We read ourselves gradually back to our
boyhood in it, and were aware of a flavor in it deliciously local and
familiar,--a kind of sour-sweet, as in a _frozen-thaw_ apple. From
the title to the last line, it is delightfully characteristic. The
family-party met for Thanksgiving can hit on no better way to be jolly
than in a discussion of the Origin of Evil,--and the Yankee husband (a
shooting-star in the quiet heaven of village morals) about to run away
from his wife can be content with no less comet-like vehicle than
a balloon. The poem is Yankee, even to the questionable extent of
substituting "locality" for "scene" in the stage-directions; and we feel
sure that none of the characters ever went to bed in their lives, but
always sidled through the more decorous subterfuge of "retiring."
We could easily show that "Bitter-Sweet" was not this and that and
t'other, but, after all said and done, it would remain an obstinately
charming little book. It is not free from faults of taste, nor from a
certain commonplaceness of metre; but Mr. Holland always saves himself
in some expression so simply poetical, some image so fresh and natural,
the harvest of his own heart and eye, that we are ready to forgive
him all faults, in our thankfulness at finding the soul of Theocritus
transmigrated into the body of a Yankee.
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