Recent Literature

TT is always hazardous to recall a vanishing renown, whether in literature, in art, in philosophy, or in politics. The men esteemed great in each age are chiefly great to that age alone, the greatest seldom reaching their height of reputation during their own lifetime. Reputations are commonly like the paper-money that circulates freely in its own country or district for a few years, and then ceases to have any value except as a curiosity ; the few great names are the gold and silver coin that are good all over the world, and after any lapse of time, even though they may be taken at a discount from their original mint mark; while the greatest of all, the Homers, Dantes, Shakespeares, are like gems, that have their value enhanced the further their antiquity reaches back. Dr. Channing’s times were recent, if we reckon by years, but they have become so completely

in the whirl of events that has since come upon us, that they seem as remote now as any period since Cotton Mather’s day. How far away appears that memorable quarrel in Harvard College, when John Quincy Adams was Professor of Rhetoric there, and when Dr. Holmes’s shadowy hero, the Reverend Eliphalet Pearson, seceded from the faculty and resigned his fellowship rather than countenance the inroad of Arminian theology ! That was less than seventy years ago.; and it is just seventy years since Dr. Channing accepted the call to settle over the Federal Street Society in Boston, where he preached for nearly forty years. Before that ministry was half ended, he was the most renowned and influential preacher in Boston ; and long before his death, in 1842, he had a European reputation, as well as the widest celebrity in the United States. His fame was of a mixed and general character; to the majority he was a heretic in religious opinion, holding and successfully propagating unsound doctrines ; to many he was the patriarch of their sect; to more, perhaps, a light and a guide in philosophy and literature ; while others knew him as the impressive pulpit orator, the enthusiastic but self-restrained reformer, the revered and saintly devotee of a faith at once spiritual and practical. He had appeared as a polemical writer in the controversy between the Unitarians and Trinitarians; as an earnest opponent of slavery and a champion of freedom of speech ; and as an unwearied, hopeful philanthropist. In all these characters, the six volumes of his sermons and essays, published soon after his death, exhibited him to his readers, who were numbered by millions, and were found in all parts of the civilized world. Portions of these volumes were translated into the Continental languages, and the story of Dr. Channing’s devout life, gathered from his biography by William Henry Channing, began to be known in France and Germany as well as in England.

But Channing was an American, and our country soon was swept along into the tumult of political controversy and civil war on the issue of slavery. The warnings and protests of men like Channing were unheeded ; timid statesmen like Webster gave way to the popular delusion, and to the clamor of short-sighted self-interest; and the intellectual life of America, withdrawn from questions of religion and philosophy, centred round political problems. The movement in which Channing had been engaged was a silent and spiritual one, contrasted with the shock of parties and of arms that has for twenty years confused the country and agitated mankind. The music of the spheres is enchanting, but it must be heard in the stillness ; it cannot compete with the thunder of the captains and the shouting of a battle-field ; and for nearly twenty years the memory of Channing has been fading from the minds of men. The influence exerted by him has gone on widening and deepening, no doubt; but there was little room in the national mind for his great method and purely moral and religious impulses to action. In other lands the noise of our quarrel, and the startling prominence America suddenly assumed in the affairs of the world at large, must have diverted attention from Channing’s school of thought and practical piety, as an American peculiarity. To bring back some portion of his countrymen and of the European readers of American books to the contemplation of this school seems to be the purpose of William Henry Channing in editing the present volume, and in proposing, as he is said to do, an abridged and revised edition of his uncle’s Memoirs. It is an undertaking not unlike the return of Ulysses and his surviving followers from the siege of Troy, and their twenty years’ absence out of Ithaca.

Even Boston has wellnigh lost remembrance of the era when Channing and Everett and Bancroft and Sparks and Palfrey were all Unitarian ministers ; and it is only by an effort that any of us can call up that long-buried past. Yet in 1819, when Mr. Everett, newly returned from Europe, was rousing enthusiasm in his Greek classes at Cambridge, and while Mr. Bancroft was pursuing his studies in Germany under Dr. Kirkland’s patronage ; while Mr. Emerson was a Junior in college, and before Mr. Caleb Cushing became his tutor, — in that year Mr. Sparks was settled over a Unitarian parish in Baltimore, and Mr. Channing, not yet a doctor of sacred theology, went down to preach his ordination sermon and declare to the Southern people what Unitarianism truly meant. Let it be added that Dr. Palfrey, who was a classmate of Mr. Sparks, was already preaching; and that Mr. George Ripley, now president of the New York Tribune Association, but then aiming towards the Unitarian ministry, entered college that same year; while Theodore Parker was painfully beginning Latin on his father’s little farm in Lexington. How much of the intellectual history of New England do these names suggest; and how many of the men who bore them owed the inspiration of their lives in good part to Dr. Channing ! But when the great fire swept over the spot where Channing preached so many years, few of the Bostonians of last November reminded themselves that his pulpit once stood there, and that his parsonage was not far off.

