Text: C. F. Briggs (?), Literary, Broadway Journal (New York), March 28, 1845, vol. 1, no. 13, p. ??

[page 193, column 1, continued:]

THE CHILDREN OF MOUNT IDA. By Mrs. Child.

THIS classic tale, by Mrs. Child, is the most simple and perfect story that any American woman has yet produced. Were it not for a superlative adjective, here and there, and sometimes a magazine platitude, it might be passed off for an old Greek legend. It has much of the sweet simplicity and touching passion of the story of Cupid and Psyche; and in purity of thought and elevated imagination, we have read no composition of late years that equals it. We trust that those who have been in the habit of representing Mrs. Child as a writer of extravagant fancies, will read this simple and Chaste production. A story like this could only come from a maid the reverse of extravagant. Its faults are those which Fast always mar the productions of an imagination teeming with rich fancies, — faults that appesr like beauties in the [column 2:] writings of a less gifted mind. Mrs. Child has, unconsciously we suspect, drawn the portrait of a perfect woman, a wife and mother, in Œnone, a very different being from the Glumdal-clitches who form the ideal of Miss Fuller's women. Corythus is, too, we fear, almost as near an approach to as perfect a man as our imperfect nature has yet developed.

The story of Œnone and Corythus however, is something more than a simple Greek legend; in the disguise of a fiction Mrs. C. has introduced one of the marvelous psychological developments, which have become too common in our day, to be laughed out of countenance by our wise men who will receive no truths less than a century old. The clairvoyance of Œnone is not in the least startling on Mount Ida; it harmonises with the old Greek legends, as naturally as though it had sprung from Greece, proving that the fables of her mythology had a deeper foundation to rest upon than the chimeras of barbarous ignorance. Enone hastening her own calamities by her unconscious revelations, made while in the sleep that the unconscious powers of Corythus had produced, is so pure and tragic, that it hardly reads like a new invention. There cannot be a finer incident for the uses of tragedy; the clap-traps of poisoned bowls and daggers are mere gewgaws compared with this terrible power by which Fate compels her victims to be the instruments of their own ruin.

Mrs. Child is too pure and gentle a spirit to harrow the soul by pictures of remorse and suffering, but she has employed an incident of daily occurrence, (at least of reported daily occurrence, and for the uses of fiction, it is immaterial whether the reports be true or false,) to produce a catastrophe as purely tragical in its developement as any in the range of fiction.