Recent Literature

MOST notable among the pleasures which we offer our readers for this new year is certainly the wonderful story of “ Septimius Felton,” by Hawthorne. If the author were yet alive and gave us such a romance from the abundance of his powers and possibilities it would be a thing to value above the gift of any other maker of romances ; but it enriches us out of his very loss ; out of his eternal absence and silence comes this wise, sad, beautiful story, a souvenir inestimably precious. Every subtle thought of life and death in it is full of poignant association ; and it is a caprice of destiny which Hawthorne himself might have imagined, and would have loved to heighten with the half-humorous light of his pensive fancy, that this gift from the romancer’s grave is a dream of earthly immortality ! A posthumous work by Hawthorne must come before the world just as he lelt it ; and the sympathetic reader will not enjoy this the less because of slight defects which the last touches of that exquisite hand would have repaired. Nor do we think he will be wholly discontented when he comes (as it is right to warn him he presently will come) to the change of plot which places some of the subordinate persons in new relations to each other, but does not disturb the unity of the prime idea or the evolution of the hero’s character. He will regard it rather as another and the rarest of those opportunities to behold the processes of a creative mind which Hawthorne’s posthumous writings have afforded ; and will feel the potent advantage which the author gains for the effectiveness of the closing scenes.

Mr. Bret Harte in his last book of verse collects a number of humorous pieces, some of which seem to us on a second or third reading as good as anything he has written in the same vein, excepting always the “ Plain Language from Truthful James.” Amongst these is a “ California Madrigal on the Approach of Spring,” and “ A White-Pine Ballad ” about the ruin, through woman’s wiles, Of “Milton Perkins, late an owner in White Pine.” The demure drollery which smiles behind the truculent unconsciousness of “ Truthful James,” and here utters the exquisitely Californian moral, —

is felt in some other pieces, which have not the best reason for being. We mean those in which Mr. Harte has used his sense of cockney character and parlance to produce grotesque local figures of apparently no native land or clime. You laugh, and reproach yourself for laughing ; it seems such an unjustifiable enjoyment, and the means which move you so unnecessary to an artist who, at his best, is one of the greatest. But the good and the bad of his California verse are no longer novel; it is to the two or three “East” poems which Mr. Harte has written, that curiosity will first tempt the reader. He will find in them, we think, assurance of all that he had a right to expect of the poet. “ A Greyport Legend ” was needlessly weighted by an explicit moral; but it was, otherwise, better than any other “earnest” poem that Mr. Harte had written. For “A Newport Romance ” we have only praise : it is a pretty story rehearsed with faultless grace, and then meditated with a waywardness of thought as natural as it is ethereal, and leading from mood to mood with delicate and winning art. “ The Old Major Explains ” merits all the favor it. won, as a piece of characterization ; and among the “ West ” poems, to which, we must revert again, we think “ In the Mission Garden ” as good character and even finer handling. The old monk blinding the traveller with his story, in which, false as it is, he expresses his true regret, and the brisk little Paquita’s flash of light at the end is admirably successful work. In “The Lost Galleon ” and “ The Wonderful Spring of San Joaquin” there is a very pleasant sense of the poetic and humorous capabilities of the old Spanish times in California, with which we believe Mr. Harte could deal as excellently as with contemporary phases. “ The Lost Galleon ” is a trifle expanded, but the other poem is entirely good.

We hint some new effort on the part of Mr. Ilarte, because we feel that, as the easy critics who do so much to form die popular mind have been saving, he must look to his laurels. At those enviable bays Mr. Miller had already whirled a lariat, which is now sweeping the horizon of English speech before lessening its rings to the fatal close (it is impossible not to write finely on this subject), and now comes Mr. George Mac-Henry, in the very best typographical panoply — and AVC own it is very handsome—that San Francisco Can afford, and disputes his renown, with an epic in twelve cantos and some millions of lines, very justly called “ Time and Eternity.” We recall nothing in Mr. Harte’s poetry like this description of the treatment of the vanquished after the Battle of Armageddon: —

With a critic’s civil distrust of his reader, we have italicized the more wondrous phrases ; but in the lines describing a flight of bad angels through space, at the Ddestruction of the Earth Ave feel that italics are not necessary : —

