Taking into consideration the ease with which Mr. Bret Harte won his laurels, and the belief which all his early admirers shared that here at last was the great American novelist, who was to hold a distinctive place in the world’s literature, he has perhaps not fulfilled expectations nor answered the demands upon his powers.  The very individuality of his work, its characteristic bias, has been, in point of fact, a hinderance and an impediment.  The unexpectedness of his first stories, the enchanted surprise, like that of a new and delicious vintage or a wonderful undiscovered chord in music,—­these effects are not easily made to recur with undiminished strength and charm.  However, one may generally find some bubbles of the old delightful elixir in Mr. Harte’s stories, and in this little group of them, regathered, we believe, from English magazines, each is interesting in its way, and each true to the author’s typical idea, which is to discover to his readers some heroic quality in unheroic human beings which transforms their whole lives before our eyes.

Mr. Thompson on his title-page announces himself as the author of two novels, “A Tallahassee Girl” and “His Second Campaign,” both of which we read with pleasure, and this impression led us to turn hopefully to a third by the same hand.  “At Love’s Extremes” does not, however, take our fancy.  If the author undertook to discuss a complex problem seriously, he has failed to make it clear or vital to the reader; and if the various episodes of Colonel Reynolds’s life are to be passed over as mere slight deviations from the commonplace, we can only say that we consider them too unpleasant and abhorrent to good taste to be imposed upon us so lightly.  There are also points of the story which seem to mock the good sense of the reader.  Has the author considered the state of mind of a young widow who has heard that her husband has been murdered in a street-brawl in Texas, who has mourned him for years, and then, after yielding to the solicitations of a new suitor and promising to marry him, learns from his own lips that it was his hand (although the act was one of self-defence) which sent her husband to his tragic death?  Mr. Thompson seems to violate the sanctities and the proprieties of womanhood in allowing the widow, after a faint interval of shock, to pass over this fact as unimportant.  This situation has, of course, its famous precedent in the scene in which Gloster wooes and wins the Lady Anne beside her murdered husband’s bier; but that is tragedy, and we moderns are, besides, more squeamish than the people of those mediaeval times.  In this story the situation becomes more logical, even if more absurd, after the return of the husband who was supposed to have been murdered.  With a good deal of effort to show powerful feeling, the characters in the book are all automatons, who say and do nothing with real thought or real passion.  The vernacular of the mountaineers seems to have been carefully studied, and is so thoroughly outlandish and so devoid of fine expressions that we are inclined to believe it more accurate than the poetic and musical dialects which it is the fashion to impose upon our credulity.  But it must be confessed that, with only his own rude and pointless patois in which to express himself, the Southern cracker becomes painfully devoid of interest, to say nothing of charm.