that on the 'First Look of the World" is an excellent example of Ik. Marvel's composite manner—the alliance of sagacious raillery and pathetic sentiment Perhaps his forte lies chiefly in the delineation of domestic sorrow, wherein his power and reality are even painfully felt; but is he not too apt to protract and intensify such delineation, line upon line—and indeed to dally with ideal affliction, and pursue its lurking details too far, until the reader impatiently recoils from what takes the shape of a morbid anatomy, an experimentalising upon his tenderest sympathies, an almost wanton empiricism in matters of life and death? To be woven into "such stuff as dreams are made of," these threads of waking anguish are too fine-spun, too long-drawn out, too intricately netted with the heart-strings. And the heart is apt to resent this, as among the unwarrantable gratuities of Fiction. The charm of melancholy may be over-strained, till exhaustion ensues, and collapse; and then such wo-worn broodings are shunned, and exiled from
The cold heart, where, after their sweet pain,
They ne'er will gather strength, nor find a home again.[1]
Under the "Autumn" division there is some fine healthy writing, always tender, and generally true, on manly hope and manly love—with wholesome sarcasm on that "kind of Pelhamism," affecting ignorance of plain things and people, and knowingness in brilliancies, "that is very apt to overtake one in the first blush of manhood"—"when the law is to conceal what tells of the man, and cover it with what smacks of the roué. Home peace and sanctity is reverently described, and so we land in the "Winter" quarter—Age—when the 'sweeping outlines of life, that once lay before the vision—rolling into wide billows of years, like easy lifts of a broad mountain range—now seem close-packed together as with a Titan hand; and you see only crowded, craggy heights, like Alpine fastnesses, parted with glaciers of grief, and leaking abundant tears." Then comes the death of the true wife, aged in years not in heart, and the marriage of sons and daughters, and the birth of grandchildren. The old man enters feebly, and with floating glimpses of glee, into the cheer and rejoicings of the young people's festive days. And then—
Eve saddens into Night—
the old man falls asleep, past earthly waking—"to sleep, perchance to dream," elsewhere, and to be disturbed by the rustling of Time's curtains never more.
- ↑ Shelly.