It appears to us that Mr. Mac-Henry has been equipped by nature for a great poet; and that his sphere is London, where they know a great poet when they see him. While in this generous mood, we will counsel Mr. Edwin W. Fuller also, who has written “The Angel in the Cloud,” to try London, though we warn him that his failure to appear directly from the Pacific slope will be against him, and that he ought at least to take with him a serape and a green snake and a brace of singing cockatoos. He is a religious poet, and these things will affect the cockney imagination as the proper accessories of an American prophet. We are sorry that we cannot comply with the earnest request he makes of readers in his Preface to read his whole poem if they commence it. We cannot, because life is short—and sweet; but we will quote from his work, in atonement, a very elegant passage : —

The poetry of the last month or two is, such as it is, very abundant, and Mr. Walt Whitman adds to the embarras de richesscs one of his curious catalogues of the American emotions, inventions, and geographical subdivisions, which was recited at the opening of the American Institute in New York. The managers call it a “ magnificent original poem,” and their note of thanks and other testimonies to its extraordinary merit are printed with it ; which does not seem desirable in the case of any poem, in spite of what Mr. Emerson has permitted himself to do for Mr. Charming’s “ Wanderer.” It must at least alarm the reader when a work is thus offered, and he is told beforehand that if he is the right kind of a reader he will appreciate it. We believe that we have liked what is clear and true in the “ Wanderer,” and we were very glad of the following lines when we came to them : —

But for all our pleasure in such delicacy and reality (we must except “ the humble toil of Erin’s hand,”) as we feel here, we could not find anything but a poor sort of literary conventionality and turgidity in any lines like these : —

We cannot perceive depth or novelty in the poet’s broodings upon the Indian, War, Slavery, Opulence, and so forth, and we think his desert is chiefly in the fresh glimpses of nature which his verse affords, and now and then the painting of a human character and figure. Here is one of these, perhaps too faint in color and vague of outline : —

It does not seem just to leave Mr. Channing’s poem without speaking of the very unpleasant halting of many lines in it, through “ that needless and even wilful neglect of rhythm ” which looks so much like affectation.

Mr. Whittier owns in the Preface to the charming collection of poetry which he calls “ Child-Life ” that “in more than one instance he has deferred to the instinctive and natural criticisms of childhood,” but he might have been reasonably suspected of testing all his selections in that way, so simply pleasing are they all. It is not a book whose character you: can very well explain without reprinting its index ; and the best we can say of it is that the finest taste in poetry for children and the largest sympathy with children’s minds have united to gather into it, not all the verses that children like, but none that they dislike, or cannot feel and understand. It is a singularly happy piece of work, — the happiest of its kind that we know ; the children who were once young will hardly miss from it any of their favorites, while the children who are still young are likely to make all the pieces in it their favorites. The selections are from the freshest sources as well as those known before, from Marian Douglas and Björnsen as well as from Hannah Gould and Wordsworth. There are several very pretty translations also from the Dutch, the German, and the Italian; and Mr. Whittier and Miss Larcom — whose services he specially acknowledged — have taken care that the fancy of their little readers shall never be cultivated (as often happens) at the cost of their sense of humanity and justice. It is abundantly illustrated with pictures which have sometimes illustrated the poems before and are sometimes new, and are always pleasing.

Of recent prose books for children (or perhaps we had better say young people, in this case) none is comparable to Mrs. Diaz’s “ William Henry and his Friends,” which will have a cordial welcome from all the readers of the “ William Henry Letters.” The new book has, in greater degree, the merits of the first,—surprising unaffectedness, and singular fidelity to human nature. It is illustrated by that new process of photographing the artist’s design upon a metal plate and printing directly therefrom ; and we sometimes fancied, in reading it, that Mrs. Diaz had discovered an. equivalent secret in literature, whereby she was able to photograph the very life of the people at Summer-Sweeting farm, and reproduce them exactly as they have their being. The material of the book is of the simplest kind : it is merely the diversions and adventures at the farm during the summer that Mr, Fry boards there with William Henry’s grandmother. William Henry has been home some years from school, and throughout this volume is seeking that place in a great wholesale business which he gets at last. He is a veritable young man, as he was a true boy ; and we believe there never were more genuine persons in literature than his cousins Lucy Maria and Matilda, his Aunt Phebe and his Uncle Jacob. The sweetest moral is implied by the whole course of the story, — though it is scarcely a story, — and it is full of a perfectly delightful humor. Indeed, as a humorist Mrs. Diaz must be recognized among the first that amiably and profitably please. Certainly no other American woman rivals her in this respect.

