So much by way of preface, lest we might seem cold to the very remarkable merits of "Sir Rohan's Ghost," if we treated it as a book worth finding fault with, instead of condemning it to the indifferent limbo of general eulogy. It is our deliberate judgment that no first volume by any author has ever been published in America showing more undoubtful symptoms of genuine poetic power than this. There are passages in it where imagination and language combine in the most artistic completeness, and the first quatrain of the song which Sir Rohan fancies he hears,--
----"In a summer twilight, While yet the dew was hoar, I went plucking purple pansies Till my love should come to shore,"--
seems to us absolutely perfect in its simplicity and suggestiveness. It has that wayward and seemingly accidental just-right-ness that is so delightful in old ballads. The hesitating cadence of the third line is impregnated with the very mood of the singer, and lingers like the action it pictures. All those passages in the book, too, where the symptoms of Sir Rohan's possession by his diseased memory are handled, where we see all outward nature but as wax to the plastic will of imagination, are to the utmost well-conceived and carried out. It was part of the necessity of the case that the book should be conjectural and metaphysical, for it is plain that the author is young and has little experience of the actual. Accordingly, with a true instinct, she (for the newspapers ascribe the authorship of the book to Miss Prescott) calls her story a Romance, thus absolving it from any cumbersome allegiance to fact, and lays the scene of it in England, where she can have old castles, old traditions, old families, old servants, and all the other olds so essential to the young writer, ready to her hand.
We like the book better for being in the main _subjective_ (to use the convenient word Mr. Ruskin is so angry with); for a young writer can only follow the German plan of conjuring things up "from the depths of his inward consciousness." The moment our author quits this sure ground, her touch becomes uncertain and her colors inharmonious. Character-painting is unessential to a romance, belonging as it does properly to the novel of actual life, in which the romantic element is equally out of place. Fielding, accordingly, the greatest artist in character since Shakspeare, hardly admits sentiment, and never romance, into his master-pieces. Hawthorne, again, another great master, feeling instinctively the poverty and want of sharp contrast in the externals of our New England life, always shades off the edges of the actual, till, at some indefinable line, they meet and mingle with the supersensual and imaginative.