Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 9.djvu/94

78 A story modest in aim, but cleverly executed and remarkably interesting as a piece of narration, will lie found in "Next Door," by Clara Louise Burnham. This author writes agreeably, in a clear, fluent style, and describes the domestic and social life of our day in a manner which merits high praise. She has a good eye for character as well, and in one of her personages, Aunt Ann Eaton, has given us a genuine portrait of a woman which many people will admire for its felicitous touches. The other people who figure in the story are perhaps less carefully discriminated; but unless it be the antipode of Aunt Ann in the city matron, who also presents familiar traits, the remaining characters are all interesting to the reader. The quartet of lovers especially enlists sympathy. It is on their experiences that the story turns. We see what its inevitable result will be, for the writer of this book is not one of those authors who are given to harrowing the sensibilities of his audience; but we follow the tale none the less, always entertained by it, and with a curiosity as to how the end is to be brought about, which is more agreeable than anxious misgiving as to what is to be done with the characters. This story, as we have said, is charmingly told. It has some of the qualities which have made the works of that English writer known as "The Duchess" popular, without her effusiveness, sometime slang and ultra-romanticism. The conversations are particularly good. They are easy and natural, and they well illustrate much of the manner of the day which is found among young people. Margery is agreeably and often spicily vivacious, and Ray Ingalls is a good specimen of a genuine, warm hearted youth. The humor of the introductions of two of the characters in the opening chapter is especially neat, and we can promise readers a genuine entertainment from the story throughout. ["Next Door," by Clara Louise Burnham. Boston: Ticknor & Co.: 12mo, pp. 371.]

The life of no man of letters could be more welcome than that of the admired, honored, beloved poet of "creative imagination, airy fancy, exquisite grace, harmony and simplicity, rhetorical brilliancy, and incisive force," who vitalized everything he touched in verse by the sympathy of his nature. He always touched humanity with voice or pen tenderly. Humanity's response is in the welcome given these exquisite volumes, which could not have been written with more appreciative fervor, or more modest, classic phrase, and could not have been issued with more delicate elegance than from the press of Ticknor & Co. As a biography it is complete in a sense that no other writer could have made it. The boyhood life is tenderly revealed, not from the standpoint of a literary critic, not as one who tries to write, but the most delicately sensitive memories of a devoted brother. School days and college years are briefly hut significantly portrayed. Where the professional biographer would have reveled in the abundant material, we are given all that is of any real interest without any of the tediousness that usually afflicts. In turning the pages as the paper-knife runs through the uncut leaves, the impression is that the biographer tarries too long on his early foreign travels, but as we read, and find Mr. Longfellow's choicest descriptions, with a vein of wit rarely revealed by him intermingled with original art sketches, we regret that it so soon shades into his professional days at Bowdoin, only to rejoice us by emerging into a second European tour, prolonged but delightful.

The Cambridge home, life, work and friends are left to appear as visitors here and there, delicate glimpses in journals, letters and poems. One of the most genuine phases of the writer's art is the ease, good taste, and discriminating judgment with which he brings into view for a moment's entertaining thought the characters worth knowing in both hemispheres for a half-century. The world is richer for having in its libraries and upon its tables two such elegant volumes as Ticknor & Co. have given us in Samuel Longfellow's life of his brother, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

"A bouquet of native New England flowers, and the flowers have a peculiar beauty and fragrance too."—Hartford Courant.

The short stories in this volume are of the very essence of New England. A somewhat fanciful revery lends its peculiar title to the book, but the "Other People's" offspring are the individual product of the soil, full of the grit, the doggedness and the grim humor that came over with our grandparents' furniture in the Mayflower. These stories are the fruit and blossom of all that is noblest and best in the qualities of the Puritan, and it may be that their appreciation—though not their beauty or their power—will be restricted by reason of what is distinctive and individual about them. Surely no short story of recent years has surpassed "The Deacon's Week" in pathos, in artistic truth, in the inspiration of a sublime and noble purpose. It would seem that no one could rise from its perusal without an impulse toward kindness and charity and a sense of benefit received. Without a word of moralizing or tawdry reflection, it gives the same lesson that is practiced out by true and manly conduct and unselfishness. And all the time the perfection of the picture as a work of art, as a truthful portrait set out with exquisite literary finish, captures the mind and entrances the imagination.