Her people, we think, are realer “ Real Folks ” than Mrs. Whitney’s, who, however, have also their reality, if they do seem to behave a little too perfunctorily. There is too much preaching in Mrs. Whitney’s book, that is the truth. If it were to be read as a homily, there would be no fault to find, for it teaches sincerity, charity, and all active Christian usefulness. There is no objection to religion in novels, we suspect, even on the part of the ideally heartless critic whom Mrs. Whitney takes to task ; and certainly we all desire novels to be pictures of human experience. The trouble with highly moralized novels is apt to be that they are not pictures of human experience, but the experience of preternatural automata, and that the only real folks in them are the bad ones,—the awful examples to be avoided. The purpose to do good, which we wish to be as far as possible from undervaluing, overcomes the author’s instinct to be true, and art and religion are involved in a common ruin. Mrs. Whitney’s book is charming as often as it is not didactic. For example, one of the best passages in it is that where light, unvaluable Glossy Megilp chats with the other girls at her toilet, and defends its arts : “ The little gap in my left eyebrow was never deliberately designed. It was a ‘ lapsus naturae.’ I only follow out the hint and complete the intention. Something is left to ourselves ; as the child said about the Lord curling her hair, for her when she was a baby, and letting her do it herself after she grew big enough. .... Twice a day I have to get myself up somehow, and why should n’t it be as well as I can ? . . . . And one person’s dressing may require one thing and another’s another. Some people have a cork leg to put on, and some people have false teeth ; and there would n’t any of them come hobbling or mumbling out without them, unless there was a fire or an earthquake, I suppose.” Both “ Real Folks ” and “ William Henry and his Friends ” have illustrations uncommonly satisfactory. In the latter the various character is admirably interpreted by the artist.

Another noticeable book for young people is Mrs. Richardson’s “ Stories from Old English Poetry,” written after the example set for all books of the kind by the Lambs in their Tales from Shakespeare. The stories are from Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and other early poets, and they arc told with a good feeling for the originals ; not always with simplicity, nor with perfect judgment as to what tales are best to tell young people, but prettily, and on the whole blamelessly.

In fiction for their elders there is a dearth of the native sort, or a harvest worse than famine, except for Mr. De Forest’s “ Overland ” ; Mrs. Stowe’s “ My Wife and I ” may have been meant to be more a lesson than a delignt, and possibly should not be considered as a novel, though it is hard to consider it in any other way. The plot is meagrely this : A young country-bred college-graduate, who goes to New York and lives by literature, marries, in spite of Mrs. Grundy, a young girl of wealth and fashion, and they set up housekeeping on one of the back streets ; and in a little house which the artistic feeling and the domestic genius of the wife have made perfectly beautiful, they live happily upon a beggarly pittance of seven thousand a year. Some toilers in Grub Street would not think this poverty; but Mrs. Stowe achieves for her young people all the social hardship of penury without its discomforts and privations ; just as Miss Dickinson plunges her hero into woe by having him marry a negress you could not tell from a white woman. The purposes of the book are good, and we suppose the sketches of the women reformers and sheBohemians are not too highly colored: but it seems to want all fineness of touch and mellowness of tone ; the reality of Mrs. Stowe’s best work is not here, as it is absent from the other books in which she deals with fashion and wealth in a moralistic spirit. We have not so many women of genius that we can afford to lose the first from the service of literature, and we hope Mrs. Stowe will come back to it, and let the lessons of her next book be taught by the character of its people, and not by their conformity or non-conformity to certain social and domestic ideals. The illustrations of the present book are infamously bad.

