REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.
We are entirely uncertain whether this work will be recognized for what it is by our young country-folk; but we are very certain, if it is not, it will be our young country-folk's loss. It is, we suppose, a novel. Its author admits that it is a story; but it is not at all the kind of banquet to which novel-readers are usually invited. We can fancy the consternation which awaits the devourers of story-books,—those persons, we mean, whose reading is confined to novels, who lie in wait for Mrs. Wood and Miss Braddon, and stretch their sales into the double-figured thousands, through whose passive brains plot after plot travels in quick succession and leaves no sign, and whose name, we fear, is Legion. They will eagerly seize this new story with the romantic title, be launched auspiciously into gay ball-rooms, glide graciously among the familiar flounces, dances, and small talk, only to find themselves suddenly and without warning in some gulf of grave discussion opening out deceptively from the sparkling stream of the story, or stranded on some lofty sentiment never dreamt of in their philosophy. For the author's mind is, in the best sense of the word, a discursive one. It is full of positive thought, and strikes out right and left like a school-boy who must needs relieve his superabundant spirits by pinching his sister's ear, thrusting his fists in his brother's face, kicking aside the foot-cushion, and making a plunge at the cat, while he is performing the simple operation of walking across the room. This book is written out of a mind so full of wit and wisdom that it overflows at the gentlest touch. It has more sense and learning and power than go to the making up of a dozen ordinary novels. The very prodigality of its resources is a stumbling-block. Its great fault is its muchness, if we may borrow a term from Hawthorne's mint. It is like a young minister's first sermon, into which he frantically attempts to cram the whole body of divinity. Especially in the early part of the book, we are constantly drawn away front the story by delightful little essays, sometimes read to us by the author himself,—sometimes wrought into the conversations by playful anecdotes, by effective character-sketches, and vivid scene and scenery-paintings. They do not always materially help forward the story, nor do they always hinder it. They often give it an air of reality, and they always help to utilize the author's idea. If they do not avail his art, they avail his didactics. Where they are not good for the story, they are good for something. By many thoughtless, and by all mere novel-readers, they will probably be skipped; but for ourselves, we confess, that, though high art may regard them as blemishes, we should not know how to give the order for their removal. Considered in themselves, in their style and sentiment, the little digressions, the long conversations, the carefully wrought side-scenes are so rich in a certain tender religious wisdom, yet crisp and piquant withal, and so full of living thought on the great questions of the day, that we dwell in them with enjoyment, though with a compunctious half-consciousness that they ought not to be there.
But though we are tolerant of discursiveness where it affects only the flow of the story, we like it less where it disturbs the flow of the style. A paragraph ought never, by the mere form into which it is cast, to require to be read over and over in order to get at the meaning. Yet we are confident that nine readers out of ten would need to read the following sentence more than once in order to get at its true construction:—
"Oh, that I were able to conform myself to that further fictitious, not to say factitious, standard of taste, according to which, just as,—though a hemorrhage from the nose, howsoever ill-timed, distressing, or even dangerous to the patient, is comic,—one from the lungs is poetical and tragic; and an extravasation of blood about the heart is not inappropriate to the demise of the most romantic civil hero, (who would seem, indeed, capable of escaping an earthly immortality only by means of pulmonary disease or some accident, unless pounced upon by some convenient and imposing epidemic,) while a similar affection of the brain of an imaginary personage can be rendered affecting or excusable only by a weight of years and virtues in the patient; so certain moral dis-