The twelve sermons now selected from the mass of Dr. Channing’s manuscripts, and published by his nephew, were written in 1830 and the ten or twelve succeeding years, and belong to the later period of their author’s life. When he preached them to his people, he was withdrawing or withdrawn from theological controversy ; and though he was also embarking, doubtfully at first, but soon with all his earnestness, in the warfare against slavery, little or nothing of political allusion appears in these discourses. They may be described as neither doctrinal nor practical, so much as spiritual ; and in them the essence of Channing’s spiritual philosophy is fully made known. One passage may be taken almost as well as another to illustrate this ; let us choose one from the ninth discourse, on Jesus Christ, the Brother, Friend, and Saviour: “ We are all conscious, however partially, that in human nature there is a Principle that delights in heroic virtue, that admires and reveres men illustrious for self-sacrificing devotedness, that feeds with joy on fictions wherein fellow-beings, amidst great trials and perils, are faithful to duty, and act with noble disinterestedness, at every cost. We all have experienced, in some degree, the workings of the Superior Nature, so as to rejoice with triumphant sympathy, when we read the memoirs of men and women, refined from self-love, pure on principle, consecrated to grand purposes, ascending by lives of everenlarging love to the blessedness of the heavenly world. Now this high power of heart and will, that prompts us to aspire after Perfect Excellence, Jesus came to set free.” This is a doctrine which it has been the tendency of recent speculations to set aside even with some contempt, but which cannot fail to reassert itself wherever the elements of faith and hope are largely present among men. In anticipation of some of the discussions that have taken place since his death, Dr. Channing says in another of these discourses : —

“ I do not wonder that men of superior intelligence, but wanting in religious faith, have been led, by a review of the extravagances and baffled efforts of the philosophic class, to treat with contempt all claims of human reason of attaining to truth. It is only as we apprehend our relationship to an All-Wise God that we can understand ourselves and become to ourselves objects of awe and solemn interest. The human mind, regarded as the offspring of the Infinite Mind, consciously partakes of the grandeur of its Source. Let me know that an Infinite Intelligence pervades the Universe, and I feel that intelligence without bounds may be possible also for myself. Let me further know that this Infinite Intelligence is the Parent of my mind, has an interest in it, watches over it, and created it that it should unfold forever, and partake more and more of His own Truth, and how can I but regard my intellect with veneration ? Then I look abroad upon the vast creation, which before had discouraged me, with joy and hope ; for I see in its very vastness only a wider field for intellectual culture. I cease to be depressed by learning slowly, if I am to learn forever. Religion thus reveals the grandeur, and still more the sacredness, of human intellect.”

As the editor of these discourses says, a “sublime sincerity” inspires their style. It is not the style of the modern sermon, nor of the old-fashioned sermon ; it has none of the humor of Beecher, none of the learning and elaborate eloquence of Jeremy Taylor ; neither the piquancy of South nor the quaintness of Donne, nor the fervid appeals of the great Methodist preachers. Simple and colorless as it is, the style of Channing was original with him, and a marked characteristic of his mind. He, first among American writers, brought down prose to a sincere plainness and brevity, in marked contrast with the style that preceded it, both here and in England. Dr. Channing found a stilted and cumbrous style in vogue : he made one for himself that erred in the other direction of too great shortness of periods and tameness of expression. His mind was correct and refined, rather than strong and rich ; his thoughts moved in a high and clear atmosphere, but had no remarkable breadth or variety. Spiritually he was a great man, intellectually a rare, rather than a remarkable, one. The revival of his discourses, and of his fame as a writer, will doubtless be well received ; and he will make a new impression on our times, in these posthumous sermons, but probably a less distinct and profound one than his editor hopes for. His day has gone by ; his tone of thought and feeling, much as our day may need it, cannot quite be restored to the freshness of forty years ago. But there will be found much that is permanent, and even prophetic, in these devout utterances of a noble and humane spirit.

— Most readers of Mr. Morley’s life of Voltaire probably looked forward to his Rousseau with an interest which the character of that study fully justifies in one sense. It is very entertaining, both because the story of Rousseau’s life could not be otherwise, and because it is here told with every grace of a singularly lucid, easy, and yet strenuous style. If some other traits of the work oblige us to hedge a little from the praises we gave Mr, Morley as a philosopher in our notice of his Voltaire, we have only to insist again upon the excellence and beauty of his writing ; it has pretty nearly all the virtues and charms of the best prose. The method of his work is to trace the career of Rousseau up to the time when his first great work, The Discourses, was written, and then to give a full critical analysis of that ; to proceed with the narrative until The New Heloïsa produced, when that is similarly examined, and the story is again resumed, to be dropped again in turn for criticism of The Social Contract, Emilius, and The Savoyard Vicar. There is no such comment on the Confessions, and there is no general summary of Rousseau’s character at the end. That is considered piecemeal, and as it revealed itself in the several actions of his life. The book is unsatisfactory on this account; for the reader has a right to the author’s help in collecting his scattered impressions of Rousseau, and their embodiment in a more tangible figure than finally presents itself to his mind. Certain great faults, weaknesses, and merits in the man of course insist upon themselves, and are very ably noticed by Mr. Morley, in telling his Story ; but as to minor traits, also very necessary to a just conception of the man, there is an annoying want of ensemble at the last.

