White Wings:  A Yachting Romance.  By William Black.  New York:  Harper & Brothers.—­Roy and Viola.  By Mrs. Forrester.  Philadelphia:  J.B.  Lippincott & Co.—­The Wellfields.  By Jessie Fothergill.  (Leisure-Hour Series.) New York:  Holt & Co.—­Troublesome Daughters.  By L.B.  Walford. (Leisure—­Hour Series.) New York:  Holt & Co.—­Brigitta.  By Berthold Auerbach. (Leisure—­Hour Series.) New York:  Holt & Co.

There is a time appointed to read novels—­a time which belongs, like that of other good things, to youth, when the real and the ideal merge into each other, and even the most practical beliefs turn upon the notion that the world was created for ourselves, and that the general system of things is bound to furnish circumstances and incidents which shall flatter our unsatisfied desires.  It seems a pity that it should not fall to the lot of the critic to write down his impression of new books at this epoch, when he is most fitted to enjoy them.  When romance and other delights have blankly vanished—­“gone glimmering through the dreams of things that were”—­he is scarcely fitted to trust the worth of his own impressions.  Reading from mere idle curiosity or with critical intentions, and reading with delight, with eager absorption in the story and an eager desire to know how it turns out, are two different matters.  The loss of this capacity for enjoyment of the every-day novel is not a subject for self-gratulation, coming as it does from our own absence of imagination and from narrowing instead of increasing powers.  That period of our existence when we could read anything which offered should be looked back upon with a feeling of purely admiring regret, and in our efforts to master the novel of to-day we should endeavor to bring back the glory and the sweetness of the early dream.

It is not so very long ago that Mr. William Black’s novels began to charm us.  He did not take Fame at a single leap, but wooed her patiently, and suffered many a repulse.  His first book, Ion; or, Marriage, was probably the very worst novel ever written by a man who was finally to make a great success. The Daughter of Heth achieved this result, and The Strange Adventures of a Phaeton, A Princess of Thule and Macleod of Dar deepened, one by one, the witchery the first threw over us.  The author’s power was especially shown in investing his maidens with glamour and piquancy:  Coquette and Sheila led their captives away from the suffocating dusts and the burning heats of life.  Then his backgrounds were so well chosen—­those mysterious reaches of the far northern seas, the slow twilights over the heaving ocean, the swift dawns, the storms and the lightnings, and the glad blue skies.  Even the music of the bagpipes inspired lamentations only less sweet than notes of joy.  Mr. Black still has lovely girls; his yachts still pitch and roll and scud over the tossed and misty Hebridean seas; there are the same magical splendors of air and sky and water and shores; the wail of the pibroch is heard as of yore—­