The readers who had shaken their heads over the unsuccessful story of “Morton’s Hope” were startled by the appearance of this manly and scholarly essay.  This young man, it seemed, had been studying,—­studying with careful accuracy, with broad purpose.  He could paint a character with the ruddy life-blood coloring it as warmly as it glows in the cheeks of one of Van der Helst’s burgomasters.  He could sweep the horizon in a wide general outlook, and manage his perspective and his lights and shadows so as to place and accent his special subject with its due relief and just relations.  It was a sketch, or rather a study for a larger picture, but it betrayed the hand of a master.  The feeling of many was that expressed in the words of Mr. Longfellow in his review of the “Twice-Told Tales” of the unknown young writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne:  “When a new star rises in the heavens, people gaze after it for a season with the naked eye, and with such telescopes as they may find. . . .  This star is but newly risen; and erelong the observation of numerous star-gazers, perched up on arm-chairs and editor’s tables, will inform the world of its magnitude and its place in the heaven of”—­not poetry in this instance, but that serene and unclouded region of the firmament where shine unchanging the names of Herodotus and Thucydides.  Those who had always believed in their brilliant schoolmate and friend at last felt themselves justified in their faith.  The artist that sent this unframed picture to be hung in a corner of the literary gallery was equal to larger tasks.  There was but one voice in the circle that surrounded the young essayist.  He must redeem his pledge, he can and will redeem it, if he will only follow the bent of his genius and grapple with the heroic labor of writing a great history.

And this was the achievement he was already meditating.

In the mean time he was studying history for its facts and principles, and fiction for its scenery and portraits.  In “The North American Review” for July, 1847, is a long and characteristic article on Balzac, of whom he was an admirer, but with no blind worship.  The readers of this great story-teller, who was so long in obtaining recognition, who “made twenty assaults upon fame and had forty books killed under him” before he achieved success, will find his genius fully appreciated and fairly weighed in this discriminating essay.  A few brief extracts will show its quality.

“Balzac is an artist, and only an artist.  In his tranquil, unimpassioned, remorseless diagnosis of morbid phenomena, in his cool method of treating the morbid anatomy of the heart, in his curiously accurate dissection of the passions, in the patient and painful attention with which, stethoscope in hand, finger on pulse, eye everywhere, you see him watching every symptom, alive to every sound and every breath, and in the scientific accuracy with which he portrays the phenomena which have been the subject of his investigation,—­in