radual dwindling of their interest
toward the end. There is a great deal of art in knowing when to stop,
and there are many stories, like some of those in this book, that are
very impressive told in a few words, but elaborated into a long poem
lose all their power to move us. At the same time, we realize that it
is not from any poverty of ideas that Mrs. Preston sometimes dwells
too long upon a subject: her poetry is not diluted with a mere
harmonious jingle of words, as destitute of any meaning as the silver
chime of sleigh-bells. "The Legend of the Woodpecker" is remarkable
for its simplicity and terseness: it is one of the best of all the
poems; only we wish that in the last verse but one she had not thought
it necessary to use the word "chode" for "chided." So in the fine
ballad called "The Reapers of Landisfarne" it is a pity to mar a good
stanza by using the queer participle "strawed" as a rhyme to _sod_ and
_abroad_, especially as the latter words do not rhyme either, save in
New England parlance. But such blemishes as these in Mrs. Preston's
work are rare, and therefore it is worth while to point them out.
Poems of so much vigor as these give fair promise for the future, and
deserve something more than merely general commendation.

Among my Books. (Second Series.) By James Russell Lowell.
Boston: James R. Osgood & Co.

The essays in this volume have an advantage over the former series
published under the same title in the greater homogeneousness of the
subjects. These are all poets, and with one exception English poets.
They are poets, too, so to speak, of one family, unequal in rank, but
having that resemblance of character which marks the higher and lower
peaks of the same mountain-chain. All are epic and lyric, none in a
proper sense dramatic. All are poets _de pur sang_, endowed by nature
with the special qualities which cannot be confounded with those of a
different order, and which forbid all doubt as to a true "vocation."
Dante, Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, differing as they do
in intellectual greatness and imaginative power, have all, as a
distinguishing characteristic, that magic mastery over the harmonies
of language which renders them responsive to subtle thoughts and
ethereal conceptions. We find, however, no intimation that it is from
any view of this kind that these essays have been collected, in a
single group. It seems indeed more probable that they have simply been
reprinted,