If “A Marsh Island” shows no distinct advance upon Miss Jewett’s earlier work, it is yet a pretty, artistic product which delicately emphasizes the author’s best points and gives us her distinct charm without any waste of effects.  Her feeling for rural life and her clear comprehension of rural people were never better displayed than in this little story.  A generous play of late-summer and autumn radiance lights up its every nook and corner; it is mellow with warm color and odorous of late fruits and flowers.  We cannot help finding the artist visitor, that product of the bloom of Boston civilization, a little hackneyed and time-worn.  He has surely done his part in literature, and may retire to the heaven of the dilettante.  But all the inhabitants of Marsh Island are human and attractive, and the untiring industries of the well-ordered household soothe one like the rhythm of a song.  The bizarre, incongruous, but, upon the whole, satisfactory specimen of New England “help” which Miss Jewett generally introduces finds an excellent example here in the person of Temperance Kipp.  Squire Owen is a genial man, so overflowing with generous nature that he can afford to fill out the more meagre humanities of his wife, who has susceptibilities, tempers, and moods.  “They used to tell a story,” he one day remarks to Mrs. Owen, with great satisfaction, when she has a distinct grievance about clothes,—­“I do’ know but you’ve heard it, —­about old Sergeant Copp an’ his wife, that was always quarrellin’.  Somebody heard her goin’ on one day.  Says she, ’I do wish somebody’d give me a lift as fur as Westmarket.  I do feel’s if I ought to buy me a cap.  I ain’t got a decent cap to my back:  if I was to die to-morrow, I ain’t got no cap that’s fit to lay me out in.’  ‘Blast ye,’ says he, ’why didn’t ye die when ye had a cap?’” The more impassioned side of life does not suit Miss Jewett so well as the humorous and pastoral; but each detail about her heroine is attractive, and nothing in recent fiction, is more true, touching, and womanly than Doris’s journey to Westmarket in the autumnal dawn to keep her lover at home from the fishing-banks.

“The Duchess Emilia” is one of those stories which ought to be withdrawn from the province of criticism by the fact of their being the delight of the reader, thrilling him with their weirdness and firing his imagination by their splendid audacity.  If the attention is so feebly grasped as to permit one to reason about an impossible situation, it becomes at once extravagant and absurd.  One would require to be considerably carried away by illusion to be moved by Mr. Wendell’s story.  The hero is a New-Englander, born of mad parents (they met while both were patients in an insane asylum); and this inherited curse would seem to be enough for any hero to totter under.  It becomes unimportant, however, when we discover that he has furthermore been taken possession of at birth by the spirit of a wicked and fascinating Italian duchess,