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climbed the Head, seeking for thimble-berries. With a great longing she longed to go back; she could not wait another year to hear the beloved voices of the dear ones on the island; how could she live so long so far away from the familiar little cabin, the homelike shore, and the well-remembered wash and murmur of the sea?

But the city was fair too; it was full of life and 'eauty for her. The picture-galleries, the ay shops, the crowds of welldressed people, the delicious opera, gorgeous ball, and occasional pageant-all these filled her with a great satisfaction. Under their influences and those of a refined, luxurious home, she ripened into a woman of extraordinary beauty and attractiveness. She was the bright particular star of the fashionable season, and her romantic story, artless ways, and surpassing loveliness filled any gaps that her unfamiliarity with the gay world's ways might have made. Men do not readily adapt themselves to a new sphere of life, whether it be higher or lower; women have the art to conceal their unacquaintance with novel circumstances, and soon learn to seem as though they had never known any other. Mamie was as one born in the purple.

Obed poured out his strong, loving soul in long letters, which Mamie read in the rosy, velvety, curtained privacy of her own apartments with a guilty blush. She was halfafraid that the stately mirrors and supercilious satin damask hangings should discover how dreadfully crabbed was her lover's handwriting, and how he misused his capital letters. It was like a breath from the salt sea to read those dear, loving messages from Nautilus; but, somehow, her bronze Hebe looked with innocent surprise from its pedestal when Mamie's rosy fingers turned over the details of the welfare of the new litter of pigs, and the net results of the mackerel season. The Louis Quatorze chairs were interested but not pleased with Aunt Thankful's directions about the yarn stockings and the catnip tea. The girl was conscious that she was living two lives-one present and one passing away.

The winter melted, leaving Mamie a trifle weary; and a summer in the mountains rested her. She saw and loved the snowy, billowy peaks, which reminded her of the familiar white-crested, tumultuous waves which rose over the watery ridge of the sea, or sank into the long level of the placid valleys. The mountains and the great forests were new to this child of the sea, but they all oppressed her, and seemed to shut out the

sky. She longed for the free expanse of the ocean. So when the time came for her to choose between the capital and Nautilus Island, between her uncle and her fosterparents, she wondered reproachfully that any one could doubt how she would decide; and thus she astonished the city family by deliberately electing Aunt Thankful and Uncle Miah as her guardians. She would turn her back on the gauds of the gay world, and, with a little sigh for its soft light and color, go back to the rude home of her childhood and to Obed.

There was mourning as well as wonder when this decision was announced to the city family. And when Obed came out of his life-long seclusion, proud, yet timid, to claim his bride, he was coldly and disdainfully shut into a drawing-room to wait for Mamie. His manliness forbade him to be dismayed at the fairy-like splendors in which he found himself; but his heart sank somewhat as the untutored youth, fresh from the bare, hard life of the Maine sea-coast, contemplated the haughty walls gleaming with treasures of art, the gilded, carven furniture, the heavy drapery, and the multitude of costly objects scattered about in what seemed to him reckless profusion. And when Mamie, blushing and half shy, floated into the room, he was almost appalled. Could this radiant creature, adorned with fragile and costly textures, be his little foster-sister, his affianced bride? The first greeting over, he contemplated her from a distance, hot and cold by turns. was ready to fall down and worship, yet he was angry that she looked so rare and fine. It was not his Mamie; still it was her whom he adored.

He

To Mamie, Obed did not look changed; he was browner and a trifle taller; he wore the moustache which she had fancied for him; but it was not becoming, and, somehow, Obed did not fit into the picture. He did not sit easily on his satin chair, and his garments, awkwardly fitting as they were, were not in keeping with the brocade drapery behind him. All this ran through the girl's mind, and she vexedly thought how wrong it was to notice them, and yet how much more handsome Obed was in his white duck trousers and red flannel shirt than in that cheap-looking, shiny black coat. Poor Obed! he felt cheap-looking, and longed to be back on Nautilus with his own little girl again.