On the other hand, some offences, which the reader, aware of Mr. Morley’s characteristic disbeliefs, might have dreaded at his hands, are not chargeable against the work. There was sufficient occasion, in writing of Rousseau and his times, to celebrate mortality and the worm at the expense of those fond hopes of eternal life which most of us cherish ; but Mr. Morley largely spares our weakness. Only once, we believe, does he elaborately bring forward his dismal convictions ; and that is when he speaks of Rousseau’s inexpensive trust that Madame de Warens would be compensated in another world for her sufferings in this : then Mr. Morley asks whether we should not really be tenderer and carefuller in our earthly relations if we once frankly accepted the fact that death absolutely separated and ended us all, — a question which the champions of a future life will have no difficulty in answering. But there is another feature of the book which constantly occurs, and which is really an offence and, we fear, a folly. Science having exploded the Supreme Being, Mr. Morley will not print the name of the late imposture with a capital letter: throughout he prints God, “god.” ; even when he quotes from another writer, he will not allow us poor believers the meagre satisfaction of seeing our God shown the typographical respect which Mr. Morley would not deny to Jove, or Thor, or Vishnu, or even Jones or Smith. Mr. Morley must admit, on reflection, that this is at least a trifle intolerant, for a philosopher; especially, as at other points heisreally very considerate and gentle with us. In fact, he is at some pains, we have fancied, to exhibit the Christian virtues in the mind of an atheist ; he is even a little goody in his patronage of purity of life and the decencies ; and he has the air—though perhaps we have unwarrantably imagined this — of desiring us to behold a man who can dismiss God (or god, as he prefers to call him) without going to the devil. Certainly he manages an essentially dubious subject like the life of Rousseau with great skill ; the facts of that strange career are not veiled, and yet they are presented with a wholesome and modest discretion that opens the book to all mature readers. Nor does he fail in the skill of decently painting an age so indecent and heartless and foolish and corrupt, that a man who lived twenty-five years in adultery with a kitchen-maid, who gave his children as fast as they were born to a foundling hospital, who was confessedly fickle and ungrateful, whose last years were great part passed in mental aberration, was a figure of conspicuous virtue, domestic fidelity, truthfulness, and sanity. Perhaps, indeed, Mr. Morley’s picture of Rousseau’s time is the best result to the reader from his work. One at least feels intelligent about the people with whom he chiefly consorted in Paris, — Madame d’Épinay and Madame d’Houdetot, Grimm, Diderot, and the rest: they are strongly sketched, and the society of which they formed a part is frankly and satisfactorily Studied. Now and then in a single point, of reflection or statement, Mr. Morley enforces its character with a peculiar aptness and vigor, as where he makes us observe how ready all those adulterers and adulteresses were to weep at some moving picture of virtue, though they never thought of applying any rule of morality to themselves, and where he calls our notice to M. d’Houdetot, dining in friendly intimacy with his wife and his wife’s acknowledged paramour Saint Lambert, and Rousseau, who had tried to seduce the lady’s affections, not from the husband, but from the paramour, — a dinner strictly en famille, as one may say.

Altogether the best portrait in the work is that of Madame de Warens, Rousseau’s early “ benefactress,” whose life with him in Savoy is delicately, almost delightfully studied : the amiable, kind-hearted, poor, light lady is almost alive again under the historian’s artful touches. This side of Mr. Morley’s work is not to be too highly praised, either for its grace or for its profound tone of morality and warning. The book, in spite of its atheism, is thoroughly moral. It does not deny the immoral lives with which it deals their undeniable charms of freedom, of poetry, of naturalness in certain degree, and neither does it veil their unrest, their misery, their utter unsatisfactoriness. Rousseau seems the least culpable of the people among whom he lived ; he paid the penalty of lawlessness in proportion to his temperament rather than his guilt. He is always a painful figure, and the final united impression you receive of him, from a book which does not assemble his traits for a final impression, is that which his own writings give of him. No one can deal more openly with him than himself, on his personal and moral side ; and Mr. Morley’s failure seems to be that he does not give you the whole intellectual outline of the man, or adequately reproduce his contemporary effect as a literary and philosophical force. But he has nevertheless made a most interesting book.

— Mrs. Thaxter’s beautiful little volume, Among the Isles of Shoals, is written with a fine, desultory, loitering grace, which lends itself to the business of the book with an insurpassable charm. There is a little history and a very little topography, to begin with, and after that not much more intentional method than there is in the days of the summer sojourner at the Shoals, for whose use the volume modestly professes itself written, though the greater truth is that it is for the enjoyment of every refined reader, there and elsewhere. It is a succession of exquisite studies of the island scenery and the character, actual and traditional, of the islanders; the local legends and the tragedies of tempest and shipwreck which give the Shoals their dark, romantic memories. It is, in this way, one of those books which you may take up at any odd moment; but it differs from most books of that kind in refusing to be as casually laid down : you read it all before the odd moment recurs. In fact, we know one honest reviewer, whose affair is to read books in order to write of them, and who, turning to this to refresh his memory of the Atlantic papers which largely compose this, found himself reading it all over again for pleasure, like some mere lover of literature. It is full of the sea, like Mrs. Thaxter’s poems ; but this delightful prose has charms which one does not find in them. It is so vividly minute in its descriptions, that scarcely a tint or petal or tendril of the flowers that so luxuriously abound at the Shoals escapes it ; and the smallest effects of the landscape are caught with pre-raphaelite faithfulness, while it seizes all those aspects of sea and shore and sky that give breadth to a picture. But it is no mere holiday picture ; the cold, hard, solitary winter-life at the Shoals, as well as its summer-day aspects, is given, by one who knew all its phases from her earliest childhood, and is part of everything she saw. The difference of this life from that on shore has bred that difference in the islanders’ character which so sharply distinguishes them from the people on the New Hampshire coast only nine miles away, and which Mrs. Thaxter portrays with so much delicate humor, from the historical period when they were an example to their brethren on the mainland in a godly walk and conversation, down through their gradual barbarization to a time when, at the beginning of this century, they had neither church nor school among them, but continual rum, fighting, squalor, and all wickedness, insomuch that the English language did not afford scope for the fierce, grotesque profanities with which their hearts were filled. Things are very much better now at the Shoals, A virtuous and unpicturesque prosperity has fallen upon the fishermen; but they are still a very peculiar people, true children of the sea, which shuts out the world from them half the year. Of the ill-fated ships dashed to pieces on their cruel coasts, Mrs. Thaxter tells many a moving tale ; and it gives a strange, pathetic interest to this group of ice-bound isles, that the most famous wreck should be that of a Spanish ship, whose “costly timbers of mahogany and cedar-wood were splintered on the sharp teeth of those inexorable rocks ; her cargo of dried fruits and nuts, and bales of broadcloth, and gold and silver, was tossed about on the shore.” Ghosts of various kinds, both visible and invisible, naturally haunt the islands, and are often encountered ; and the newspaper reader knows what a tragedy was enacted in the winter that is just past, on the loneliest of the group, in the murder, with circumstances of most harrowing atrocity, of two young and beautiful Norwegian women. There is a considerable Norse settlement at the Shoals, where those Northmen of old, the earliest discoverers of our continent, may have cast anchor on a summer’s day. Indeed, the accidents of commerce and disaster and adventure have conspired to give these islands a singular hold upon the imagination ; but the chief part of their poetic good fortune is that they have come to have such a book as this written about them. We ought not to leave it without speaking of the very satisfactory beauty of the wood-engravings that too sparingly illustrate it.

