of whales, and in other monuments of another time. Far out to sea we may perceive by the lines of breakers where lie the remnants of the cliffs which have been eaten back for miles. The sands and clays melt in the ravenous waves; the bowlders are harder to grind, and remain after the rest has gone. We turn willingly from this sad region of wasting land and people, back to the verdant central region, where the freshness of the sea and the land are so well united. It is worth another ride over the eighteen miles of road along the south shore to see the pretty village of Edgartown, at the easternmost end of the island. In a commercial sense it is a place far advanced in decay: of all its whale-ships, which got from the sea the hard-earned fortunes of its people, there is but one left. This lies upon the ways, stripped of its rigging, looking like a mere effigy of a living craft. But the thrift and cleanliness of the sailor is marked in every paving-stone and shingle of the village. As soon as a mariner comes to fortune his first effort is to get a comfortable home, a big, square, roomy house, which shall always be ship-shape and well painted. I never thought so well of white paint before I saw these handsome houses, actually resplendent with a hue which is so often merely garish in such uses. If there be a trace of an instinct of cleanliness, white paint is an excellent stimulant to its activity, for it makes dirt hateful by making it apparent. These comfortable homes, like those of New Bedford, mark a period of prosperity which has passed never to return. Little by little the population is drifting away; some houses stand empty, and the quick agents of decay which make havoc with our frail New England houses will soon be at work at them, and even Yankee thrift cannot keep it away. In the new life which our growing fashion of summering by the sea is bringing to Martha's Vineyard, it is to be hoped that the pleasant traces of the old may be well preserved. But lest it be all swept away, we advise our tourists who would see the best of their own land to see it for themselves. Certainly no part of our long shore line has as much to attract and hold the reasonable traveler. N. S. Shaler. LAND AND SEA. THE green land sings her song of praise The blue sea lacks not anything, Hiram Rich. - RECENT LITERATURE.1 MISS NORA PERRY, like Miss Lucy Larcom, has a name so gracefully like the musical pseudonyms which ladies affect in literature, that when, a great many years ago, one of the first numbers of this magazine made her known as the author of After the Ball, most people said, "Nora Perry? Yes, yes. But what's her real name?" Since that time she has tried much to make her real name remembered; and if she is still chiefly known as the author of that poem, it is not because her other pieces are not very well, or for the most part less than good. She cheerfully and wisely honors After the Ball as the public favorite, and calls her new book - which we believe is also her first book - after it; and indeed it is her most characteristic effort. It is not easy, we find on reading it over, to say in just what its charm lies; but it is perhaps in its skillful suggestion of a very sweet, natural situation. Two young girls sit down before the fire in their night-gowns, and comb out their hair and talk over the delights of the ball from which they have just come, till the fire dies out, and then they go prettily to bed, and dream of the dances and the favored partners. We are sorry to say that one of them dies before the year is out; this seems a very unnecessary bereavement of the reader, which Miss Perry would have spared him if she had had the artistic courage to stop when her poem was really done. But this courage belongs only to the highest artists, and it must be owned in her behalf that she does not make such a mere morgue of her book as ladies are apt to do. Very few of her young girls die; not many come off with broken hearts from their love-affairs; not above two, we think, are of doubtful character; all which is vastly comforting to such old-fashioned people as believe that no woman is so fascinating as a pure, happy, and reasonably well one. We do not mind that such a girl should like waltzing and 1 After the Ball, and other Poems. By NORA PERBoston J. R. Osgood & Co. 1875. RY. Songs of Two Worlds. (Second Series.) By A New Writer. Second Edition. London: Henry S. King & Co. 1874. The Prophet: A Tragedy. By BAYARD TAylor. Boston J. R. Osgood & Co. 1874. Poems. By CELIA THAXTER. New and Enlarged Edition. New York: Hurd and Houghton. 