troth, but it is one never to be portrayed too often or too tenderly, and it is not desecrated, but ennobled by the handling.  It is refreshing to be able to say for Miss Prescott that she absolutely reaches the end of the book without a suicide or a murder, although the heroine for a moment meditates the one and goes to the theatre to behold the other.  The dialogue, usually a weak point with this writer, is here for better managed than usual, having her customary piquancy, with less of disfigurement from flippancy and bad puns.  The plot shows none of those alarming pieces of incongruity and bathos which have marred some of her stories.  And one may fancy that it is not far to seek for the originals of Azarian, Charmian, and Madame Sarator.

It is the style of the book, however, to which one must revert with admiration, not unmingled with criticism, and, it may be, a trifle of just indignation.  There are not ten living writers in America of whom it can be said that their style is in itself a charm,—­that it has the range, the flexibility, the delicacy, the ease, the strength, which constitute permanent power,—­that it is so saturated with life, with literary allusion, with the symbolism of Nature, as to make us dwell on the mere sentences with delight, apart from all thought of argument or theme.  This it is to be a literary artist; and as Miss Prescott may justly claim to rank among these favored ones, she must be tried by the code which befits her station.  There is not, perhaps, another individual among us who could have written the delicious descriptions of external Nature which this book contains,—­not one of the multitude of young artists, now devoting their happy hours to flower-painting, who can depict color by color as she depicts it by words.  We hold in our hands an illuminated missal, some Gospel of Nature according to June or October, as the case may be.  The price she pays for this astonishing gift is to be often overmastered by it, to be often betrayed into exuberant and fantastic phrases, and wanderings into the realm of words unborn.  One fancies the dismay of the accomplished corrector of the University Press, as his indignant pencil hung over “incanting” and “reverizing” and “cose.”  Yet closer examination always shows that she, too, has studied grammar and dictionary, algebra and the Greek alphabet; and her most daring verbal feats are never vague or wayward, for there is always an eager and accurate brain behind them.  She dares too much to escape blunders, yet, after all, commits fewer in proportion than those who dare less.  The basis of all good writing is truth in details; and her lavish wealth of description would be a gaudy profanation, were it not based on a fidelity of observation which is Thoreau-like, so far as it goes.  “Sabbatia sprays, those rosy ghosts that haunt the Plymouth ponds,”—­“the cardinal, with the very glitter of the stream it loves meshed like a silver mist behind its scarlet sheen,”—­“the