To the shaping imagination which this work indicates, we must add that form or expression of the imaginative faculty, by which things inexpressible in images are suggested by cunning verbal combinations, or which escape in the peculiar turn of a period, or which are breathed to the inner ear of the mind in the rhythm of a sentence. This mystical charm, this elusive, dreamy, ever vanishing and yet ever appearing grace, gives to the whole work a character of strangeness almost bewitching, and produces that fine and faint intoxication of the imagination which makes it ready to receive and accredit wonders with as much faith as it commonly awards to possibilities. It is this quality also which makes it impossible to convey the moral of the story in any didactic proposition. It has a profound moral, but it is a moral which refuses to be comprehended in an ethical axiom, being felt in the brain and “felt along the heart.” We have been so much engrossed by the merits of this story that we have little space left to notice some faults. The notes should not be retained at the bottom of the page, but should be transferred to an appendix. Occasionally the imagination of the authoress stutters in its sublime talk, and gives fragments of gigantic images instead of wholes. Here and there the philosophic prevails over the imaginative, and discourse monopolizes a sentence which should be strictly sacred to representation. But the sweetness, the tenderness, the beauty, purity and majesty, with which the work is so replete, hardly allow even the critical reader to be captious; and to the uncritical, the absorbing interest of the story would be sufficient to hide even prominent defects. * * * * * _Poems. By James F. Fields. Boston: Wm. D. Ticknor & Co. 1 vol. 16mo._