1874. The Hanging of the Crane. By HENRY WADS Through twenty Aprils' rain and mist, Here, very delicately suggested character is added to the charmingly suggested situation, and the poem is really an advance upon After the Ball, in this. It is mighty pretty also, as Master Pepys would say, to observe with what playful tenderness Miss Perry touches in the likeness of her heroine, and as it were caresses her into a bewitch ing reality. We notice that women very commonly have this fashion with their literary inventions, and seem to fall in love with the pretty girls of their fancy, just as women in life have pets of their own sex and must be kissing them; whereas men do but seldom embrace the creatures of their brains. On the whole, we like this way of most authoresses; it is at any rate better than George Eliot's, who seems often to hate her handsome women as far as she can see them, and is apt to bring them to some bad end or other. Tying her Bonnet under her Chin is another of the poems in which Miss Perry notably has this way with her heroine; and there are but few in which she has it not. That little ballad is very famous, and is probably in as many scrap-books, and destined to as much undying immortality This we think sweet and musical and ' finished, without being more than finished as, by the way, The Romance of a Rose has been since it appeared in these pages. The two new stanzas added to the poem rub in a not necessary inference with a very heavy hand. However, they do not spoil the ballad, which the reader may read, omitting them. In fine, we cannot help openly wishing good fortune to this little book. Its mood is so good, and its art on the whole so blameless, that we do not care if it is not very lofty or profound. The pieces often seem to us written in the atmosphere of a young lady's first year in society, and we mean that they are the more pleasing for this reason. They are full of faith in the importance of glances and of gloves, of attitudes and of tones-and doubtless these things are important. They certainly are so to all the youth of the world, and were so once to all its middle-age; and who would not breathe again that lamp-lit or moon-lit air, and go about to a golden gittern's tune? Not that we know what a golden gittern is, but at twenty one does not stop to measure phrases; and as we turn over Miss Perry's pages, we seem distinctly to have recovered that epoch. -We sometimes fancy that the peremptory mood of criticism is not the best for valuing certain gentle, negative kinds of poetry, and that the true estimate of a book like Songs of Two Worlds would be made by the leisure that reads books without the latent intention of reviewing them. To us these Songs appear in great part rather slow and pale and thin, but we have come upon passages here and there that make us think an ampler patience would find them better. They seldom move outside of a pretty definite circle of quiet meditation upon various earthly conditions, with a gentle, somewhat mystical rise toward faith in better things after death; and when they do leave this circle, it is hardly to their advantage, or ours. Yet in one poem, The Organ Boy, there is a glimmer of humor, which makes us doubt whether the author might not have enlarged his range in the direction of a light, pensive satire. He is looking at a Roman organ-boy, as the final result of Roman supremacy in arts, wars, and politics, and he wonders what shall be the outcome of English supremacy after as long a time. Shall they sail to new continents, Or turn strange reverse — Not English, but angels' Shall this tale be told Of Romans to be As of Romans of old? Shall they too have monkeys Try their luck with an engine We are bound to say, however, that in such more deliberate satires as we find in his book, the author's touch is anything but light or skillful. In most of his work are a tenderness and a sweetness that to be sure do not greatly move, but which nevertheless appeal to kindred feelings in the reader, and if his sentiment is never keen, it is always delicate. The last poem in the book is so much better than the rest that in quoting it we feel obliged to guard the reader against inferring too much. A REMONSTRANCE. If ever, for a passing day, My careless rhymes shall gain to please, I would that those who read may say, "Left he no more than these?" For sure it is a piteous thing Not from high peak to peak alone Our faithful footsteps care to guide, But oft by plains of sand and stone, Dull wastes, and, nought beside : Who the low, crawling verse prolong, A straight road, by a stagnant stream, A babble of sound, like that flat noise Grave error; since not all of life Are rare for all, -no food for song Only when heart is fired and brain, -In Mr. Taylor's tragedy of The Prophet (wherein he follows many lines of the familiar Mormon history), every one must perceive the clearness and fineness with which the character of David Starr, the prophet, is presented. He is the only son of a hard-headed farmer, who never believes in his son's vocation, and of a wife long barren, who, when David came, looked on him as peculiarly from the Lord, yet who, while she gave him all the pride and tenderness of her heart, never gave his gift implicit belief. It was for a younger woman, the girl who became his wife, to do this, and it is her loving faith, and the simple, inspiring credulity of his neighbors, that work upon David till he feels himself a prophet