of fun and fancy was unexampled.  “Why, good gracious,” cried Madam Grundy, “we’ve got a genius among us fit last!  I always knew what it would come to!” “Got a fiddlestick!” says Mr. G.; “it’s only rockets.”  And there was no little watching and waiting for the sticks to come down.  We are afraid that many a respectable skeptic has a crick in his neck by this time; for we are of opinion that these are a new kind of rocket, that go without sticks, and stay up against all laws of gravity.

We expected a great deal from Dr. Holmes; we thought he had in him the makings of the best magazinist in the country; but we honestly confess we were astonished.  We remembered the proverb, “’Tis the pace that kills,” and could scarce believe that such a two-forty gait could be kept up through a twelvemonth.  Such wind and bottom were unprecedented.  But this was Eclipse himself; and he came in as fresh as a May morning, ready at a month’s end for another year’s run.  And it was not merely the perennial vivacity, the fun shading down to seriousness, and the seriousness up to fun, in perpetual and charming vicissitude;—­here was the man of culture, of scientific training, the man who had thought as well as felt, and who had fixed purposes and sacred convictions.  No, the Eclipse-comparison is too trifling.  This was a stout ship under press of canvas; and however the phosphorescent star-foam of wit and fancy, crowding up under her bows or gliding away in subdued flashes of sentiment in her wake, may draw the eye, yet she has an errand of duty; she carries a precious freight, she steers by the stars, and all her seemingly wanton zigzags bring her nearer to port.

When children have made up their minds to like some friend of the family, they commonly besiege him for a story.  The same demand is made by the public of authors, and accordingly it was made of Dr. Holmes.  The odds were heavy against him; but here again he triumphed.  Like a good Bostonian, he took for his heroine a schoolma’am, the Puritan Pallas Athene of the American Athens, and made her so lovely that everybody was looking about for a schoolmistress to despair after.  Generally, the best work in imaginative literature is done before forty; but Dr. Holmes should seem not to have found out what a Mariposa grant Nature had made him till after fifty.

There is no need of our analyzing “Elsie Venner,” for all our readers know it as well as we do.  But we cannot help saying that Dr. Holmes has struck a new vein of New-England romance.  The story is really a romance, and the character of the heroine has in it an element of mystery; yet the materials are gathered from every-day New-England life, and that weird borderland between science and speculation where psychology and physiology exercise mixed jurisdiction, and which rims New England as it does all other lands.  The character of Elsie is exceptional, but not purely ideal, like Cristabel and Lamia.  In Doctor Kittredge