Dorothy Wordsworth. In the literary annals of later England the name of Dorothy Wordsworth holds an honored place, and yet to the majority of readers she who bore the name has been little more than a gracious satellite shining in the glory of her famous brother. Wordsworth himself spoke of her in no doubtful way, likening her to the spring that went before his steps and strewed his path with flowers. We find, too, affectionate tributes to her fine qualities of mind and heart in the pages of Coleridge and De Quincey. Principal Shairp, as late as 1874, edited passages from her journal recording the experiences of a tour in Scotland made with her brother and Coleridge in 1803, and to this work the editor prefixed a brief memorial of the author. And in the writings of many who have dealt with the so-called lake school and the lake country, Dorothy Wordsworth is the subject of suggestive reflection and affectionate remembrance. It has remained for Mr. Edmund Lee, an ardent Wordsworthian, to gather up these scattered threads of biography and weave them together into an agreeable and valuable narrative. He has done his work with sympathy and good taste, and has amply justified the high esteem which he places upon the native talent of Miss Wordsworth, and her significant influence upon the development of Wordsworth's genius. In this little volume, which is about the size of the monographs dedicated to the English Men of Letters the life of Dorothy is effectively outlined. We see how indispensably her personality must be considered in forming an estimate of Wordsworth's intellectual development. It is not alone that she served as a sympathetic stimulus, guiding the uncertain steps of her brother at the outset of his entrance upon the poet's career, but she was bound to him by a profound and enduring tie of absolute unity of purpose. They saw with the same eyes, experienced the same emotions, and their imaginations, different as they were in degree, answered to the same impressions and sought utterance in the same ideas. 'Her journals are Wordsworth in prose, just as his poems are Dorothy in verse," says a discerning critic; "the one soul kindled at the other." Descriptions of this admirable woman vary. Coleridge found her exquisite "-"a woman indeed"-"simple, ardent, impressive." De Quincey enters more into detail. As he saw her she was small in stature, ungraceful in bearing, with a face of "Egyptian brown;" her eyes were "wild and startling," her speech hurried and agitated, her manners quick and ungoverned, but "the subtle fire of impassioned intellect" burned within her and could not be restrained; intellectually, "she was a person of very remarkable endowments." (Dodd, M. $1.25.) A Year in Eden. From the American. Dr. Huntington, the octogenarian pastor of Pierpont, a pleasant, well-to-do New England village, lies dead at the opening of the story called "A Year in Eden." For sixty years he has led his people, through the Land of Promise, as it might be said; governing their intellectual impulses, dominating their material instincts, and satisfying all their spiritual needs. He began as an orthodox minister; then gradually abjured dogmas and creeds, until finally revealed religion became to him an extinct message, a thought whose day was over. There was no loss-rather a quickening of high religious sense in the apostle, but he ceased, and taught his people to cease, talking idly about God; he proclaimed no scheme of salvation; he put no compulsion upon others to worship or to pray, or to do more than develop the noblest possibilities which lay in their own nature. He tried, indeed, to bring to its ideal consummation the every-day, cordial, loving, happy life possible to men and women who help one another, all laboring to the same end of goodness. So potent was the old pastor's grandeur and simplicity of character to influence others that so long as he lived he drew all his people after him by this guiding spiritual force. Naturally such teachings, almost wholly independent of dogmas and ordinances, involved farreaching consequences, and Miss Preston's book conceives the mental, moral, and social attitude of a whole community, who, after having had all their thinking done for them throughout their lives, while they tried to live up to an imperfectly conceived standard of intellect and morality, are suddenly left to their own unaided reason and judgment. The picture of a New England village is very carefully filled up with innumerable fine touches which come from a knowledge of the place described which must have grown with the writer's growth and strengthened with her strength. The story is very thoughtfully told, and yet is pervaded by a most charming and kindly humor. Every character except the heroine must have had its prototype in real life: the gentle old sisters; the Spiritualist mother. who sent messages by a dying woman to her little boy in the other world, and wished she could have sent a package; the fine, manly young heroes-twin brothers; the overbearing professor, who, the moment he had lost his spiritual teacher, took false lights to guide him; the petulant. lovable squire, and the English woman who was shocked over the absence of ritual at the pastor's funeral services, where the village quartette sing the Psalm of Life, and a loving hand sounds on the piano the grand chords of