Life — January 24, 1884 — page 5: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

- LIFE: know.” All this is wonderfully realistic, and so one is not surprised to read a little further on that “he knew | some judges who were marvellously accommodating.” | We are not, however, burdened with the details of the Westbrook investigation. As a story the book is weak, but as a series of char- | acter sketches the work is admirably done, especially the portrait of Sally Peters, the beautiful American widow who, though still young, had “ passed through some of the vicissitudes of married life, including the death of her husband.” * * * HILIP BOURKE MARSTON is one of the younger English poets whose lines catch faint echoes of Shelley, but resound with the sensuous music | of Rossetti and Swinburne. Yet there is no servile im- | itation ; he is a worthy disciple of eccentric and bril- liant masters. The undertone which pervades his latest volume, “Wind-Voices,” is fully characterized | in his own lines as ** A Voice, most like the wind’s voice when it says Some sorrowing word within a pine-thronged place.” The gem of the volume is “ Thy Garden,” which is | almost as delicate, beautiful and sad as the Shelley’s | “Sensitive Plant,”—but without the sustained power and unmatched fancy there displayed. This stanza, perhaps, represents best its qualities : “* My sad heart in thy garden strays alone, My heart among all hearts companionless; Between the roses and the lilies thrown, It finds thy garden but a wilderness.” It is all the more a disappointment to find amid pages of graceful verses such exaggeration of sentiment as the following : “LT have been weary for your voice, your touch, The desperate sweetness of your kiss— The joy which almost thrills me over-much, Oh sweet, my heart, so sweet it is.” The “ Desperate Sweetness of Your Kiss” suggests Ella Wheeler’s “ Poems of Passion,” and what a certain Buffalo dramatic critic would probably term “the in- carnate delirium of a whirlwind.” It will probably require the “incarnation of a blizzard” to cool down the American imitators of the Rossetti school to the temperature of respectable passion. * * * It is reported in Washington that a new portraiture of society in that city will soon appear in a novel- ette, to be published in Boston, which will take the form of letters written by a Washington belle to friends | in New York. It is to be a vindication of society at the capital from the charges of that vulgar book “A Washington Winter.” The report does not mention Ex-Senator Tabor or Col. Ochiltree as the probable author. * * * PERUSAL of “Beyond the Gates” has con- vinced Lilian Whiting that in the “power of bringing the heavenly mysteries to the earthly com- prehension no man or woman in aly age has done the work that distinctively characterizes Elizabeth Stuart Al Phelps.” Lilian’s “ earthly comprehension ” is proba- bly more accustomed to color symphonies and celestial marriages than the average mortal’s. Drocx. A FALsE Prorit.—Ill-gotten gains. “Hater a loaf is better than no leisure” remarked the tramp as he settled himself for a nap on a park bench. ALways GETTING InTO ScRAPES.—Nutmegs. A TRANSCONTINENTAL EPISODE, oR, METAMORPHOSES AT MuccIns’ MISERY : A CO-OPERATIVE NOVEL. BY Bret JAMES AND HENRY Harte. I. IDNIGHT among the Sierras. The moon reels remorselessly through the cloud-betattered sky. The wild cry of the coyote sounds from the recesses of the pine-clad mountain-side, And more to the same effect. The moonlight glitters fan- tastically upon the rotting shing- les of Muggins’ Misery. From the curtainless windows broad sheets of light are thrown out over the roadway, and through the chinks in the walls there comes a sound of revelry by night. Within the AZiserables are all assembled ; miners, Chinese, cow- boys, Mormons, half-breeds,— anything, everything. “Old Muggins’ gal,” as they call her, is the center of an admiring group. Observe her. The fire and ferocity of an Indian mother gleams from her wild black eyes. A glittering bowie-knife is skewered through her rank and raven tresses. She is dancing a double shuffle among the mugs and bottles that litter the bar. She drinks—this girl—she chews, she gambles, she curses ; she is a terror. But she can love, and she can suffer; she is one of us, after all. I salute thee, Calamity Jane Muggins, noble type of Western womanhood. The dance goes on and joy is unconfined. But amidst the rasping rhapsodies of the O-Be-Joyful band, the caustic remarks of the ever-present revolver, and the resounding Ri-yi of more than one transported reveler, the old man keeps one ear on the main chance, and presently he speaks: ‘Drop that, Calamm! Don’t ye here the stage? Go and see who’s comin’ !”” us ‘*Go yourself, you old gopher,” replies Calamity, and flings a beer-bottle at her father’s head. Enter the new comer. “« Another blank tenderfoot,” says Red-top Jim. “You're blank right,” says Sassafras Charley. A palid and thin young man with a cut-away coat, a single eye- glass and a natty little valise. Calamity is on to him in an instant. She strides toward him comicbooks.com