No word of criticism escaped Mamie's lips. All was well, and a torrent of talk swept away the first natural coolness of re

straint which fell on both. There were a thousand things to say and ask, and though, during the two or three days of Obed's stay, she had great difficulty in trying to make him fit into the life where she was so much at home, she still found her old friend as dear and loving as ever. He was still her Obed!

"I am Cinderella, and the clock strikes twelve," she said, as she laid aside "the fine feathers," and prepared for her return to Nautilus Island. Silk and satin trains were not suitable for her wild runs across the Bar; her laces would not "fit in" with the spruce boughs and sweet-brier of Gray's Head. So, amidst great wonder and lamentation in palatial city mansions, she went her way homeward with Obed.

The sunshine, softened and mellowed, came again with Mamie to Nautilus Island. Obed, proud and happy as a king, conducted his affianced bride to the old cottage; Aunt Thankful's hard features relaxed with joyful tears as she gathered in her arms her restored treasure. Old Miah sounded his nasa! trumpet loudly in the depths of his bandanna, and turned away, after a greet ing, to split firewood with unnecessary vigor. The girl brought back with her a greatly changed demeanor, but she was the same loving child as of yore. If she wove into her quiet browns and grays a stray bit of bright ribbon or lace, like a souvenir of her city life, it was not out of keeping with the somber woods, the dazzling shore, and the blue-green water that lapped the island. Her beauty was heightened by the accidental lights which gleamed in her quiet dress, and even undemonstrative Thankful Morey was constrained to say: "Wal, I dew declare you've grown to be a right proper young gal, and you allers wuz as putty as a pink."

The first excitement of returning over, Mamie tried to settle contentedly into the old order of things. She pranced about the little island like a child, revisiting all their old haunts, sitting on Black Rock with Obed for a moment, then darting to the dovehouse to call her pets, visiting the cow-yard to recognize the mild-eyed Brindle, inspecting the fish-flakes and listening half-inattentively to Obed's account of the net result of the season's catch. But, most of all, she delighted to chase across the Bar; it was not so easy a climb up Gray's Head as it once was, but the purple asters were as bright and the white amaranths as perfect as ever. The tide came in as it used, lacing the wet sand with its long streams of frothy spume, and chasing their steps with eager glee

as they ran to and from the Head to Nautilus.

Yet, somehow, when she tried to be quite satisfied with the dear old home, she was mortified and angry with herself that it was not easy to be so satisfied. Something ailed the place. It was clear that Aunt Thankful had not been so scrupulously neat about the house as when she was a younger woman. She had grown old and careless in a year and a half. The rooms were smaller and dingier than when Mamie went away. The ceilings were low, and her pure little bedroom smelt of her foster-mother's pipe. She laughed airily to herself about all these trifles: she should soon get over them.

"I cal'late," said Aunt Thankful confidentially to her good man, "that our little gal will build on an L on to the haouse when she and Obe are married. It'd be nuthin' more'n right, for she's forehanded naow."

"Wal, wal, don't less hurry the child; she's noways mean, and 'll dew the right thing when the time comes. I'spose she'll hev a sight o' money when she squares up with the Hortons ?"

"I don't knaow, but I would like to hev that I built onto the haouse. Mame wants me to git a help; that air Booden gal over to Somes's would be right handy. But no, I don't want none o' the pesky critters raound, breakin' more dishes than they are wuth, and spilin' vittles by the pailful. But I would like to hev that air L onto the haouse."

Mamie took great pleasure in Obed's manly, resolute ways; he was in refreshing contrast with the delicate young gentlemen whom she had known in the city. It was a little trying to her ideas of niceness that he should put his knife to his mouth at table; but then the three-tined steel forks were not just the thing to use as she would like to see him use them. These little non-essentials would be corrected when they were married. Married? She thought of that now with a little shiver. She was too young yet to take up life for herself. But she was true to Obed; she never, never could love anybody else, for he was noble, loving, and true as steel. Still, there was no hurry, for she had a great deal to do. And one of these things was to soften down some of the asperities which chafed her gentle soul about the family. Aunt Thankful must certainly learn to do without that shocking pipe; and she really did think that Uncle Miah might shave oftener; his gray stubbly beard detracted much from the beauty of his dear old face, never very handsome.