Beethoven's Funeral March. So long as the author keeps to the delineation of every-day life and character she shows a very delicate insight into the springs of human thought and action. Her heroine, however, is one of those difficult and complex creations whose individuality is independent of all its associations and traditions. Monza is the orphan daughter of an artist father and an Italian mother, and both by artistic temperament and by race may well be supposed to find a quiet New England village no congenial place of nurture. The good old pastor's teachings have, in her case, fallen among thorns: what good there is in the girl is choked out by vanity, rebellion, and an absolute lack of sympathy and intelligence. The girl is beautiful, but the mere physical attractiveness of so unlovely a character repulses the reader. When she throws herself away for a married man, as coarse and heartless as herself, there is no tragic effect, and the incident seems merely displeasing and trivial. It was probably a part of the author's intention to enforce the moral that had Monza received more definite and personal religious teaching, and held faiths which might have been a substantial help and guidance in the hour of trial, she would have escaped this spiritual shipwreck. But we are ready to predict that Monza would, under any circumstances, whether Catholic or Protestant, free-thinker or devotee, have been the slave of her own vain and lawless impulses. As the author of "A Year in Eden" is one of those whose reactionary tendencies from Puritanism have carried them into the Catholic Church, the reader looks throughout the story for the enforcement of the precept that the pastor's life-long teachings come to naught, that his temples made with hands crumble to pieces, the intellectual sense he has inculcated goes wrong, the lights he has set up for beacons die out. But unless the moral is sought for it may be missed, and the book may easily be accepted simply as a careful picture of New England life, and is sure to be enjoyed for its pleasant and often humorous dialogues, its descripions of country scenes, and its kindly hits at social foibles. The author has for years held a distinctive place among American writers, won by her literary skill, her versatile powers, and her somewhat unusual authorship. She is well known as the translator of a brilliant version of Mistral's "Mirèio," and her rendering of Virgil's Georgics met with a kindly reception from the best authorities. She is one of the regular Atlantic essayists and critics, and has before made ventures into the realm of fiction before giving us this product of her ripened powers. "A Year in Eden" we consider in its own way a distinct success, and readers drawn to it by the author's reputation as a skilled littérateur will be rewarded by the substantial merits of the book. (Roberts. $1.50.) Sons and Daughters. From the Boston Traveller. The appearance of a new work by the author of "The Story of Margaret Kent is an event of literary importance. At one bound the former novel leaped into an extraordinary popularity, and not to know "The Story of Margaret Kent" was to argue one's self unknown. Never was a literary secret better kept than the name of its author; and but for the chain of circumstantial evidence discovered by the Traveller, and published in detail in this column on the appearance of the novel, the name of the author might not yet have been surmised. The reader will question, first of all, if this story is equal to "Margaret Kent," and a simple reply is not easy to give. The former story pictured in a graphic and wonderful manner a picturesque personality under circumstances peculiar to modern life. The essence of the passing moment was seized and dramatized. Only modern conditions of woman's life could make possible a Margaret Kent. "Sons and Daughters" deals more with universal and absolute, rather than with relative social truth. It is essentially a love story. The scene is laid at Sycamore Hill, a Philadelphia suburb, and with consummate art the entire action of the novel takes place within this quiet and limited place. The tragedy and pathos and comedy of life are skilfully touched, and this limitation of environment is a very artistic and suggestive thing. The play upon human life in all its variations, its actions and reactions, is effectively done. The vitality of the panorama renders it one replete with social magnetism. The story opens in Mr. Reese's library, where the "Shakespeare Society" is holding one of its sessions to consider the conundrums bequeathed by the melancholy Prince of Denmark to an inquiring world. Mr. Reese announces, with true Shakespearian fervor, that he believes he has made a momentous discovery in the meaning of the poet, and says: "Turn, if you please, to Act. ii., Scene 2, to the place where Polonius asks permission to take leave of the prince. You cannot,' says Hamlet, take from me anything that I will more willingly part withal, except my life, except my life, except my life.' Now, in reading this over three days ago, it suddenly occurred to me that this was a singular phrase, I would part with nothing so readily except my life.' Pray how is a man to part with his life? What is he without his life? Nothing. What is his life without him? Nothing whatever. One is the indestructible essence of the