SEVEN DREAMERS.* Mns. SLossox has written a singularly beautiful and

fascinating volume ; and it is a volume, too, which possesses

• SIMON Dreamers. By Annie T. Reason. Now York : Harper and Brothers.

a peculiar interest, in virtue of the fact that the genius of its author makes itself manifest in the one literary form in which any indications of genius are most seldom to be found. The short tale, so far, at any rate, as England is concerned, is the typical literary pot-boiler ; and though in France it has at times been made a finished work of art by such men as Balza° and Gautier, in America by Hawthorne and Edgar Poe, it still remains in the eye of the reading public, as the manager of any circulating library will testify, a thing of no account. We have used the word " genius " in connection with Mrs. Slosson's book, knowing well that genius is as rare as it is precious ; but we know no other word which adequately represents the combination of felicitous invention, of imagi- native insight, of quaint fancy, and of delicate literary expression which is to be found in these stories.

They are seven in number, and as mere stories are entirely unconnected. The nature of the imaginative motive which is common to them all, and which imparts to the collec- tion a certain artistic unity, is indicated in a prologue put into the mouth of one of those rustic philosophers whose thought and expression have something of the stimulating savour of freshly turned earth, the crispness of autumnal country air :—

"‘ No, I don't call Cap'n Burdick crazy,' said my good friend, Aunt Cherry, as we looked out on the quiet village street, He's right enough about everything but one ; smart, forehanded, a good farmer, and a consistent Church member. There's only jest one little thing that makes him different from other folks, and that's his thinking that the millennium's over and done with instead o' comin', and that he rec'lects it all. Got him on ary other topic, and you'd never notice anything queer about his talk. But jest as ho's goin' on smooth and sensible, and you thinkin' what a smart, knowledgable man ho is, something will be sure to bring up that notion of his. And he'll go on about what a beautiful time it was, and how queer it looked to see the wolves dwellin' with the lambs, and the leopard lyin' down with the kids, and the children lea,din"em, and he'll talk so earnest about it all—voice shaky and hie eyes wet—as he tolls how the desert blossomed like the rose, and the parched ground became a pool ; how they beat up their swords into ploughshares and their spears into prunin'- hooks, that you can't taisdoubt ho believes it every single word ; and when he says, real low and softly," And sorrer and sighite did all flee away," why, you're nigh onto believin' it yourself, and wishin' you'd lived in them clays. Now, that isn't bein' crazy ; it's jest kind o' dreamin'. I've had dreams myself jest as real and nat'rul as that, and couldn't scasly believe sometimes after I woke up that they hadn't act'ally happened. But you see I did wake up, and the cap'n never has. That's the difference. There's lots o' that sort ; dreamin' awake's about as common as drea,min' _Asleep. That's what I hold. And as long as the dreams are pleasant, comfortable ones—not nightmares o' course—why, I sometimes think the people that lives in 'em are about as happy as other folks, and maybe happier. I'm sure they!re a sight more interestin' to talk with. You see, they've got somethin' that don't change, and that's a dreadful comfort in this alterin' and twistin' and tinnin' world. Real things oilers have to alter somehow here; make-believe ones don't. So, with these dreamin' folks, crops may fail, their creature die, their children dishonour 'em, elections go wrong, and church meetin's get off the right track—everythin' real may be in a stir and a mix and a muddle—but their dreams go straight along, allers jest the same, smooth and quiet and peaceful like."

Of course, in the prosaic language of science, Captain Burdick's ease was one of simple monomania, and a collec- tion of stories of monomania, howsoever winningly told, would almost certainly have something of both morbidness and monotony ; but, so far as Mrs. Slosson's simple, childlike heroes and heroines are concerned, Aunt Charry's homely differentiation holds good. With one or two possible excep- tions, the word " crazy " is altogether inappropriate to them, unless, indeed, we add to the popular modern interpretation of the world the old idea that those in whom one organ of mental vision was blind or dim, had been dowered with another and rarer sight, which made them free of the world of things unseen. They are truly "dreamers," much in the same sense that the Lazarus of Browning's great poem, An Epistle of Karshish, is a dreamer, having a grasp of something which to them is as real as it is unreal to all the world besides, and living a life which does not lose sight or touch of the actual, but which sees the things of the actual in some strange, incom- municable relation to other things made known to them in dreams that die not with a dawn and an awakening.

It must be about six years ago that, in reading the current number of Harper's Magazine, we encountered a short tale, bearing the title" How Faith Came and Went," and we have never forgotten the impression made upon us by the imagina- tive beauty and pathetic grace of the story of the young girl who appears out of the unknown, plays her little part in the unfinished love-drama, and when all is ready for the final scene of fulfilment upon which the curtain may drop, vanishes into the sunset as mysteriously as she came. Perfect as it is, this story, which comes first in Mrs. Slosson's book, lends itself less readily than some of its companions to descriptive com- ment, for in it the mere narrative idea, which is the body of the work, is in itself slight, aerial, and elusive, and the im- pression made by it is due entirely to the exquisite reality, and not less exquisite rendering, of its inherent pathos,— that kind of pathos which moves and stirs us, not by effects of pain, but by effects of simple loveliness. To some extent this remark applies to all the stories, in so far as what is told owes to the telling its final oharm ; some of them have more of that kind of substance which can be weighed and measured, and therefore appreciated, by people who, be- cause they do not dream, can feel the force of weighing and measurement. The girl, Faith, who came and went must be known ; but there is something to tell about in poor Botany Bay, who made the great sacrifice for that other self—that twin-soul—who was at once his joy and his terror ; in Fishin' Jemmy, to whom life has a new meaning from the moment in which he hears of the' Friend of the fishermen ; in Deacon Pheby, who for love's sake had played a part so long that the wild-boy nature, which had once been his, seemed the nature of a half-forgotten stranger; in the lonely woman, with her quaint, pathetic memory of the rosy-cheeked boy-ghost who spoke his "pieces," and made his farewell on that Christmas eve, when he and her lost ones sang "Home, Sweet Home," in concert,. and so passed home together.

