In addition to his lovers, Mr. Longfellow has sketched with much beautiful humor, the characters and characteristics of a country town. His mirth is the very poetry of mirth, sly, genial, fanciful, reminding the reader of Dickens without suggesting the thought of imitation. All the incidents and emotions of the book are enveloped in an atmosphere of poetry. It is this magical charm of the poet, investing the commonest materials with a drapery of imagination, and sending a rich and golden flush through the whole expression, which constitutes the merit of the volume. An ideal sweetness, sometimes felt in the music of the words, sometimes in the fine felicity of the imagery, and sometimes in the “soft, Ausonion air,” breathed upon the characters, pervades equally the author’s humor, pathos, sentiment, passion and reflection. The effect of the whole is not to thrill or exalt the reader, not to inspire terror or awaken thoughts “beyond the reaches of his soul,” but to fill him with the highest possible degree of intellectual and moral comfort. There are no stings in the author’s mind, and he plants none in the minds of others. He is a mortal enemy to unrest, to all haggard and unhandsome thoughts and sensibilities, and fuses matter and spirit into a sensuous compound, calculated to give poetic pleasure rather than to inspire poetic action. There is one fault to the book more serious, perhaps, than any other, and that is its shortness. The characters are well conceived, but imperfectly developed. The premises of Kavanagh’s character are excellent, but no conclusion is drawn from them except his marriage, and that is something of a _non-sequitur_. The ground is fairly broken for a long work, for a sort of American Wilhelm Meister, and though the author’s plan hardly demands its cultivation to the extent of its capacity, we feel rather provoked that he did not make his plan commensurate with the elements of his characters. In Kavanagh we have a reformer who blends cultivated and sensitive tastes with great aspirations, and to have fully developed such a person, by representing the modifications of his mind through its contact with the reformers and conservatives of New England, would have enabled Mr. Longfellow to produce the most original and striking novel of the day, and one which would have been a mirror of New England life in its present manifestations. The ideas and purposes of Kavanagh alone are given, and he, rather than Mr. Churchill spreads a gulf between intentions and deeds. To have made the woman he loved non-sympathetic with him as a reformer, and the woman he did not love his adherent in that capacity, would have finely complicated the matter, and resulted in many original agonies, ecstasies, mental struggles, and thrilling situations. Such a novel, even if, like Goethe’s, it had cost ten years’ labor, would, as treated by Mr. Longfellow, have obtained an instantaneous and enduring popularity.