vibrates and responds like a harp-string to the master-hand. She has somewhere said, “Hereafter, when I no more belong to earth, I should love to return to it as a spirit, and impart to man the deepest of that which I have suffered and enjoyed, lived and loved. And no one need fear me;—should I come in the midnight hour to a striving and unquiet spirit, it would be only to make it more quiet, its night-lamp burn more brightly, and myself its friend and sister.” Although she still belongs to earth, this aspiration has been satisfied. Even here, without having crossed the mysterious bourn, she has revealed to us great depths of suffering and joy, of life and love, and to many troubled hearts she has come in their midnight hours, a friend, a sister, a consoler. It is no wonder, then, that homes and hearts have opened to her, and that welcome and gratitude await her in every town and village of our country.
When Miss Bremer’s works were first introduced to us a few years ago, the brilliant narrations of Scott had been succeeded by the passionate and romantic creations of Bulwer, and our literature was flooded with inundations from the voluptuous and sensational school of France, which deposited its débris and diffused its malaria wherever its impure waters subsided. At this period the writings of Fredrika Bremer came upon us, suddenly and beautiful as summer comes in her northern clime, as pure and sparkling as its mountain streams, as fresh and invigorating as its mountain air.
As works of art, or in a literary point of view, these novels have doubtless their faults. But those who have been elevated by their ennobling spirit, who have drunk at their clear, cool fountains, and felt their strengthening and life-giving influence, who have dwelt with her lovely characters in their happy homes, and participated in their joys and sorrows, would find it as impossible to turn upon them the cold eye of the critic, as to analyze the sunshine and the landscape that delight the eye, or to judge the features of a beloved friend by the strictest rules of beauty or of art. The office of the critic has come to be in literature what that of the surgeon is in the actual world. With perfect development, beauty, and harmony, he has nothing to do. He has eyes only for deformities and faults, and wherever they are to be found, he applies his merciless scalpel,