Mr. De Forest’s “Overland” is as good a story of a certain good kind as we have read. But for a little feebleness of outline and general immateriality in the heroine (the weak point in all of Mr. De Forest’s novels), it is as admirable as “ Foul Play,” with which it has much in common in the vivid character and rapid succession of its incidents, though in “ Overland ” these are often better found if not truer. What ground for his romance could the novelreader more desire than that Mr. De Forest has chosen in Santa Fe, with Lieutenant Thurstane in love with Clara Van Dieman, and her Mexican kinsmen averse to him for reasons of love and money ? The march across the desert to California, with its Apache fights, the sojourn in the ancient Aztec city of the Moquis, the love-making between Clara and Thurstane, the longbaffled and at last successful villany of her cousin Coronado, who sets Thurstane adrift on the Colorado ; the thrilling escapes and the sufferings of Thurstane and his companions in their descent through the Grand Cañon, and their final rescue; Texas Smith’s attempts on Thurstane at Coronado’s instigation ; — these form the warp of a story in which innumerable slighter frets are interwoven, with a great variety of character and vivid descriptions of the strange local life and scenery. Mr. De Forest, who is always strong in the presentation of his characters, has never realized his figures better than in those diverse reprobates, old Garcia and Texas Smith, who unite in themselves whatever is peculiarly atrocious in the Latin and Teutonic races. Coronado, successfully as he is drawn In his adaptability to the varying purposes of hate and friendship, his intellectual appreciation of things he does not feel, his murderous lust of power and money, and his narrow ambition, his patience and impatience, his courage and cowardice, — still seems to us somewhat conventionalized ; but those other two (Garcia being scarcely more than a sketch) are dreadfully fresh and powerful in their impression of wickedness. The squat, swarthy, one-eyed, timid Mexican, with his headlong fury for killing whatever kept money from him, and the gaunt, sallow borderer, who saw, when a boy, his mother tortured to death by Indians, and who, with his instincts of destruction and revenge, has led a life of murder With a Simple enjoyment of slaying ; cruel, stupid, fearless, — these figures are Worthy pendants ; but they are hardly balanced by the good people of the story. Yet Thurstane is far above the average of heroes ; he is a real man of the best sort, with the traits of his army training finely touched. Good, too, of their sort, are the soldiers under his command, with their simple habits of discipline and implicit obedience tempering strong peculiarities ; while Clara’s strong-minded aunt and Captain Glover, if not perfectly novel, are very amusing in their way. We have heard the descriptions of Western scenery, in which the story abounds, praised for wonderful truth and force by those best acquainted with it.

With “ Pictures of Travel ” the series of Andersen’s works issued from the Riverside Press is complete. The sketches which it embraces, now for the first time given to the American public, are very characteristic in style, and full of his quaint conceits and kindly humor. Among the best chapters are the last two : " The Passion Play at Oberammergau ” and " A Visit at Charles Dickens’s House.” Andersen witnessed the Passion Play in 1860, and he gives us as striking an account of it as we remember to have read. The “Visit at Charles Dickens’s House” took place at a time when a series of dramatic performances were given by Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and others for the benefit of Douglas Jerrold’s widow. This paper presents Dickens to us as an admirable actor, and gives us new, but unneeded, evidences of the value of his friendship and of his warm heart. “Take the best out of all of Dickens’s writings,” Andersen wrote in a letter home, “ make from them the picture of a man, and you have Charles Dickens.” We find in this chapter, also, an excellent critique on Riston, an interesting sketch of Miss Burdett Coutts, and glimpses of various persons and things prominent in London life.

Miss Proctor’s “ Russian Journey” is a book which provokes suspicion that many desirable things have been left out from a fear of burdening the reader with details, and so he does not do as prompt justice as he ought to what is really given him. The journey is a tour of the great Russian cities from St. Petersburg to Moscow and Nijni and Kazan, and thence through the eastern part of the Empire and the Cossack country down to the Crimean coasts, to Sevastopol and Odessa; and its story is told in a succession of careful, neatly touched, conscientious pictures, which are sometimes vivid, and always admirable for evident truthfulness and honest study. The description of the fair at Nijni and the sketches of rivertravel everywhere are good examples of what is best in Miss Proctor’s manner, who makes her reader see all the variety of the great mart, and feci the sublime monotony of Russian scenery with whatever reliefs it has. There is a very good sense given, too, of the old Tartar city of Kazan, and when we come into the Crimea, we have the enjoyment of lands and cities little visited by travel, in some fresh, bright sketches of people and landscapes. Miss Proctor reminds us from time to time of the facts of recent history in Russia; she is an ardent Russian in politics, and enthusiastic about the reforms projected or accomplished by the Czar.

Before we leave the books of travel, we must speak of the charming new translation of “A Journey round my Room,” which Hurd and Houghton have published in a shape wholly worthy of De Maistre’s exquisite little masterpiece. As a bit of mere book-making it is not equalled in tastefulncss by anything yet done in America, we think, and ought to be so praised. The fine workmanship might almost be an inspiration from the pretty story or revery, which, whatever its attenuation, is of unsurpassable sweetness of tone, and most subtly satisfies with its airy touches of humor and sentimentality.