— We are doing a favor to the summer tourist who visits the famous city of Quebec, in calling his attention to M. Le Moine’s very agreeable guide to the many points of interest in the place. The best preparation for a visit to Quebec is an acquaintance with Mr. Parkman’s histories, The Pioneers of France in the New World and The Jesuits in North America, which will put the reader in exactly the right mood for appreciating and enjoying that ancient centre of a system utterly passed away; but for that minuter local knowledge which the sojourner will desire, Mr. Le Moine’s Album dn Tourists is indispensable. Hawkins’s Picture of Quebec — which was one of the best guidebooks ever written — is now quite out of print; but its place is fairly supplied by this work of Mr. Le Moine, which also has some advantage over the older guide in using the results of the most recent historical inquiries, and in coming from the pen of a Quebecker singularly qualified, by race, education, and predilection, to write of his native city. His name will readily recur to the reader of his Maple-Leaves, — a succession of little books, in which the picturesque scenes and romantic episodes of the history of Quebec are treated with an antiquarian diligence and sincerity very happily united to the lightness of a sympathetic conteur. The same spirit characterizes the Album du Touriste, which differs chiefly from the author’s pleasant English sketches in being more systematized, and in covering more ground. It opens with an historical notice of Quebec, to which succeed an account of the churches and the pictures and some interesting archaeological studies of divers curious facts. 1 hen ensue gossiping essays on widely various topics, such as Nelson’s sojourn in Quebec; the place where Montcalm died ; the charming and storied neighborhood of the city ; the different battle-fields ; the objects of interest and the natural wonders in reach of the excursionist, with full and entertaining notes. Not to be wanting in anything, the book gives us some agreeable causeries on the local game, birds, fish, and beasts; and a second part of the Album is devoted to the itinerary of a voyage from Quebec to Gaspé. The style is lively and the material is that of a thorough inquirer, whose historical studies, and whose works in French and English on the fisheries and ornithology of Canada have made him an authority on the points which he treats. The Album would be the better, however, for a more complete index. It is very gracefully and appropriately dedicated “ au Touriste, aimé, qui chaque printemps, nous revient avec les hirondelles ; au brillant et sympathique historien, qui a su entourer d’une auréole notre vieux Québec, .... à Francis Parkman.”

— Another handbook of far more than ordinary value and interest is Mr. Holley’s Niagara, which, after a sufficient historical sketch and some chapters on the geology of Niagara, is devoted to satisfactory notices of those scenes and incidents to which the intelligent tourist cares to have his attention directed. It is written with the fervor inseparable from the composition of works of this kind, but it seldom offends good taste ; it is not burdened with idle disquisition of any sort; and some passages are of really notable simplicity and excellence, as the account of the shooting of the Whirlpool Rapids by the steamer Maid of the Mist. It tells things pleasant to know of Robinson and other heroes of the Falls, and abounds in that kind of tragic anecdote which has grown up about Niagara. The chapter on the Poetry of the Falls might be advantageously omitted. But the little book is one of real research and observation.

— Mr. Fisher, in the preface to his History of the Reformation says : “ With the religious and theological side of the history of the period I have endeavored to interweave and to set in their true relation the political, secular, or more general elements, which had so powerful an influence in determining the course of events. The attempt has also been made to elucidate briefly, but sufficiently, points pertaining to the history of theological doctrine, an understanding of which is peculiarly essential in the study of this period of history.” He has been successful in his endeavor, while he has been forced to such brevity in his allusions to events connected with his immediate subject, that a considerable knowledge of general history is essential to the right reading of his book. We do not offer this in any sense as a criticism, but, on the contrary, that we may commend the method which is here employed, and enforce the necessity which is constantly laid upon us to know many things if we would know anything. This volume has grown out of a course of lectures given in 1871 at the Lowell Institute. In addition to all which has been gained by the writer’s subsequent studies, there has doubtless been a gain also in coming from the lecture to the printed book. The surroundings of the history proper are admirable, and indicate an amount of pains in the reader’s behalf for which he should be grateful. There is an elaborate table of contents at the beginning. In an appendix is a chronological table running from I479 to 1697. This is followed by a list of works treating of the Reformation and of the general history with which it is connected. The list is not complete, but is full enough for its purpose, occupying as it does twenty-five pages. After this is an index of twenty-eight pages. The book is, therefore, well equipped for its work in the library or the class-room. It is, of course, a Protestant history ; but it is written in a candid and charitable spirit. Though we might conjecture what the author is not, it would be hard to tell with which particular branch of the Protestant Church he is connected. What he says of his book is true : “ It is intended in no sense as a polemical work. It has not entered into iny thoughts to inculcate the creed of Protestantism, or to propagate any type of Christian doctrine, much less to kindle animosity against the Church of Rome. Very serious as the points of difference are which separate the body of Protestants from the body of Roman Catholics, the points on which they agree outweigh in importance the points on which they differ.” Yet it must not be thought that we have here an author who has cast away his own feeling lest he should bestow admiration where, in his judgment, it belongs. He gives the facts, which he has neither made nor fashioned. But it is inevitable that, in treating of an epoch so laden with stirring events and momentous issues, he should make known his allegiance to what he accounts liberty and right, and a true human progress. The method adopted in the book is to give first a sketch of the general character of the Reformation, followed by a chapter on the rise and decline of the Papal hierarchy, and one on the speical causes and omens of an ecclesiastical revolution prior to the sixteenth century. We are then brought to Luther and the German reformation; Zwingli and the reformation in Switzerland; the reformation in Scandinavian and Slavonic nations and in Hungary; then to John Calvin and the Genevan reformation; whence we pass to France, the Netherlands, England and Scotland, Italy and Spain. Then follow the counterreformation in the Roman Church, the struggle of Protestantism in the seventeenth century, the Protestant theology, the constitution of the Protestant churches and their relation to the civil authority, and, finally, the relation of Protestantism to culture and civilization. The bare recital of the subjects of the fifteen chapters shows how wide a field is traversed. We are confident that the book will take a high place at once among the histories of whose reputation we may well be proud.

