us, they breathe about us an atmosphere of gentle and delicious melancholy like the soft azure haze spread over meadow and hills by the faint south-wind.  With fresh incident on every leaf, with a charm in every scene, its spell is enthralling, and its chapters are enchanted.  There is no fault in it; nothing can be more perfect, nothing more beautiful.  One may put “Consuelo” side by side with “Charles Auchester,” but what novel in the wide world deserves a place by “Counterparts”?  It was worth having lived, to have once thrown broadcast such handfuls of beauty.

Between the publication of Miss Sheppard’s second book and “Rumour” two others were issued,—­“Beatrice Reynolds” and “The Double Coronet,”—­for which one wishes there were some younger sister, some Acton or Ellis, to whom to impute them,—­evidently the result of illness, weariness, and physical weakness, perhaps wrung from her by inexorable necessity, but which should never have been written.  In the last, in spite of its very Radcliffean air, there are truly terrible things, as Gutilyn and his green-eyed child bear witness; but the other reminds one, as nearly as a modern book may do so, of no less a model than the redoubtable “Thaddeus of Warsaw!” But Miss Sheppard had already written all that at present there was to say; rest was imperative till the intermittent springs again overflowed.  “Rumour,” which approached the old excellence, was no result of a soul’s ardor,—­merely very choice work.  Notwithstanding, everything is precious that filters through such a medium, and in these three publications she found opportunity for expressing many a conviction and for weaving many a fancy; moreover, she was afraid of no one, and never minced matters, therefore they are interspersed with criticisms:  she praised Charlotte Bronte, condemned George Sand, ridiculed Chopin, reproved Elizabeth Browning, and satirized “Punch.”  In her last book there was a great, but scarcely a good change of style, she having been obliged by its thinness to pepper the page with Italics; still these are only marks of a period of transition, and in spite of them the book is priceless.  Judging from internal evidence, she here appears to have frequented more society, and the contact of this carelessly marrying world with her own pure perception of right struck the spark which kindled into “Almost a Heroine.”  Here awakens again that graceful humor which is the infallible sign of health, and which was so lightly inwrought through the earlier volumes.  Reading it over, one is struck with its earnestness, its truth and noble courage,—­one feels that lofty social novels, which might have infused life and principle and beauty into the mass of custom, were promised in this, and are now no longer a possibility.  And herein are the readers of this magazine especially affected; since there is no reason to suppose that the work promised and begun by her for these pages would not have been the peer of her best production,