Mr. Huntington’s work, “The Church Idea,” opens with an expression of the dissatisfaction, perplexity, and longing for unity which mark Christendom to-day; and his purpose is to define catholicity, to show that the Church is a living body, and that unity therefore belongs to it of right, and to indicate the way in which the “Church of the Reconciliation” is to be established. This he does from a Churchman’s stand-point, and the solution which he offers is the acceptance of the essential Anglican idea, — which he believes to be the true Church Idea,—a position which he supports in a very interesting manner. Believing that Christ meant there should be built up in the world a Church bearing his name, he reviews the principal misapprehensions to which he thinks the original thought has been subject, namely, Romanism, or the exaggeration of the divine idea, Puritanism, or the diminution of the idea,, and Liberalism, or its distortion. The reconciliation of the discordant forces of Christianity Mr. Huntington believes must be based upon the Anglican position ; and his exposition of the essential Anglican idea is very clear, and it will be of service to those who are unable to dissociate Anglicanism from a vision of surplices and choristers and Gothic towers and the whole picturesque costume which English life has thrown around it. Uniformity in divine service and other features of the present Episcopal system may be best, but these are subjects foreign to the direct issue and all open to men’s discussion and preferences. In the author’s searching analysis, none are corrected more freely or called upon to yield more than Churchmen who are mere denominationalists; and however men may differ from him, none will fail to admire the spirit of his work.

We can praise for the same virtue Mr. Robert Dale Owen’s new book, which we have space here only to mention, but to which we hope to recur soon again. “ The Debatable Land ” is in great part a record of those spiritualistic phenomena which Mr. Owen believes take place, like the miracles, under law, and which he feels to be a very essential condition of belief in immortality. His collection of facts is preceded by a prefatory address to the Protestant Clergy, in which he traces the rise and gradual decline (still continued, he declares) of Protestantism ; and in a summary of his opinions and impressions at the close of the work, he affirms that between Catholicism and infidelity there is no rational ground but the Spiritualism which accepts all supernatural occurrences in all times, not as abnormal manifestations of power, but as events strictly in accorddance with intcrmundanc laws.

FRENCH AND GERMAN.²

THE war has naturally left its traces on both the French and German literatures, not only in the shape of military histories, apologies, and explanations of unlucky generals, records of the sieges of Paris, etc., but also in the fiction of each country. This is true to a greater extent of the German novels, whose heroes gallop from one end of France to the other, on their way kindling the love of even the most patriotic French girls by their trim uniforms, jangling spurs, and bold mustaches. Or else we have the simpler tale of the poor girl who is left at home to weep. It is exactly as it was with many of our magazine stories just after our war, when the brave officer held the place now occupied by the penniless artist, —who is a lasting favorite, — and the omniscient professor, who is always sitting by a lamp dabbling in Hebrew; geology, the history of music, comparative anatomy, astronomy, Homer, and botany. While there is no new German novel of any marked merit, — we say nothing about the old ones, — there has appeared in the Revue des Deux Maudes during the summer and autumn a story by Victor Cherbuliez, which alone has the material of many a shelf-full of ordinary novels. It is called I.a Revanche de Joseph Noiret. Many will be already familiar with the earlier works of this fascinating writer, and more, we hope, will be persuaded to read this story, which we are willing to call one of the greatest works of fiction of the day. Cherbuliez is a remarkable writer of fiction in a country where the standard is very high, where even the second and third rate novelists have at least some qualities that are deserving of respect. Prosper Randoce and Le Comte Kostin are by no means poor because this story is better. This is the best, and the best of a series in which it is easy to detect a steady improvement. They are all marked by tire same merits, namely, an ingenious plot, an exceptionally brilliant style, and a cleverness of treatment that is almost unequalled. This praise will not, we think, appear undeserved to those who have read his novel, although those who have not will probably take them up prepared for disappointment, — that is, if they will consent to take them up at all. His brilliancy is indeed his worst foe, because, although it is not distracting, we nevertheless feel that less of it would at times permit the story to have greater force. Out of deference to the possible readers of Joseph Noiret, whom Cherbuliez will insure against untimely exercise of their critical faculties while they hold the book in their hands, we will net quote the passage in which it seems to us that he transgresses. It is at the very crisis of the story that, on re-reading and reflection, he seems to us to be too clever. Nothing that he says offends, but a writer of more poetical feeling would have held his hand, no matter what sentence he would have had to cut put, And this is perhaps the point in which Cherbuliez most nearly misses being the greatest writer of prose fiction, for his over-brilliancy where it exists is but one sign of this greater deficiency, a certain lack of real poetry. In general he tells his story as something outside of himself; he seems to own it and to be the master of it ; it is with all its beauty, its extraordinary comprehension of man and the world, something bounded, something finite; the poet, on the other hand, tells us something infinite that is ever old and ever new, something that can never be comprehended, only felt. In this respect Teurguenieff fur surpasses Cherbuliez, and we hope at some future day to return to the investigation and comparison of their relative merits. But what we have said above is less true of Joseph Noiret than of the others. In this story he has drawn a lovely character, the heroine, Marguerite. Nothing could be more charming than the study of her character. All the others are well drawn, the unsatisfactory Joseph, the vulgar Bertrand, the Count, but she stands pre-eminent. Through all her troubles, which are manifold, she is always calm, self-possessed, and the end— But we forbear. Cherbuliez tells the story better than we do.

