He read it through--all that perfect, perfect scene. From the moment when he said, "I overlean, This length of hair and lustrous front--they turn Like an entire flower upward"-- his voice low, sustained, clear--till he reached the line, "Look at the woman here with the new soul"-- till he turned the leaf and murmured, "Shall to produce form out of unshaped stuff Be art--and, further, to evoke a soul From form be nothing? This new soul is mine!"-- till then he never glanced up. But there is lack of constructive skill, lack of definiteness, lack of reality. The story sprawls at the end where it should culminate with compelling power. The last sentence is startling, but it is not connected with the _motif_ and is a mere sensational addition. Everywhere there is the unusual, the overwrought, incoherent vagueness. It is not experience, it is a revel of color and of sensuousness; it is a Keats-like banquet, sweets and spicery. The parallelism with Keats may be pressed far. She was first of all a poet, a lyrist, a dweller in Arcady rather than in a New England village. She, like so many others of her generation, had fallen under the spell of the young Tennyson, and her world is a world of cloying sweetness, of oriental sensuousness, of merely physical beauty. Poems like "Pomegranate-Flowers" and "In Titian's Garden" show her tropical temperament: And some girl sea-bronzed and sparkling, On her cheek the stain ensanguined, Bears aloft the bossy salver: As the innocent Lavinia Brought them in old days of revel Fruits and flowers amesh with sunbeams-- No red burnish of pomegranates, No cleft peach in velvet vermeil, No bright grapes their blue bloom bursting, Dews between the cool globes slipping, Dews like drops of clouded sapphire, But the brighter self and spirit, Glowed illusive in her beauty. The same poetic glamour she threw over all the work that now poured in swift profusion from her pen: _Sir Rohan's Ghost_, _Azarian_, and a score of short stories in the _Atlantic_ and _Harper's_ and other periodicals. It had been felt that the faults so manifest in "In a Cellar" and "The Amber Gods" would disappear as the young author gained in maturity and knowledge of her art, but they not only persisted, they increased. Like Charlotte Brontë, whom in so many ways she resembled, she knew life only as she dreamed of it in her country seclusion or read of it in romance. At length toleration ceased. In 1865 _The North American Review_ condemned _Azarian_ as "devoid of human nature and false to actual society," and then added the significant words: "We would earnestly exhort Miss Prescott to be _real_, to be true to something." It marks not alone the end of the first period in Miss Prescott's career; it marks the closing of an era in American fiction.