Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 096.djvu/334

320 themselves would have drawn a picture more intense in its colouring than that of Eleanor on the dark and stormy bridal-morn, when she lay gasping on the bed, as her maid brought in the lace veil, and the orange-flowers, and theand, with a crushing presentiment of woe and killing anguish, watched what was going on, "as the wretched Mary Stuart might have watched the preparations for her toilet on the morning of her execution." When a sorrow-poisoned arrow of this sharp, merciless sort is to speed its way to the soul, few there are who can bend Mrs. Marsh's bow.

Her dramatic power of narrative is largely illustrated in "Ravenscliffe." For instance: in the conversational intrigues of Lady Wharncliffe with Randal and his bride—the panic at Lisburne Castle on the flight of Marcus, and the éclaircissement of Mr. Sullivan—the scene between Eleanor and Marcus in the wood—and, above all, that chef-d'œuvre of tragical description, justly compared to a parallel passage in the "Bride of Lammermoor," the wedding morning at Lidcote Hall. The catastrophe beneath the raven’s oak—is over-fraught with pain; one cannot forgive Marcus the bearishness of his embraces—he is as rough at a salute as at a horse-whipping, and in both cases occasions illimitable disaster. After this, the narrative flags sadly. In energy, interest, style, characterisation, there is a decline—and one almost wishes it were a galloping decline—for, with the exception of the very last stage of all, the book suffers a slow and steady atrophy, and dies by inches. The second Mrs. Langford and her son, Priest, are in every sense de trop; and the story is closed with a wish on the reader's part, that Mrs. Marsh had in this case, as in others, been a Dissenter front the Established Churchdom of three vols. post 8vo., and sided with the Nonconformists, who have faith in two.

Dispersed here and there throughout the tale we come across tid-bits of the picturesque—etched off in flowing but not careless style. Such is the description of the castle of Ravenscliffe, gloomily towering on a scaur, high over a rocky-bedded impetuous stream, and the vast ruinous old tree, of ante-Norman date, called the raven's oak, with its hoary, rugged, moss-grown trunks its huge coronet of branches, and its outspread arms swaying majestically to the rising and falling wind—a sublime relict of ages gone by. Such, too, the sketch of the stately castle of Lisburne, on the west coast of Ireland—that coast scooped out and hollowed by the waves of the Atlantic—encompassed by cloud-peaked mountains and precipitous cliffs, with grand torso-like islands to break the view of the wild sea, as it dashes its rushing waters against the cold grey crags. Or take the flight of Randal from Cambridge, on that dark November morning, when the sun was covered with low, heavy clouds—not dark thunder clouds, great and imposing, but elevating to look upon—but low, dusky, uncharacterised clouds, telling of mizzling rain—rain of that regular, voiceless, baptising, determined sort, which is more than sufficient to deaden any spirits and any courage—and follow the dishonoured fugitive along the mountain-path, running dimly discernible between coarse tufts of grass and sweet gale, and scanty knots of heath and gorse, winding among