color of mingled shame and joy;” while on more especial occasions we are assured that her face is “made all of poppies,” that it “changes from poppy-color to milk, and back from milk to poppy-color,” that it “keeps shifting from frightened white to mortified red, and back again,” and, better than all, that “cheek and chin and pearl-fair throat grow all one rose-red flame,” with which triumph of compound adjectives we will close our quotations, only remarking that Gillian’s blushing chin rivals the achievement of Ursula in “John Halifax,” who, we are gravely told, colored over her throat, neck, and arms.

All honor to the lady Olivia, who has taught us how to make a rational inventory of a woman’s charms!  “Item, two lips indifferent red; item, two gray eyes with lids to them; item, one neck, one chin, and so forth.”  To these let us add, item, one blush indifferent rosy, and then have done with the subject forever.

A.R.

* * * * *

LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

“Nathaniel Parker Willis.”  By Henry A.Beers. 
“Edgar Allan Poe.”  By George E. Woodbury. 
(American Men of Letters Series.)
Boston:  Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

The American Men of Letters Series is giving us some excellent biographies, well written, the facts well assimilated and grouped, and the whole treatment so accurate and graphic as to be full not only of instruction but of entertainment.  Formerly American biography was so deficient in just those qualities which endear English biographical literature to us, that we were inclined to believe that the fault was inherent in Americans and American life, that our days and works lacked picturesqueness and color and left no salient points for the chronicler to seize.  We now see that the meagre harvests of former biographers were due to their hasty and superficial generalizations.  For at least three of the volumes in this series—­the life of James Fenimore Cooper and the two now before us—­may be favorably compared with the best work in the English Men of Letters Series, which is indeed high praise.  Unusual and striking as were the incidents in the life of Cooper, they had completely dropped out of sight of the present generation.  The biographers of Willis and Poe had no such advantage.  Willis is still remembered, not only as a litt?teur and journalist, but as a man about town, while legend has never ceased to be busy with the memory of Poe, so that the traditions of his strange career are curiously linked to and incorporated with his best-known works.