— Mr. Matthew Arnold’s new volume conies to us with the old modest aspect, and opens in the subdued and polished tones to which his previous writings had used us. But before the attentive reader has proceeded many pages, he becomes fullyaware ofa change in his author, — hardly of manner, certainly not in the crystalline style whose clearness and symmetry we can only despairingly admire, but rather of attitude and function. The man who has hitherto seemed content to roam a little idly over questions of literary, social, and religious interest, alighting now here and now there, glorying, as it were, in dilettantism, chanting the praises of pure art, and setting the Greek, for the time being, far above the Jew ; teasing, with the light lash of his exquisite satire, now the unsuccessful translators of Homer, now Mr. Spurgeon, now Mr. Bradlaugh, and now Mr. Robert Buchanan with his unfortunate “ story of the fig-leaf time ” ; the man who, despite his literary grace, his critical acumen, and his always interesting vivacity, has fairly laid himself open sometimes to the charge of being incoherent, inconsistent, and ineffective, appears before us now in the character of a professed teacher and an extremely serious one. During a momentary pause in the noisy debate between science and faith, reason and revelation, or whatever you may choose to call the opposing parties, this refined voice is lifted proposing an adjustment, and, if possible, a reconciliation. Its delicacy, in contrast with the ruder tones of the disputants, will attract attention. Its decision and the pregnancy of its utterances will be sure to rivet it. Still, as in former times, Mr. Arnold gracefully calls his work an “essay,” — An Essay toward a better Apprehension of the Bible ; but we speedily see that this time the “ essay” has engaged all the author’s powers, and will at least engage all ours in a right appreciation of it.

In his Introduction, Mr. Arnold explains the title, Literature and Dogma, to mean a plea for a literary treatment of the Bible records as opposed to the dogmatic treatment of the professors of scientific theology, represented by the Bishops of Winchester and Gloucester, who resolved in convocation “ to do something for the honor of our Lord’s Godhead,” and the “blessed truth that the God of the Universe is a PERSON,” and by other divines whom he holds responsible for having strained and distorted the simplicity of Scripture to suit their own metaphysical conceptions. “ The valuable thing in letters, that is, the acquainting one’s self with the best which has been thought and said in the world,” he affirms to be “ the judgment which forms itself insensibly in a fair mind along with fresh knowledge..... Far more of our mistakes,” he truly adds, “ come from want of fresh knowledge than from want of correct reasoning.....So that minds with small aptitude for abstract reasoning may yet, through letters, gain some hold on sound judgment and useful knowledge, and may even clear up blunders committed, out of their very excess of talent, by the athletes of logic.”

Mr. Arnold’s bearing toward the dignitaries whom he defies is fairly foreshadowed in the last sentence. If it be thought at times a trifle too sarcastic, and the homage he scrupulously pays to the ability of his opponents more ironical than is always needful, it should be remembered that he comes to us now as the earnest advocate of a very positive, however unorthodox, system of faith in the Bible and in Jesus Christ, and that the resistance he has most to apprehend is, of course, not that of the irreligious, but of those who are eminent in the Church that now is. To these, his summary work with the elaborate doctrinal structure of the ages will be the wildest iconoclasm, and his new-fangled “ righteousness ” the “filthiest” of “rags”; and of these, like an adroit fighter, he never loses sight throughout the volume

His argument is briefly this : Conduct constitutes three fourths of life. The other fourth he divides between art and science, thus securing himself at once from what may be called the fashionable thinkers of the day. The habitual desire to be right in conduct becomes, in conscientious men of a comparatively cold and worldly type, morality. In the more ardent and emotional, it is religion. But no one can earnestly devote himself to right conduct or “ righteousness,” without becoming conscious of a power not himself which makes for and helps to righteousness. Now, this power is God ; and we virtually know nothing more of God than that he (if the pronoun be admissible) is this power. But the typical “ Bishops of Winchester and Gloucester,” with their “Aryan genius” and “logical training,” have come to conceive of God and authoritatively to announce him as a “ magnified and non-natural man, a personal first cause, the moral and intelligent governor of the universe.”