Aunt Thankful's eyes were not so old but they were sharp enough to see Mamie's unsatisfaction. "Wal," she said one day, "ef ye think them air sheets on yer bed air too coarse, I 'spose ye knaow where there's finer ones to be bought. But I hain't got no money to fool away on such extravagance at my time o' life."

"O Aunty," pleaded she.

"Wal, wal, my little pink, make 'em dew for naow; yer'll hev better when yer set up fur yerself."

These little disputes worried Obed, but Mamie and he never spoke to each other about them, and, before they knew it, a thin wall had risen up between them. It was thin, so thin, but cold; and they looked at each other through it. Then he remembered angrily the gentle criticisms which she had

"We've no opera on Nautilus, and I never heard one."

"You shall hear one some day, dear; but I guess we had better go home. Dinner is ready see, Aunt Thankful has hung the cloth in the window."

On the way down to the beach, a whim seized her to go across the Bar. "But the tide is coming in, and the ice is running to-day."

"Never mind," said the laughing girl; "I haven't been on the ice-cakes for so long, I want to take a run. You go in the boat and I'll beat you across."

In vain Obed pleaded and in vain commanded. "Will you go in my boat with me? Now or never," he said, meaningly.

"No, and never," she laughed gayly, and fled away, her bright red hood fluttering in breeze.

passed upon his unculture, he muttered to the bed took his way sullenly across the

himself; but he swore roundly at Aunt Thankful one day when she hinted that Mamie was "consider'ble uppish since she had been spiled by them Hortons."

He thought of the wondrous apparition of loveliness which had been revealed to him when he met her in the Horton drawingroom; and he reproached himself that he had been so eager to take her away from a station in life which seemed to have been made for her. After all, was she not the dove in the fish-hawk's nest? But he ground his teeth and kept everything to himself.

cove, making a wide détour to reach into clear water. And Mamie went on, her gayety gone-her heart was heavy; she looked yearningly after Obed's retreating form. "Poor boy!" she murmured; "I do not love him as I thought I did. But, before God who pities me, I must keep my word."

She set her teeth firmly as she whispered this to the spectral ice-cakes which came crowding up about her. The way was hard; the tide was flowing in rapidly, and the time she gained in running on the open sand was lost in climbing over the frequent sheets of treacherous ice. The ominous whisper of the sea grew loud and hoarse under the icy

Winter came on apace, and Obed sullenly consented to a postponement of their mar-shapes which hurried in upon the Bar, hiding riage until spring. They had long talks now, loving and tender, but sometimes fierce; for the girl had a temper of her own, and Obed was "very aggravating" at times. He was jealous as the grave; she was willful, prankish, and sometimes teased him until he was frenzied, and she was astonished at her own audacity; but she kept on teasing. And the thin veil of ice betwixt them did not melt.

They were sitting one day on the rocky ledge of Gray's Head, whither they had rowed in Obed's boat. The tide was coming in, and they watched the great spongy ice-cakes grinding together as they tumultuously huddled up the Bar. "How lovely this is," she said. "It somehow makes me think of the hurried, crashing, mournful music of an opera I once heard."

"Oh, cuss the opera," said Obed, roughly, for he was in one of his black moods, and she had been unconsciously worrying him.

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her from the shore and from Obed, who was standing up in his boat now and looking for her. Up, up crept the tide, gushing through the blocks of ice and chilling her poor little feet. Her slender hands were torn with the rough crystalline edges of the frozen sea-water over which she toiled; but she bravely struggled She was half way across, and could see the fish-flakes on the snowy bank, the old jolly-boat hauled up for the winter. How distant they were!

on.

