The introductory chapters, containing the flight of the slave Antony through the Louisiana swamp, are almost unequalled for unfaltering power, for gorgeous wealth of color.  Many of the glowing sentences belong rather to passionate poetry than to tamer prose.  The agonized resolution that turns the panting fugitive’s blood and body to fire,—­the fear, so vividly portrayed that the reader’s nerves thrill with the shock that brings the hunted negro’s heart almost to his mouth with one wild throb,—­the matchless picture of the forest and marsh, lengthening and widening with dizzy swell to the weary eye and failing brain,—­all are the work of a master of language.

When the scene shifts to Boston, the language, which was in perfect keeping with the tropical madness of Antony’s flight and the tropical splendor of the Southern forest, is extravagant to actual absurdity, when used with reference to ordinary scenes and ordinary events.  All the force of contrast is lost; and contrast is the great secret of effect.  The lavish richness of our author’s words is as little suited to the things they describe as a mantle of gold brocade would be to the shoulders of a beggar.  Even the loveliest of young women is more likely to enter a room by the ordinary mysterious mode of locomotion than to “flash” into it like a salamander.  That it was possible for Muriel Eastman, in gratifying her “vaulting ambition” by a very creditable spring over the parallel bars, to “toss the air into perfume,” we are not prepared to deny, having no very clear notion of the meaning of those remarkable words; but when, we are told that Mrs. Eastman was “ineffably surprised, yet more ineffably amused,” we must be allowed to enter an energetic protest.  Harrington himself is perhaps a trifle too “regnant” to be altogether satisfactory; and there are many similar extravagances and inaccuracies.

The social intercourse of the ladies and gentlemen in this book is particularly bad.  It seems as if the author were ignorant of the usages of good society, and, impatient of the vulgar ceremony of inferior people, had seen no way to assert the superiority of his two fair ladies and their unimaginable lovers, except making them dispense with all such observances whatever.  His uncertainty how people in their position really do act has hampered his powers; and he is not that rarity, an original writer, but that very common person, one who tries to be original.  Real ladies and gentlemen are not reduced to the alternative of either being embarrassed by the ordinary social rules or disregarding them altogether; they take advantage of them.  It is a false originality that is singular about ordinary forms; it is only the tyro in chess who is “original” in his first move; Paul Morphy, the most inventive of players, always begins with the customary advance of the king’s pawn.