Of the “something not ourselves which makes for righteousness,” Israel, the Jewish nation, had, from the days of Abraham to those of David, a clearer and happier perception than any other people has ever possessed. They gave him the names of Elohim and Jehovah, for both of which Mr. Arnold substitutes the less specific and, as he thinks, less misleading term of the Eternal. After the days of David, this perception became gradually obscured, along with a growing degeneracy in the manners of the people, until it had become, with the mass of them, little more than a tradition of lost political greatness, accompanied by the vague expectation that that greatness would some day be restored by a heaven-sent and victorious monarch. Only the prophets—men pre-eminent for piety and ability — retained a clearer view of the loss their nation had sustained, and continued to preach “ righteousness ” as the only way of return to the favor of the Eternal. This was their mission ; by no means the miraculous prevision of future events. They did not even foretell the Messiah, that is, they foretold no such Messiah as finally came. Even Isaiah, in his famous fifty-third chapter, had in his mind only some afflicted servant of the Eternal with whom Jesus, when he came, voluntarilyidentified himself. With some of the famous “ proof texts ” concerning Christ, and with the orthodox methods of Biblical criticism generally, Mr. Arnold makes short, though never sharp or irreverent work, in his tenth chapter, entitled the Proof from Prophecy. We give a specimen of his method : —

“That Jacob on his death-bed should, two thousand years before Christ, have ‘ been enabled,’ as the phrase is, to foretell to his son Judah that ‘ the sceptre shall not depart from Judah until Shiloh (or the Messiah) come, and to him shall the gathering of the people be,’ does seem, when the explanation is put with it, that the Jewish kingdom lasted till the Christian era and then perished, — a miracle of prediction in favor of our current Christian theology. That Jeremiah should have ‘ been enabled ’ to foretell in the name of Jehovah, ‘ The days shall come when I will raise to David a righteous branch ; in his days Judah shall be saved and Israel shall dwell safely ; and this is the name whereby he shall be called the Lord our righteousness' does seem a wonder of prediction in favor of the tenet of the Godhead of the Eternal Son for which the Bishops of Winchester and Gloucester are so anxious to do something. For unquestionably Jehovah is often spoken of as the savior of Judah and Israel ; ‘All flesh shall know that I, the Eternal, am thy savior and thy redeemer, the mighty one of Jacob ” ; and in the prophecy given above as Jeremiah’s, the branch of David is clearly identified with Jehovah. Again, that David should say, ‘The Lord said unto ray Lord, Sit thou on my right hand until I make thy foes thy footstool,’ does seem a prodigy of prediction to the same effect.....

“ But who will dispute that it more and more becomes known that these prophecies cannot stand as we have here given them ? Manifestly, it more and more becomes known that the passage from Genesis, with its mysterious Shiloh and the gathering of the people to him, is rightly to be rendered as follows: ‘The pre-eminence shall not depart from Judah so long as the people resort to Shiloh (the national sanctuary before Jerusalem was won), and the nations (i. e. the heathen Canaanites) shall obey him.’ We here purposely leave out of sight any such consideration as that our actual books of the Old Testament came first together through the piety of the house of Judah, and when the destiny of Judah was already traced ; and that to say roundly, ‘ Jacob was enabled to foretell — the sceptre shall not depart from Judah,’ as if we were speaking of a prophecy published by Dr. Cumming, is wholly inadmissible. For this consideration is of force, indeed ; but it is a consideration drawn from the rules of literary history and criticism, and not likely to have weight with the mass of mankind. Palpable error and mistranslation are what will have weight with them.

“ And what, then, will they say as they come to know (and do not and must not more and more of them come to know it every day?) that Jeremiah’s supposed signal identification of Christ with the God of Israel, ‘ I will raise to David a righteous branch,’ etc., runs really, ‘ I will raise to David a righteous branch ; in his days Judah shall be saved, and Israel shall dwell safely, and this is the name whereby they shall call themselves, The Eternal is our righteousness!' The prophecy thus becomes simply one of the many promises of a successor to David, under whom the Hebrew people should trust in the Eternal and follow righteousness ; just as the prophecy from Genesis is one of the many prophecies of the enduring continuance of the greatness of Judah. ‘ The Lord saith unto my Lord ’ in like manner : — will not people be startled when they find that it ought to run instead, ‘ The Eternal said unto my Lord the king ’ ? A simple promise of victory to a prince of God’s chosen people ! ”

Nevertheless, in the fulness of time there did appear among the same “ simple Semitic ” people to whom the first revelation of the Eternal had been granted a new and a unique teacher, whose closeness of spirit to the Eternal amounted almost to a sense of identification with him, and who discerned clearly not only what had been lost in the ages of obscured belief, but what had been lacking in Israel’s first ideal. To this he added the quality of mildness, commonly rendered meekness, and the habit of constant self-sacrifice. His method of appealing to the consciences of men was no longer startling and denunciatory, but, above everything, “ sweetly reasonable,” for so Mr. Arnold renders the word Ἐπιεικής not very inadequately translated in the Epistle of James by the phrase “ easy to be entreated.”

“ Israel is perpetually talking of God and calling him his Father ; and every one, says Christ, ‘ who hears the Father comes to me, for I know him and know his will and utter his word.’ God’s will and word in the Old Testament was righteousness; in the New Testament it is righteousness explained to have its essence m inwardness, mildness, and self-renouncement. This is in substance the word of Christ, which he who hears ’shall never see death ’; of which he who follows it ‘ shall know by experience whether it be of God.’ ”

But this doctrine, so lofty and spiritual that it has not yet been fully apprehended by the world, was, of course, far above the level of those to whom it was immediately delivered. The early disciples had their personal attachment to the infinitely lovable Jesus, and even Saint Paul was near enough to feel the influence of his personal magnetism ; but before the first gospel narratives were written, imagination and superstition were at work to adorn and overlay the simple story. We must judge as far as we can by internal evidence what are the words of Jesus himself and what have been innocently added by his chroniclers. The whole series of miracles Mr. Arnold not so much rejects as reluctantly lets go. He says they are doomed and cannot stand before the spirit of the time. His chapters on the New Testament Record, the Testimony of Jesus to himself, and the Testimony of the early Witnesses, are models of critical writing of the most careful, courteous, and dispassionate order. In his treatment of popular theology,— that is, of the system of so-called “ evangelical ” belief which has grown up around the story of Jesus Christ, — Mr. Arnold is decidedly less scrupulous ; and his illustration of the doctrine of the Trinity by the “ fairy tale of the three Lord Shaftesburys,” will be thought by many little short of blasphemy.