The fifth volume of the German translation of Tourguenieff, containing “Helena,” a rather long story, and a remarkable sketch called “ Visionen,” has appeared. Both exist in French translations, and " Helene” in English. This is the story of the love of a young girl for a young man, a subject that is ordinary enough, but the way in which it is told is rare indeed. The hero is not of the usual faultless heroes of fiction, nor, on the other hand, is he by any means commonplace, but a compound as rare in novels as it is frequent in life, of good and bad qualities. In her eyes his obstinacy is heroic perseverance, his exaggerated severity, manliness. Then, too, love softens him, and we see within his breast the struggle between his love for Helene and his devotion to his country. The way in which he is brought to obey his love by the bold tenderness of Helene is beautifully told. We see human beings actually moved by passion and not society-figures smirking through a flirtation as if it were a figure in a ball-room dance. The book is sad, the end is tragic, but yet it is not merely sad ; we see, in spite of its gloomy termination, that there is something that survives even the greatest sufferings of life ; that if man is mortal, there are feelings and emotions that are immortal. It is a book that can be read and re-read with pleasure.

Julian Schmidt’s Bilder aus dem Geistigen Leben unserer Zeil, neue Folge, is scarcely a new book, nor yet one of the most valuable that he has published ; for inasmuch, as the book appeared during the war, he was so far carried away by his patriotism as to publish a great many of his more recent letters on France, which are not of great interest to the foreigner. There are some other essays, however, which are purely literary. One is on Dickens, and very interesting it is. There is another on Fernan Caballero, which is the nom de plume of Madame Cecilia de Arrom, a German by birth, who has for many years lived in Spain. One of her novels is now appearing in the “ Catholic World.” Following these is an essay on Lamartine, and one on Heine. The modern French novelists receive a few pages of intelligent criticism. We quote a few sensible words from the book : “ After all, has the moralist to pass judgment on a work of art ? Has art anything to do with morality ? Is it not free from those bonds which limit and condition actual life ? In fact, one could dispense with the moralist’s view of art, if art would not concern itself with morality. Whoever wished to judge a landscape from a moral point of view would make himself ridiculous, but where human actions, principles, thought, and sensations are concerned, one can hardly regard the characters of a novel otherwise than as human beings, — that is to say, one will form an opinion about their morals and examine whether this opinion agrees with that of the author. Now, moralizing is one of the main occupations of the writer in modern times, and there is scarcely a novel that does not bring its examples even of the strangest actions and thoughts under general principles. Our age is more inclined than earlier ones to reflect, to ponder over the cause and effect in the moral as well as in the physical world. Hence the novel is not only the drawing of certain models, but it is the most convenient vehicle for that which especially concerns modern culture.” These words are a key to the position that Schmidt takes in all his criticism, for in everything he is a decided moralist.

Of less general interest are Rudolf Gottschall’s Portrats und Studien. One name, in the book, however, Charles Sealsfield, should catch the reader’s attention, for he lived many years in this country' and wrote novels in English, and in German many sketches of this country. In Germany he is better known than he is here, and this sketch of him would preserve many an American about to go to Europe from an awkward confession of ignorance to the wondering German. Rather solid reading are the two essays on Die Unsterblichkeitsfrage und die neueste deutsche Philosophie and Ein Philosoph des Unbewussten. This last is a brief analysis of a very interesting, and, in Germany, very popular book, Hartmann’s Philosophie des Unbewussten. That it is popular is not strange; it is well written, as entertaining as a novel, far more so than any German novel, with no wearying terminology, — we speak of it simply from the point of view of the general reader,—and full of the blackest pessimism. It is interesting as an example of much of the thought of the time.

The Chronique du Siege de Paris, by Francis Wey, is entertaining, and moreover full of valuable papers which one would not always be able to put one’s hand on.