of love, so far from
being the prime motive, as in other fictions, does not enter at all. The
author seeks to reach, without other incident, one tragic event, and
endeavors to make up for a want of adventure by the subtile analysis of
character and the study of a civil problem. The novelty and courage of
the attempt will attract the thoughtful reader, and will probably tempt
him so far into the pages of the book, that he will find himself too
deeply interested in its persons to part from them voluntarily. The
national sin with which the author so pitilessly deals has been expiated
by the whole nation, and is now no more; but its effects upon the guilty
and guiltless victims, here alike so leniently treated, remain, and the
question of slavery must always command attention till the question of
reconstruction is settled.

In "Fifteen Days" the political influences of slavery are only very
remotely considered, while the personal and social results of the system
are examined with incisive acuteness united to a warmth of feeling which
at last breaks forth into pathetic lament. Is not the tragedy, of which
we discern the proportions only in looking back, indeed a fateful one? A
young New-Englander, rich, handsome, generous, and thoroughly taught by
books and by ample experience of the Old World and the New to honor men
and freedom, passes a few days in a Slave State, in the midst of that
cruel system which could progress only from bad to worse; to which
reform was death, and which with the instinct of self-preservation
punished all open attempts to ameliorate the relations of oppressor and
oppressed, and permitted no kindness to exist but in the guise of
severity or the tenderness of a good man for his beast; which boasted
itself an aristocracy, and was an oligarchy of plebeian ignorance and
meanness; which either dulled men's brains or chilled their hearts. In
the presence of this system, Harry Dudley lingers long enough to rescue
a slave and to die by the furious hand of the master,--a man in whose
soul the best impulse was the love he bore his victim, and in whom the
evil destiny of the drama triumphs.

From the conversation of Harry and the botanist, his friend, the author
retrospectively develops in its full beauty a character illustrated in
only one phase by the episode which the passages from Edward Colvil's
journal cover, while she sketches with other touches, slight, but
skilful, the people of a whole neighborhood,