urated with life, with
literary allusion, with the symbolism of Nature, as to make us dwell on
the mere sentences with delight, apart from all thought of argument or
theme. This it is to be a literary artist; and as Miss Prescott may
justly claim to rank among these favored ones, she must be tried by the
code which befits her station. There is not, perhaps, another individual
among us who could have written the delicious descriptions of external
Nature which this book contains,--not one of the multitude of young
artists, now devoting their happy hours to flower-painting, who can
depict color by color as she depicts it by words. We hold in our hands
an illuminated missal, some Gospel of Nature according to June or
October, as the case may be. The price she pays for this astonishing
gift is to be often overmastered by it, to be often betrayed into
exuberant and fantastic phrases, and wanderings into the realm of words
unborn. One fancies the dismay of the accomplished corrector of the
University Press, as his indignant pencil hung over "incanting" and
"reverizing" and "cose." Yet closer examination always shows that she,
too, has studied grammar and dictionary, algebra and the Greek alphabet;
and her most daring verbal feats are never vague or wayward, for there
is always an eager and accurate brain behind them. She dares too much to
escape blunders, yet, after all, commits fewer in proportion than those
who dare less. The basis of all good writing is truth in details; and
her lavish wealth of description would be a gaudy profanation, were it
not based on a fidelity of observation which is Thoreau-like, so far as
it goes. "Sabbatia sprays, those rosy ghosts that haunt the Plymouth
ponds,"--"the cardinal, with the very glitter of the stream it loves
meshed like a silver mist behind its scarlet sheen,"--"the wide rhodora
marshes, where some fleece of burning mist seemed to be fallen and
caught and tangled in countless filaments upon the bare twigs,"--such
traits as these are not to be found in the newspapers nor in the
botanies. With all her seeming lavishness, she rarely wastes a word.
Though she may sometimes heap upon a frail hepatica some greater
accumulation of fine-spun fancies than its slender head will bear, she
yet can so characterize a flower with a touch that any one of its lovers
would know it without the name. If she hints at "those slipshod little
anemones that cannot stop to count their petals, but take one fro