en
Shakspeare's poems and earlier plays come before us for judgment, we
could only say of them, as of Keats's "Endymion," that they showed
affluence, but made no sure prophecy of that artistic self-possession
without which plenty is but confusion and incumbrance.

So much by way of preface, lest we might seem cold to the very
remarkable merits of "Sir Rohan's Ghost," if we treated it as a book
worth finding fault with, instead of condemning it to the indifferent
limbo of general eulogy. It is our deliberate judgment that no first
volume by any author has ever been published in America showing more
undoubtful symptoms of genuine poetic power than this. There are
passages in it where imagination and language combine in the most
artistic completeness, and the first quatrain of the song which Sir
Rohan fancies he hears,--

----"In a summer twilight,
While yet the dew was hoar,
I went plucking purple pansies
Till my love should come to shore,"--

seems to us absolutely perfect in its simplicity and suggestiveness. It
has that wayward and seemingly accidental just-right-ness that is so
delightful in old ballads. The hesitating cadence of the third line is
impregnated with the very mood of the singer, and lingers like the
action it pictures. All those passages in the book, too, where the
symptoms of Sir Rohan's possession by his diseased memory are handled,
where we see all outward nature but as wax to the plastic will of
imagination, are to the utmost well-conceived and carried out. It was
part of the necessity of the case that the book should be conjectural
and metaphysical, for it is plain that the author is young and has
little experience of the actual. Accordingly, with a true instinct, she
(for the newspapers ascribe the authorship of the book to Miss Prescott)
calls her story a Romance, thus absolving it from any cumbersome
allegiance to fact, and lays the scene of it in England, where she can
have old castles, old traditions, old families, old servants, and all
the other olds so essential to the young writer, ready to her hand.

We like the book better for being in the main _subjective_ (to use the
convenient word Mr. Ruskin is so angry with); for a young writer can
only follow the German plan of conjuring things up "from the depths of
his inward consciousness." The moment our author quits this sure ground,
her touch becomes uncertain and her colors inharmonious.
Character-painting is unessent