. Opposed to these we have grand and life-like portraits of Miles Standish, Endicott, Winthrop, and other Puritan celebrities, with only an occasional view of the Indians. The business of the affections is principally transacted by two persons—a pure, elevated, large-hearted and high-spirited woman, and a noble-minded but somewhat irascible man; and this portion of the novel has the ecstasies and agonies which are appropriate to the subject.