indeed. How do the religious impostures arise? Mr. Taylor, without answering this question, has dealt with it wisely and suggestively. David to the very last never perhaps wholly believes in himself, but he accepts the self-delusion of his followers as proof of his prophetic mission, while they wait in patience for proof from him; he is simple, devout, anxious, and earnest throughout. Even Nimrod Kraft, the designing high-priest, who act ively promotes the imposture, we do not feel to be wholly false. These characters are treated by the poet as we believe the historian must finally treat the founders of Mormonism, with large allowance for the tricks that fervent hope, religious enthusiasm, and sacerdotal ambition play upon human nature. When the prophet and his followers quit their native region for their city of refuge in the West, a beautiful and willful woman of the world joins them, having fallen in love with David; and through her desire and the cunning of the high-priest, a revelation sanctioning polygamy is juggled out of the prophet. This alarms some of the believers, who plot with the Gentiles of the backwoods against the hierarchy: one of the believing conspirators is murdered by order of Nimrod Kraft; the Gentiles attack the city, and David is killed, upon whom dying a self-knowledge falls too late for him to utter it. He can only recognize the supremacy of love in the face of his first wife, the faithful and devoted bride of his youth. Here, the reader sees, is material for mighty effects; but it is a curious trait of this drama that there is so little drama in it. The situation is there again and again; the points are clearly made; but there is no passion, no exalted feeling to avail of them. So it seems to us. There is suggestion of the great tragedy that might be where a woman like Livia loves so much that she is willing to see her sex thrust back into patriarchal barbarism, if so she may share the heart of another's husband, and where Rhoda suffers a bereavement a thousand fold worse than widowhood, but the tragedy is somehow absent. By some mischance the poet's performance falls short of his thoroughly good intention; he amplifies and expatiates where he should have been brief and sharp, and he labors out his suggestion. On the whole, it affects us like work begun, dropped, and then returned to after a long interval, and finished in haste too great for condensation. The art declines after the first act, which we think good, solid work, well felt, if not fervently felt, and remarkable for the subtly managed conversion of David to full selfbelief through the half-feigned faith of Nimrod Kraft in him. The characters of David's father and mother are here extremely well sketched. When Mr. Taylor makes the hard old man say such a thing as "I always counted less than likely seemed; he shows an uncommon insight into the naturally superstitious working of the common mind; and that is a very fortunate stroke by which he makes David's mother, who has been blaming her son for flightiness at the outset of his career, turn and take his part at the first word of blame from his father. The camp-meeting exhorter's strain is fairly caught, but Peter's vernacular does not seem quite frankly dealt with, nor quite assimilated. In fine, the drama strikes us as embodying the materials of a poem, a tragedy, and not as being a poem. But after his Lars, Mr. Taylor can afford for once to make a failure. -A new and enlarged edition of Mrs. Thaxter's poems is something to be glad of, though we are not sure but it would have been better to print separately a new volume of verse than to add the fresh pieces to those already collected. The additions do not affect the general character of the volume. The strings of this shell are few, and the tones are not many: sometimes the instrument seems not different from the shell that one picks up on the shore, and putting to his ear hears in it forever the hollow murmur, the remote, faint sobbing of the sea. What gives such poetry its charm is its unfailing truthfulness within its narrow range. Never a false note is struck; neither ship nor ocean is painted, but an air fresh and pure and wholesome breathes from the very sea as you read. It is true that Mrs. Thaxter before her song is done is very likely to tell you the moral of it outright; but this is the fault of nearly all American poets, from the greatest to the least. Among the newly collected poems here, we like especially In Kittery Churchyard, which our readers have seen, and May Morning, which they have not seen. In the latter poem the very spirit of the weather seems to be caught, and expressed: MAY MORNING. Warm, wild, rainy wind, blowing fitfully, sea, What shall fail to answer thee? What thing shall withstand The spell of thine enchantment, flowing over sea and land? All along the swamp-edge in the rain I go; I watch across the shining pool my flock of ducks that sail. Redly gleam the rose-haws, dripping with the wet, Fruit of sober autumn, glowing crimson yet; |