f syllables. He counts the number
of cabbages in a field, of cows in a pasture, and tells us how many
times a squirrel ran up (or down) a given tree in a given time. He
informs us that the bark of the shagbark is shaggy, that the
sleep-at-noon slumbers at mid-day, that moss is apt to grow on fallen
tree-trunks in damp places,--treats us as the old alchemists do, who
give us a list of the materials out of which gold (if it had any moral
sense) would at once consent to be made, but somehow won't,--and leaves
us impressed with that very dead certainty, that things are so-and-so,
which is the result of verses that are only so-so.

Readers of the "Atlantic" need not be told that Dr. Palmer is not a
descriptive poet of this fashion. They have known how to appreciate his
sketches of East Indian life, so vivid, picturesque, and imaginative
that they could make "Griffins" feel twinges of liver-complaint, and so
true that we have heard them pronounced "incomparable" by men familiar
with India. Dr. Palmer is no mere describer; he sees with the eye of a
poet, touches only what is characteristic, and, while he seems to
surrender himself wholly to the Circe Imagination, retains the polished
coolness of the man of the world, and the _brownness_ of the man of the
nineteenth century. He not only knows how to observe, but how to
write,--both of them accomplishments rare enough in an age when
everybody is ready to contract for their display by the column. His
style is nervous and original, not harassingly pointed like a
chestnut-burr, but full of _esprit_ or wit diffused,--that Gallic leaven
which pervades whole sentences and paragraphs with an indefinable
lightness and palatableness. It is a thoroughly American style, too, a
little over-indifferent to tradition and convention, but quite free of
the _sic-semper-tyrannis_ swagger. Uncle Bull, who is just like his
nephew in thinking that he has a divine right to the world's oyster,
cannot swallow it properly till he has donned a white choker, and
refuses to be comforted when Jonathan disposes of it in his rapid way
with the shell for a platter. We confess that we prefer the
free-and-easy manner in its proper place to the diplomatic way of always
treating the reader with sentiments of the highest consideration, and
like a book all the more for having an Occidental flavor.

But it is not merely or chiefly as being among the cleverest and
liveliest of modern light literature that we value Dr.