at the risk of making our author's lip
curl with disdain of the sordid insensibility that refuses to join
in his enthusiasm throughout, we shall venture to remind him that
enthusiasm is no proof of truth, whether in argument or conclusion.

The introductory chapters, containing the flight of the slave Antony
through the Louisiana swamp, are almost unequalled for unfaltering
power, for gorgeous wealth of color. Many of the glowing sentences
belong rather to passionate poetry than to tamer prose. The agonized
resolution that turns the panting fugitive's blood and body to
fire,--the fear, so vividly portrayed that the reader's nerves thrill
with the shock that brings the hunted negro's heart almost to his mouth
with one wild throb,--the matchless picture of the forest and marsh,
lengthening and widening with dizzy swell to the weary eye and failing
brain,--all are the work of a master of language.

When the scene shifts to Boston, the language, which was in perfect
keeping with the tropical madness of Antony's flight and the tropical
splendor of the Southern forest, is extravagant to actual absurdity,
when used with reference to ordinary scenes and ordinary events. All the
force of contrast is lost; and contrast is the great secret of effect.
The lavish richness of our author's words is as little suited to the
things they describe as a mantle of gold brocade would be to the
shoulders of a beggar. Even the loveliest of young women is more likely
to enter a room by the ordinary mysterious mode of locomotion than to
"flash" into it like a salamander. That it was possible for Muriel
Eastman, in gratifying her "vaulting ambition" by a very creditable
spring over the parallel bars, to "toss the air into perfume," we are
not prepared to deny, having no very clear notion of the meaning of
those remarkable words; but when, we are told that Mrs. Eastman was
"ineffably surprised, yet more ineffably amused," we must be allowed to
enter an energetic protest. Harrington himself is perhaps a trifle too
"regnant" to be altogether satisfactory; and there are many similar
extravagances and inaccuracies.

The social intercourse of the ladies and gentlemen in this book is
particularly bad. It seems as if the author were ignorant of the usages
of good society, and, impatient of the vulgar ceremony of inferior
people, had seen no way to assert the superiority of his two fair ladies
and their unimaginable lovers, except making them dispense w