It is easy to see, even from the bold outline and the scant extracts given above, how clean a sweep Mr, Arnold makes of the principal tenets of orthodoxy. What we have far less adequately illustrated is the deep earnestness of the book, its quiet confidence and winning clearness, and the unswerving loyalty it shows to the Bible as the author reads it, and to its central figure. We think that many will read Literature and Dogma with a sense of profound if unspoken relief, that so much may be conceded to the aggressive and seemingly irresistible spirit of modern inquiry, and yet so much that is reverend and sacred remain inviolate. It would, of course, be presumptuous to attempt to assign the final place of a volume which, for all its finish and repose, must yet rank among the controversial literature of its day; but we are ourselves inclined to think that it embodies more fully than anything which has yet appeared the purest faith of the time immediately to come. Mr. Arnold’s work allies itself with many contemporary efforts, but more closely than with any others, we think, with the work of our own earlier and more devout Unitarians and with that of the author of Ecce Homo. We place it clearly beyond both.

Literature and Dogma is also deeply interesting as completing and giving consistency to the whole series of Mr. Arnold’s previous works. Whatever in these may have appeared idle, discursive, or simply tentative seems now properly regulated and subordinated, as part of a great plan and necessary to its general fulfilment. This is especially true of the ardent defence of Hellenism against Hebraism in Culture and Anarchy, the balance of which is fully restored (if not more than restored) by the devout tribute paid by Mr. Arnold in the present volume to the Hebraic spirit. It seems to us also not a little significant that this book should have been written by Dr. Arnold’s son. If to any of those who have felt the personal magnetism of the great head-master of Rugby — and who that has read Stanley’s Memoir or the writings of Thomas Hughes has not ? — it has seemed strange and a little sad, that from the loins of that fiery, positive, and apostolic spirit there should have sprung precisely the pensive and fastidious amateur whom Matthew Arnold has at times appeared to be, we think they will find, in the crowning work of the latter’s ripened life, the wisdom of the more heroic father justified of the serener son.

Of the literary wealth of this work and the intense intellectual vitality which renders every page luminous, we have said nothing, but cannot close without directing the reader’s attention to the definitions of the Apostolic and Athanasian Creeds as embodying respectively only the “ popular ” and the “learned science” of Christianity; to the division between the Catholic and the Protestant churches of his old favorite characteristics of “ sweetness ” and “ light”; to his summing up of the life and labors of Mr. Maurice, “that pure and devout spirit of whom, however, the truth must at last he said, that he passed his life in beating, with deep emotion, about the bush, but never starting the hare” ; and to that remarkable passage in his chapter on The true Greatness of the Old Testament, in which Mr. Arnold offers for sacrifice, as it were, on the altar of the great truth he is defending, his own fondly cherished Greek and Gallic ideals. And just here, at last, we would venture, although diffidently, a little to demur.

When Mr. Arnold assigns all of conduct to the Hebrew, and gives us as the mission of Greece only that gospel of art which he himself says can apply to no more than one eighth of life, it seems as if he hardly made due allowance for the work of a man who is at least as pre-eminent in Greek history as Jesus Christ in that of the Jews. Something of conduct — and that a heroic and inspiring something — we have all learned, or might have learned, from Socrates, There are those, we fancy, who, while easily surrendering to the demands of the “Zeitgeist” all the other miracles of Jesus, will yet cling with a passion only too natural to that final miracle of the physical resurrection which seems so apt to alleviate our sharpest sorrow and quiet our most harrowing fear, But if that also must go, there is, at least, something like recompense for the apparent deepening of the shadows into which we go away, in the spirit of those dying words which render so perfectly into a phraseology nobly Scriptural.

“ Hearken unto my words yet again, O judges, for I bid you be of good cheer in the time of death. And be ye sure in your own minds, for unto the good man happeneth good and not evil. And if so be that he live it is good, and if he die it is good likewise. For the Lord his God doth not forget him.....The hour is come and

we must depart; I shall go forth to die and you to live. But whether of these twain is better,—of this knoweth no man save God alone.”

— Outside of the normal and regular influence of our mental states upon our bodily functions there have been noticed in all ages a mass of exceptional and irregular occurrences, such as cures by sudden frights, or by the laying on of a gifted person’s hands, or the wearing of relies or amulets, which have powerfully struck the attention of spectators. Referred by the people to witchcraft, celestial miracle, “ animal magnetism,” or spiritualism, according as the intellectual temper of the time was favorable to the supernatural or was semi-rationalistic, these cases have always been a subject of profound wonder and inquiry to thoroughly rationalistic observers. Such observers rightly see in exceptions the most pregnant instances for enlarging our comprehension of nature’s laws; but they at the same time carry the desire for simplicity of explanation so far as to be satisfied with nothing which will not bring the abnormal phenomena in question into a relation of continuity with more familiar events, such as the effects of voluntary attention on sharpening our senses, of emotion on blushing, excitement on muscular strength, etc.