But the water was rising. She must wade for it, if she got to clear water. Suddenly there was a tremor; the air was hushed and still, save where a little sob crept up from ice-covered Man-o'-War Reef. A jam of cefloes gave way with a noise like thunder, and great blue and white masses came crowding down across the Bar with the rising tide. Like a drove of white, hungry wolves, the fantastic shapes sped from shore to shore, sweeping everything before them. There

was a little cry as of a human note muffled in the sea, and the icy waves flowed silently over the Bar.

Obed's strained eyes saw no graceful figure climb the bank below the cottage, and from the island to Gray's Head the tide coursed in strong deep currents. Frantic, he pulled his boat through the hindering ice and sprang ashore. No dainty foot-prints led up from the island end of the bar; no form met his distracted vision. Shore and sky, ice, water, and stony-faced precipice looked pitifully at him, as he stood, speechless, in his great agony.

The news spread, as such news does, in the air, and from far and wide flocked the rough, compassionate sea-farers of the bay, searching for-it. They never found the form for which they sought.

As the sun went down, compassionately tinting the frosty shores with a rosy glow, John Clark, removing his seal-skin cap in deference to a great grief, tenderly handed Obed a little red hood which he had found on a floating sheet of ice.

And that was all. The Waif of Nautilus Island had returned to the sea whence she

came.

MR. LOWELL'S PROSE.

FOR several reasons, Mr. Lowell's prose, as well as his poetry, has almost altogether missed, hitherto, the homage of that sincere and serious criticism which alike his real merits, in either kind of composition, and the high rank to which the general consent of enlightened opinion has advanced him, should seem to have demanded. When he first began to publish, now nearly one whole. literary age ago, he was greeted by the powers of criticism that then were with a certain condescension of notice, magisterial, to be sure, in tone, but kindly, as exercised toward a young man personally well known to his censors, and affectionately regarded by them, of whom good things were justly to be expected in the future, but to whom it would meantime be premature to pay the compliment of a very thorough examination of his claims to permanent regard. There followed a considerable period of nearly unbroken silence on the part of Mr. Lowell, during which a tradition of his genius and accomplishments made the tour of cultivated minds, traveling outward from Boston through the slowly widening circle of the fellowship of American letters.

By the time that he appeared again in print, Mr. Lowell had thus an assured welcome of generous acclamation already awaiting him from every organ of critical opinion in the country. There seemed nothing in the circumstances of his fortune as an author to create any diversion against him. His quality was manifestly not popular enough to make him an object of jealousy with his peers in authorship. He was just sufficiently removed from obvious and easy comprehension to become a good shibboleth of culture and insight among the critics of the periodical press.

| Something, too, of that personal impression of the man, which seems to be inseparable from the effect produced upon us by the work of the author, accompanied, to assist Mr. Lowell in his easy conquest of the most formidable and most influential critical appreciation that as yet had a voice in the current American literature. It speedily became a point of literary patriotism with us all to swear a loyal and enthusiastic oath by the wit, the learning, and the genius of our brilliant fellow-countryman.

By a curious coincidence, too,-lucky for the recent immediate spread of his fame,—it happened that Mr. Lowell's latest and most important publications appeared at that precise juncture of our international relations with Great Britain when paramount public considerations were operating to disarm British criticism for the moment of its natural and traditional suspicion respecting American books, and even to dispose it to a lavish literary hospitality toward whatever of American production might seem most likely to be generally accepted among us as representative of the national genius and culture. Mr. Lowell was obviously the favorite of American literary men. English periodicals could not fail to gratify the American public by praising their chosen literary representative. Accordingly English organs of criticism were found, for instance, eagerly pronouncing the "Commemoration Ode " a great poem (which it scarcely escaped being indeed), but without so much as hinting faintly that the retorted sneer in it at the Old World, and especially Great Britain, was perhaps an artistic mistake, which nevertheless it may easily appear even to Mr. Lowell's sympathizing countrymen to be. It has thus re

which he may fairly be judged. He is a critic. Fair criticism asks, Is he a good critic? Is he adequately qualified, and has he made adequate use of his qualifications?