other— they are blended, united destroy one, you destroy the other! You cannot part with life as you part with a friend at the corner, one going one way and the other the other. He and his life were inseparable, began and ended together. I have a different reading to suggest for that line." "Just let me inquire, to begin with, whether you never thought Hamlet's behavior to Ophelia was just a little peculiar? He goes forward and back; loves and curses in a breath. Now, there must have been some reason for these inconsistencies. I wish you to observe how my reading of his words to Polonius resolves the situation. Here is my emendation: You cannot, sir, take from me anything that I will more willingly part withal, except my wife, except my wife, except my wife.'" "His wife!" repeated Dr. Chichester. "Do you mean that Hamlet was a married man?” Mr. Reese leaned back, a little exhausted, but he nodded impressively in reply to this question. "He means that Hamlet had been secretly married to Ophelia," murmured Mr. Brainerd, breathless. Although a confirmed celibate, the priest still had some youthful sentiment and imagination. "But why should he have wished to get rid of her?" "I don't wonder at that in the least," said Dr. Jasper. "He showed the regular conjugal feeling-found her a superfluity and a bore while she was alive, but had the true widower-like appreciation of her virtues the moment she was dead and buried." THE author, who was lately United States Minister to Persia, states in his preface to "Persia" that he "wishes to call attention to the fact that the scope of this work is entirely different from that of the volume recently published by him, entitled 'Persia and the Persians.' The latter work is intended to give a description of Persia as it is; while the present volume is a history of Persia, as it has been, offering a narrative of the most noteworthy characters and events of that ancient empire from its foundation in prehistoric times, "This work differs from other histories of Persia in giving more proportionate attention to the legendary period of her history than is usual with those who have dealt with this subject, as well as "I'll tell your wife, doctor; as sure as the world, I'll tell your wife," said the rector. "I meant that he was married to somebody else, and that that was the reason why he behaved so badly to Ophelia. Of course, I cannot speak from accurate knowledge; my facts are conjectural, but I cannot help thinking that he had made an unhappy and disastrous connection while at coilege in Wittemberg. His friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, no doubt, were his confidants and the witnesses of the marriage. For don': you remember that when they come to see him at Elsinore, he remarks to them Man delights not me; no, nor woman neither,' then adds-jeal ously conscious that they are well aware that, at one period, he had not been so dead to the enchantments of the fairer sex-though by your smiling you seem to say so." "Why, this is wonderful, wonderful!" murmured Mr. Redmond. "It does indeed put everything in a new light." The novel is one of very exceptional power and interest. It holds the reader, in its brilliant, fascinating pages, in absorbed and irresistible attention. (Ticknor. $1.50.) ASSYRIA. to the great career of the House of Sassân, which, in the opinion of the author, has never received full justice from those Christian historians who have undertaken a connected history of Persia. On the other hand, the long period between the Saracen invasion and the rise of the Sefaveans has been presented so fully elsewhere, and offers so few salient points that are distinctly connected with the development of Persia as an independent monarchy, that it hardly seemed best to give more than a mere outline of that period in a vo!ume whose limits are circumscribed. "It seems to be the established rule for historians to refer to the authorities they have consult ed. The author may therefore state that he has, From The Story of Persia." (Copyright by G. P. Putnam's Sons.) Persia. A long residence in various parts of the East, including several years in Persia, has led the author to form a higher and, he thinks, a more just estimate of the character of Orientals than many European writers are willing to concede to them. For the rest, the author commits this little work to the reader with the hope that he may find 'The Story of Persia' not unworthy a place by the side of the histories of Greece and of Rome." The history of "Assyria" is written by L. Ragozin, who has already prepared the history of "Chaldea" in this excellent series. It is not 46 yet published, and we cannot speak "as having authority" of its merits, although we know that to be admitted in the series is "a patent of nobility." We give an illustration from its pages, as well as one from the work on Persia," and we do not hesitate to assert that both volumes are fully up to the high standard of The Story of Nations. The whole series would make excellent readers for schools and classes studying history, and we can say from experience that girls and boys from fifteen to eighteen rejoice at every new volume that is added, and read them with undiminished interest. (Putnam. ea. $1.50.) 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A. *Murfree, In the Clouds. Houghton, M. Ticknor. Ticknor. |