_The Pearl of Orr's Island._ A Story of the Coast of Maine. By MRS. HARRIET BEECHER STOWE, Author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," "The Minister's Wooing," etc. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 12mo.
Mrs. Stowe is never more in her element than in depicting unsophisticated New-England life, especially in those localities where there is a practical social equality among the different classes of the population. "The Pearl of Orr's Island," the scene of which is laid in one of those localities, is every way worthy of her genius. Without deriving much interest from its plot, it fastens the pleased attention of the reader by the freshness, clearness, and truth of its representations, both of Nature and persons. The author transports us at once to the place she has chosen as the scene of her story, makes us as familiarly acquainted with all its surroundings as if we had been born and bred there, introduces us to all the principal inhabitants in a thoroughly "neighborly" way, and contrives to impress us with a sense of the substantial reality of what she makes us mentally see, even when an occasional improbability in the story almost wakes us up to a perception that the whole is a delightful illusion.
This foundation of the story in palpable realities, which every Yankee recognizes as true the moment they are presented to his eye, enables the writer to develop the ideal character of Mara Lincoln, the heroine of the book, without giving any sensible shock to the prosaic mind. In the type of womanhood she embodies, she is almost identical with Agnes, in the beautiful romance which Mrs. Stowe has lately contributed to this magazine: the difference is in time and circumstance, and not in essential nature. The Puritan maiden, with all her homely culture and rough surroundings, is really as poetic a personage as any of Spenser's exquisite individualizations of abstract feminine excellence; perhaps more so, as the most austere and exalted spiritualities of Christianity enter into the constitution of her nature, and her soul moves in a sphere of religious experience compared with which "fairy-land" is essentially low and earthy. She is an angel as well as a woman; yet the height of her meditations does not interfere with, but rather aids her performance of the homeliest human duties; and the moral beauty of her nature lends a peculiar grace to her humblest ministries to human affections and needs. The vivid delineation of this character, from her childhood to her death, we cannot but rank among Mrs. Stowe's best claims to be considered a woman of true imaginative genius.