Large knowledge of literature is among the necessary qualifications of a good critic. In literature, as in everything, comparison and contrast are our best, almost our only means of just estimation. Critical faculty goes for nothing without adequate material of information upon which to have exercised itself beforehand, and from which now to form its present appraisals. No one can read Mr. Lowell's prose, or for that matter his poetry either, without acknowledging his

sulted that the verdict without discussion which American criticism had spontaneously passed upon Mr. Lowell, now stands doubly established in the apparently justifying and confirming accord of English opinion. By consequence, could a poll of the best instructed and most controlling editorial suffrages of the country be taken on the question to-morrow, the well-nigh unanimous sentence would pronounce Mr. James Russell Lowell, upon the whole, beyond controversy, if not the first, then certainly the second among living American literary men. We state the fact. We make no quarrel with it. Our own judgment might not be different. We merely point it out in explain-wide familiarity with literature, both vernacuing how it is that Mr. Lowell has failed so long of that faithful and unprepossessed criticism of his work, to which by his unenvied though enviable eminence he is justly entitled. We herewith offer the initiative* of such a criticism with regard to Mr. Lowell's prose.

The first remark to be made about Mr. Lowell's prose concerns the kind in literature to which it belongs. It is not creative; it is critical. It is that in respect to other men's literary productions which this article aims to be in respect to Mr. Lowell's own productions in prose. It appreciates, and, except incidentally, it does not originate. We say this without intending comparative disparagement of that species of literary work to which in his prose Mr. Lowell has almost exclusively devoted himself; although it is perfectly obvious that criticism makes a humbler claim than creation on the gratitude and reverence of the reader toward the author. While, however, late literature has names like M. Sainte-Beuve in France, Mr. Matthew Arnold in England, and Mr. Lowell (as a prose writer) in this country, to show among those who contentedly accept the vocation of critic, criticism, still justly adjudged to remain subordinate in rank to creation, may yet be admitted to confer degrees of greatness upon its servants higher perhaps than any but the highest of all.

The one thing, however, that concerns us in classifying Mr. Lowell's prose productions as criticism, is to settle the rule by Exception to this implication ought perhaps to be

made in favor of a tentative article published some months ago in Lippincott's Monthly, which made several good critical points unfavorable to Mr. Lowell, and sustained them well, but which, whether deservedly or not, incurred in certain quarters where jealous susceptibility on such a point was natural and was pardonable, the accusation of personal unfriendliness

to the illustrious author.

lar and foreign. Culture, in this sense of it, flavors every page of his writings. Allusion, near or remote,—often, it must be admitted, remote,-lurks in almost every one of his sentences. So much indeed is this the case, that it is often a task to all but readers tolerably well informed themselves to track his hiding sense with certainty. We have been told on excellent authority that so wellinformed a gentleman, for instance, as the head of Harvard University presumably is, was obliged to resort to Mr. Lowell himself to find out what his friend meant by a word in his poem of "The Cathedral" felicitously coined to convey an allusion to a usage of the Latin poets that happened not to be present to the learned president's mind at the moment of his reading the piece. Mr. Lowell certainly does not lack discursive acquaintance with literature to qualify him for his office of critic.

A second necessary endowment of the good critic is a capacity on his part of entering into the thought and feeling of another, without such accompanying prepossessions of his own as unconsciously to modify his new investiture by exchange and confusion of the separate individualities. This trait, the most amiable and generous of the critic's intellectual traits, Mr. Lowell possesses in an eminent degree. The fluent lapse from mood to mood in sympathy with his author which Mr. Lowell achieves or undergoes (is it active, or is it passive ?) in his capacity of critic contrasts wonderfully say with the iron rigidness of Lord Macaulay's persistency in uniformly remaining himself, of whomsoever he may chance to be discoursing in ostensible criticism. Lord Macaulay, however, it ought in judgment of him to be remembered, seemed himself not unaware of his own incapacity for dealing with any but those literary men whose work, like their critic's, was

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