ands here and there to explore a fishing-village
or seaport town, with all the interest of an outlandish man. He
describes scenery with the warmth of a lover of Nature and the accuracy
of a geographer. Acting as a kind of volunteer aide-de-camp to a
naturalist, he dredges and fishes both as man of science and amateur,
and makes us more familiarly acquainted with many queer denizens of
fin-land. He mingles with our fishermen, and finds that the schoolmaster
has been among them also. His book is lively without being flippant, and
full of information without that dulness which is apt to be the evil
demon of statistics. The moral of it is, that, as one may travel from
Dan to Beersheba and see nothing, so one needs but to open his eyes to
the life and Nature around him to find plenty of entertainment and
knowledge.

_Azarian_: An Episode. By Harriet E. Prescott, Author of "The Amber
Gods," etc. Boston: Ticknor & Fields.

If one opened the costly album of some rare colorist, and became
bewildered amid successive wreaths of pictured flowers, with hues that
seemed to burn, and freshness that seemed fragrant, one could hardly
quarrel with a few stray splashes of purple or carmine spilt heedlessly
on the pages. Such a book is "Azarian"; and if few are so lavish and
reckless with their pigments as Harriet Prescott, it is because few have
access to such wealth. If one proceeds from the theory that all life in
New England is to be pictured as bare and pallid, it must seem very
wrong in her to use tints so daring; but if one believes that life here,
as elsewhere, may be passionate as Petrarch and deep as Beethoven, there
appears no reason why all descriptive art should be Quaker-colored.

Nature and cultivation gave to this writer a rare inventive skill, an
astonishing subtilty in the delineation of character, and a style
perhaps unequalled among contemporaries in a certain Keats-like
affluence. Yet her plots have usually been melodramatic, her characters
morbid, and her descriptions overdone. These are undoubtedly great
offences, and have grievously checked her growing fame. But the American
public, so ready to flatter early merit, has itself to thank, if that
flattery prove a pernicious atmosphere. That fatal cheapness of
immediate reputation which stunts most of our young writers, making the
rudiments of fame so easy to acquire, and fame itself so
difficult,--which dwarfs our female writers so especially that not one
of them,