in the
way to form some just notion of the style of thought proper to so large
a class as our New England country-people, and of the motives likely to
influence their social and political conduct, does us a greater service
than we are apt to admit. And the power to conceive the leading
qualities that make up an average representative and to keep them
always clearly in view, so as to swerve neither toward tameness nor
exaggeration, is by no means common. This power, it seems to us, Mr.
Trowbridge possesses in an unusual degree. The late Mr. Judd, in his
remarkable romance of "Margaret," gave such a picture as has never been
equalled for truth of color and poetry of conception, of certain phases
of life among a half-gypsy family in the outskirts of a remote village,
and growing up in the cold penumbra of our civilization and material
prosperity. But his scene and characters were exceptional, or, if
typical, only so of a very limited class, and his book, full of fine
imagination as it is, is truly a romance, an ideal and artistic
representation, rather a poem than a story of manners general and
familiar enough to be called real.

Mr. Trowbridge, we think, fails in those elements of (we had almost said
creative) power in which Mr. Judd was specially rich. If the latter had
possessed the shaping spirit as fully as he certainly did the essential
properties of imagination, he would have done for the actual, prosaic
life of New England what Mr. Hawthorne has done for the ideal essence
that lies behind and beneath it. But, with all his marvellous fidelity
of dialect, costume, and landscape, and his firm clutch of certain
individual instincts and emotions, his characters are wanting in any
dramatic unity of relation to each other, and seem to be "moving about
in worlds not realized," each a vivid reality in itself, but a very
shadow in respect of any prevailing intention of the story. With the
innate sentiments of a kind of aboriginal human nature Mr. Judd was
at home; with the practical working of every-day motives he seemed
strangely unfamiliar. It is just here that Mr. Trowbridge's strength
and originality lie; but, with that not uncommon tendency to overvalue
qualities that we do not possess, and to attempt their display, to the
neglect, and sometimes at the cost, of others quite as valuable, but
which seem cheap, because their exercise is easy and habitual,--and
therefore, we may be sure, natural and pleasing,--he insists o