The Sun.
London, England, 1867-03-29 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

Joyce Dormer's Story. By Julia Goddard, author
of " Adriaua." Two Vols. Bradbury, Evans,

and Co.

A very charming story is this " Story of Joyce
Dormer," as partly narrated by herself in extracts
from her diary, and partly recorded by her historian.
There is sufficient originality about the character'
described, and about the events in which they take
part, to impart a freshness and piquancy to the tale
not to be met with in an every-day novel. In the first
chapter of the first volume Joyce Dormer comes to
reside with her aunt, Mrs. Carmichael. Joyce
Dormer is an orphan, but belonging to the well-to-
do and highly-respectable family of the Dormers,
which family, whatever may be its estimation in
the eyes of the world, stands uncommonly high
in its own particular opinion. Mrs. Carmichael is
a Dormer, but her individual excellencies and her
family advantages are all rendered entirely sub-
servient to the influence and authority of
the very authoritative, austere, and intolerable Mr.
Carmichael. In the eyes of his wife, at all events,
Mr. Carmichael is a hero. The Dormer family ro-
eognise his high respectability, but little commu-
nion takes place between them. "He was
rather an appendage, tacked on by stitches that
appeared in constant danger of giving way than one
who was now part and parcel of the family circle."
The evil machinations of this respectable Mr. Car-
michael give rise to the various complications of
the story. His character is singularly repulsive
throughout, and is not, let us hope, very
true to reality. By far the most interest-
ing chapter of the whole work, one abounding
with pathos and tenderness, is an episode en-
titled " The Poor Wife's Story," in which a poor
wife, supposed to be drowned at sea, discovers, after
years of separation, her husband, though still lament-
ing her death, consoling himself with a new home,
with another wife and children. The poor wife, out of
love for him, conceals her secret, and will not mar the
felicity of the little circle. She writes to him from
her death-bed, and it is this letter, which records
her sufferings and her heart-struggles, that we have
spoken of as the most interesting portion of the
book. The friend and companion heroine of Joyce
Dormer, Doris Carmichael (both heroines are en-
dowed with peculiar names !) is quite a contrast in
character, and seems intended as a foil to the attrac-
tions of the very excellent Joyce ; but, on look-
ing back upon the histories of both damsels,
the reader comes to the conclusion that, after all,
Doris is the most single-hearted and unselfish, and
she is most certainly very badly dealt with by for-
tune and the novelist. The assembling of the
members of the Dormer family on the occa-
sion of a solemn family funeral reveals some
of their prominent peculiarities, and in some way
reminds us of the inimitable description of the
Sisters in the Mill on the Floss." It is
hardly necessary to add that the Dormer sisterhood,
by suggesting such an association of ideas, lose
somewhat by the comparison.

Willis's Poetical TVorks. One vol. pp. 260. Georgo

Routledge and Sons.

With a melancholy appropriateness the recently
announced death of N. P. Willis has been followed
by the publication of this elegant new edition of his
Poetical Writings---a volume the contents of which
partake far more of the genuine character of poetry
than of mere graceful versification. Taking his
place in excellence far below either Longfellow or
Poe, Willis ranks with them in Anierican Poetry
as certainly as do either Bryant or. Lowell. As
with so many of our own poets (Cowper in his
Correspondence, Dryden in his Prefaces, Moore and
Campbell in their Biographies,) and with nearly the
whole of his brother poets of America, without, if we
remember rightly, one single exception—he could
write with about equal facility in prose and in verse.
To his prose, in fact, he owes his popularity. His name
as a man of letters has long since come to be identi-
fied, not with any one among his poems, but rather
than that from his " Pencillings by the Way."
Nevertheless his poetical capabilities ought, for that
reason, on no account to be deemed inferior to his
capabilities as a writer of prose. They were
fully upon a par in their general excel-
lence. And in order to appreciate the suavity
of his lyrical style, it might be said with
confidence that the volume now under our
notice might be opened just haphazard almost any-
where. Read, in token of this, his "Birth-day
Verses," addressed in apostrophe to his mother
—or any fragment of verse that you may
chance to light upon in opening the volume.
Now that the poet himself has so recently passed
away, the tender affection palpitating in so many of
these rhymical effusions of his, effusions welling ou t
from the heart rather than from the head, have a
touching sadness about them that they possessed
not before. And so real are they in their spon-
taneous and unaffected beauty that they
carry our sympathies with them across the Atlantic
to the realisation of the homes there cherished as
dearly by their denisens as the best-loved homes
in England. They half reconcile us to our almost
unwilling recognition of the fact that the sweetest
of all home-songs ever penned, the song of " Home,
sweet Home" was penned not in England but in
America, not by an Englishman but by au
Americau,