Perhaps, however, the story which will come home to the greatest number of readers in virtue of a simple humanness which does not stray far away from familiar highways of

experience and emotion, is the story of Aunt Randy, to whom, in her despair, the creeping and flying things of earth bring the message of a divine love and an immortal life. Her

worthless husband has deserted her, her boy has been snatched away into the darkness, whither she has no faith to follow him, and life is black and blank and cold. She cannot bear to hear the birds or to see the flowers that the little lad loved, but one day she suddenly catches sight of a clump of pink fire-weed shining in the sun, and the hour of her deliverance is at hand :—

" Now, fire-weed was my boy's fav'rite posy : it growed all. round our house in North Woodstock, an' he used to pick it and bring in big bunches on it, and set 'em in the old blue pitcher. He was dreffie fond e' that plant, and when I see it—well, it all come over me so, I jest bust out cryin' right in the road, an' I was 'fraid somebody 'd see me, so I had to stop and purtend I was lookin' at the posies. An' as I was stoopin' down a-lookin' an tryin' to got my handk'ehief out, I see a big worm on the fire- weed. 'Twa'n't crawlin' or satin', but jest settin' up on its hind. logs in the humanost way, with its head up an' its hands out,. an'—you'll think I'm an old fool, but what with tho water in. my oyes and the sun a-clazzlin' me, an' my heart just broakin' for that boy, why I kinder thought that worm favoured the young one, an' I felt the queerest drawin' to it. I reached out my finger to poke it, an' it put down its head and drawod its chin in for all the world like that boy when he was scarot and bashful. I tell ye, from that minnit I 'dopted that creanr and took him right inter my heart. I hadn't cared for a Bain' thing afore Bence that little coffin went out my front gate, an' I tell ye 'twas good to feel that drawin' towards suthin'. I picked the plant he was on, an' I carried him home jest's careful, and then I fixed a box o' dirt and stuck the plant in, and jest let it alone till he'd got kind of acquainted like. But, dear me I he made friends to once ; he never tried to get away ; he never was off his vittlos from the minnit he come. The fust time I see him eat, my heart come right up in my mouth, he ot so like my boy, jest bitin' little bites right reglar round an' round a leaf till hed made a place the shape o' half a cent, like the boy 'd do with his cooky. I named him Jacob after the other, an'—oh, I can't tell ye what a

comfort he was to me I Another thing that make him look like the boy was his color He was kind o' blacky-green,

with round pink spots on his sides, for all the world like my other little Jacob in his little tight jacket with the buttons I made for him outer my old invisible-green dress. An' he had a little pink face, an' he used to look up at me so poart an' knowin' when I'd talk to him. 'Tams a new thing to me, after all them lonesome months, to have some one at home waitia' for ins when I was out, an' I used to hurry back 's quick 's I could, jest 's if the boy was watchin' at the winder with his pretty little nose all, flat agin the glass."

This is a lengthy quotation, but it is impossible, save by copious extract, to give anything like a partially adequate impression of the homely grace and tenderness of the story ; and though sampling by extract is, at best, a makeshift process, we make no apology for reproducing yet another passage :—

" Well, I might 's well come to the wuat sooner 's later. One day I see Jacob didn't seem like hisseIf ; he stopped eatin', and -went crawlin' round 's if he wanted suthin' he hadn't got. I give him water an' fresh fire-weed ; I set him by the north winder where the wind blew in, for 'twas a hot day ; but nothin' did any good. All day he went crawlini round, restless an' fev'rish like, never eatin' nothin', nor takin' no notice o' any- thing. I set up by him all night long, my heart 's heavy as lead, for I was goin over again them dreffie days when my boy took sick. Just at daylight he crawled down onto the ground an' lay there a spell, an' then I heard him a-rustlin' about, and when I looked he was kinder diggin' in the ground, pickin' up little bits o' dirt an' throwin"em about. 'It's like pickin' at the bed-clothes,' I says, my heart a-sinkin"way down. So he wont on for hours, diggin', diggin'. I put him up on the leaves lots o' times, but he'd crawl right down agin, so I let him alone 't last. Bimeby I see he'd made quite a little bolo, an' all on a suddent it come into my head he was makin' a grave. An' he was. Slow an' sure he dug, an' crawled in 'a he dug, an' I sat watchin' hour after hour, and cryin' my poor old heart out over him. An' late in the afternoon he'd finished his work, an' buried hisself, jest leavin' a little hole at his head ; an' he put his little pink face at me so human-like, an' then he reached out and took a little lump o' dirt, an' pulled it over the hole, an' he was gone, an' I hadn't anything left in all the world but my two graves,"

This seems to us perfect, alike in its broad effect of simple, unstrained pathos, and in its intimately human touches of homely detail. The tenderly triumphant story of resurrection, to which this is but the prelude, must be read in Mrs. Slosson's own pages ; and we know that we can count beforehand on

the gratitude of those readers who are induced by anything that we have said or quoted to number among their friends Aunt Randy and her fellow-dreamers. The seven stories are pervaded by a sweet fantasy which never becomes merely fantastic ; they are records of vision which, coming, it may be, in broken lights, is visiOn nevertheless, and not mere illusion; dream from which the sleeper will awaken, not to be

disappointed, but to be satisfied.