Azarian:  An Episode.  By Harriet E. Prescott, Author of “The Amber Gods,” etc.  Boston:  Ticknor & Fields.

If one opened the costly album of some rare colorist, and became bewildered amid successive wreaths of pictured flowers, with hues that seemed to burn, and freshness that seemed fragrant, one could hardly quarrel with a few stray splashes of purple or carmine spilt heedlessly on the pages.  Such a book is “Azarian”; and if few are so lavish and reckless with their pigments as Harriet Prescott, it is because few have access to such wealth.  If one proceeds from the theory that all life in New England is to be pictured as bare and pallid, it must seem very wrong in her to use tints so daring; but if one believes that life here, as elsewhere, may be passionate as Petrarch and deep as Beethoven, there appears no reason why all descriptive art should be Quaker-colored.

Nature and cultivation gave to this writer a rare inventive skill, an astonishing subtilty in the delineation of character, and a style perhaps unequalled among contemporaries in a certain Keats-like affluence.  Yet her plots have usually been melodramatic, her characters morbid, and her descriptions overdone.  These are undoubtedly great offences, and have grievously checked her growing fame.  But the American public, so ready to flatter early merit, has itself to thank, if that flattery prove a pernicious atmosphere.  That fatal cheapness of immediate reputation which stunts most of our young writers, making the rudiments of fame so easy to acquire, and fame itself so difficult,—­which dwarfs our female writers so especially that not one of them, save Margaret Fuller, has ever yet taken the pains to train herself for first-class literary work,—­has no doubt had a transient influence on Harriet Prescott.  Add to this, perhaps, the common and fatal necessity of authorship which pushes even second-best wares into the market.  It is evident, that, with all the instinct of a student and an artist, she has been a sensation-writer against her will.  The whole structure of “Azarian,” which is evidently a work of art and of love, indicates these higher aspirations, and shows that she is resolved to nourish them, not by abandoning her own peculiar ground, but by training her gifts and gradually exorcising her temptations.  Like her “Amber Gods,” the book rests its strength on its descriptive and analytic power, not on its events; but, unlike that extraordinary story, it is healthful in its development and hopeful in its ending.  The name of “An Episode” seems to be given to it, not in affectation, but in humility.  It is simply a minute study of character, in the French style, though with a freshness and sweetness which no Frenchman ever yet succeeded in transferring into language, and which here leave none of that bad taste in the mouth of which Charlotte Bronte complained.  The main situation is one not new in fiction, being simply unequal love and broken