you take Auchester,
developing so when first thrown on himself in Germany, and becoming at
length the rare type of manhood which he presents,--or the one change
wrought by years in Miss Benette, just the addition of something that
would have been impossible in any child, a deepened sweetness, that
completest touch of the perfect woman, "like perfume from unseen
flowers, diffusing itself when the wind awakens, while we know neither
whence the windy fragrance comes nor whither it flows." Perhaps this
characterization is most noticeable in "Counterparts," which she called
her small party of opposing temperaments: Salome, so gracious; Rose,
like the spirit of a sunbeam; Sarona, so keen and incisive, his passion
confronting Bernard's sweetness; and Cecilia, who, it is easy to
conjecture, wrote the book. I have always fancied that some mystic
trine was chorded by three beings who, with all their separate gifts,
possessed an equal power and sweetness,--Raphael, Shelley, and
Mendelssohn. And perhaps the same occurred more emphatically to Miss
Sheppard, for after Seraphael she drew Bernard,--Bernard, who is
exceeded by none in the whole range of romance. "Counterparts" is a
novel of ideal life; it is the land of one's dreams and one's delights;
its dwellers are more real to us than the men and women into whose eyes
we look upon the street, they haunt us and enrapture us, they breathe
about us an atmosphere of gentle and delicious melancholy like the soft
azure haze spread over meadow and hills by the faint south-wind. With
fresh incident on every leaf, with a charm in every scene, its spell is
enthralling, and its chapters are enchanted. There is no fault in
it; nothing can be more perfect, nothing more beautiful. One may put
"Consuelo" side by side with "Charles Auchester," but what novel in
the wide world deserves a place by "Counterparts"? It was worth having
lived, to have once thrown broadcast such handfuls of beauty.

Between the publication of Miss Sheppard's second book and "Rumour" two
others were issued,--"Beatrice Reynolds" and "The Double Coronet,"--for
which one wishes there were some younger sister, some Acton or Ellis, to
whom to impute them,--evidently the result of illness, weariness, and
physical weakness, perhaps wrung from her by inexorable necessity, but
which should never have been written. In the last, in spite of its very
Radcliffean air, there are truly terrible things, as Gutilyn and his
green-eyed chi