Author after author has paid his tribute to the importance of the subject, but always with much the same result of repeating the old string of cases and adding a few new ones : Noch keiner der den alten Sauerteig verdaut ! Dr. Tuke bears such an honorable name, and has proved himself ere now to be such an unprejudiced inquir-

er, that we turned to his book with rather higher expectations than usual ; but we have once more been disappointed. The work modestly professes to be little more than a collection of the facts for convenient reference ; and as the author seems dubious what theory to hold concerning the facts of animal magnetism proper, spiritualism, etc., he leaves them out. It has evidently grown out of note-books begun with the hope of gradually bringing order into the subject, but published by the writer when they became sufficiently voluminous, before any important theoretical results had been reached ; for the gentle thread of critical commentary that accompanies them can hardly bear the name of theory. They contain, we should think, a pretty complete culling of the English literature both of cases and of essays of interpretation ; but many German and French authors who would have enriched the collection have not been consulted ; and to find a modern writer resorting to Herodotus and other ancients for illustrations makes one feel as if the phenomena were more sparse than is really the case. The last chapter of the book, entitled Psycho-therapeutics, is perhaps its most valuable part. Dr, Tuke narrates many instances of cure by arousing strongly the patient’s attention, hope, or expectation, while inert applications were employed. Every physician has seen such cases. He gives a short but interesting account of Braidism (practised by itinerant showmen in this country as “ electro-diology ”), and pleads that, since the efficacy of such influences is undoubted, they should be systematically employed and legalized in medicine. The plea has been repeatedly made, but as repeatedly unnoticed. Mr. Braid’s simplification of mesmerism was a great discovery; but although an individual now and then takes it up with enthusiasm,—we may mention M. Liébault in France, — no general use has ever been made of it. We suppose the trouble always will be in these matters what the author calls “ the unseemliness .... and the danger of sullying that strict honor which by no profession is more prized or maintained than by the professors of the medical art.” Indeed, it would be difficult to use the word “ quack ” as conveniently as is now done by the “ regular ” school, if psycho-therapeutics had a recognized place in its pharmacopœia. The reader may be edified by our quoting one case out of a hundred as an example of the book’s contents. It illustrates the power of the will over threatened disease, and is taken from the life of Andrew Crosse, the electrician : “ He was bitten by a cat which died the same day hydrophobic.....Three months after he had received the wound, he felt great pain in his arm, accompanied by extreme thirst. He called for a glass of water. The sequel will be best told in his own words : ‘ At the instant that I was about to raise the tumbler to my lips, a strong spasm shot across my throat. Immediately the terrible conviction came to my mind that I was about to fall a victim to hydrophobia.....The agony I endured for one hour is indescribable, at the contemplation of such a horrible death ; the torments of hell itself could not have surpassed what I suffered. The pain .... passed to the shoulder, threatening to extend......At length I began to reflect on my condition. I said to myself, “ Either I shall die or I shall not. If I do, it will only be a similar fate which many have suffered, and many more must suffer, and I must bear it like a man ; if, on the other hand, there is any hope of my life, my only chance is in summoning my utmost resolution, defying the attack, and exerting every effort of my mind.” Accordingly, feeling that physical as well as mental exertion was necessary, I took my gun, shouldered it, and went out for the purpose of shooting, my arm aching the while intolerably. I met with no sport, but I walked the whole afternoon, exerting at every step I went a strong mental effort against the disease. When I returned to the house I was decidedly better ; I was able to eat some dinner and drank water as usual. The next morning the aching pain had gone down to the elbow, the following it went down to the wrist, and the third day it left me altogether. I mentioned the circumstance to Dr. Kinglake, and he said he certainly considered that I had had an attack of hydrophobia which would possibly have proved fatal had I not struggled against it by a strong effort of mind.’”

Those fond of similar anecdotes will find a plenteous harvest in the volume itself; and, on the whole, with all its shortcomings, we recommend it to students as the most convenient repertory of facts and opinions on the subject of which it treats that we are acquainted with.

— We do not look upon Mr. David Dudley Field’s Draft Outlines as a book challenging criticism, but rather as an effort

which all humane persons should welcome and applaud. At a meeting of the British Association for the Promotion of Social Science, held at Manchester in 1866, the author proposed the appointment of a committee to prepare the basis of an international code such as the nations of the present time might be supposed capable of accepting. The committee was appointed, consisting of eminent jurists of Europe and America, Mr. Field being its chairman. “ In the distribution of the labor,” the author explains, “ a portion was assigned to me. It was at first understood, that, after preparing their respective portions, the members should interchange them with each other, and then meet for the revision of the whole and the completion of the joint production. But the distance of the members from each other has made it difficult for them to take note of each other’s progress, and to interchange their respective contributions with advantage, previous to a general meeting for consultation and revision. I have therefore thought it most convenient, for the other members of the committee as well as for myself, to present my own views of the whole work by essaying a draft of the whole, hoping that my colleagues may do the same.” The author, with equal modesty and precision, requests his readers to note that his work is put forth, not as a completed code, nor even as the completed outlines of a code, but only as the Draft Outlines. The volume, indeed, is a free offering toward the realization of that dream of humanity, — the reign of law and reason in the intercourse of nations. Mr, Field has brought to the performance of this selfimposed task a vast experience in kindred labors, a truly prodigious learning, a power of sustained toil such as few men possess, and a zeal in the cause designed to be promoted that does him very great honor. Nothing will more surprise readers unversed in such studies, than the great number of topics which the contemplated code must embrace. Nations touch one another at so many points, that Mr. Field has been obliged to subdivide his work into one thousand and eight articles. The regulations with regard to ships’ lights in fog and in darkness are twenty in number ; but their due observance would render collision nearly impossible. Hundreds of the articles relate to the mitigation of the horrors of war, aiming to define with exactness who may, and who may not, be taken prisoner ; who may, and who may not, be slain; what are the rights of the various classes of combatants and non-combatants; what regulations should govern truces, armistices, paroles, and capitulations. Among the most labored and valuable parts of the volume are the articles relating to a uniform system of weights and measures, longitude, time, and money, in preparing which Mr. Field enjoyed the assistance of President Barnard of Columbia College. Some of the subjects treated appear for the first time in international literature. Oceanic telegraphy could find no fitter lawgiver than the brother of its most resolute promoter. The time is auspicious for the appearance of such a volume as this. The happy issue of the Geneva arbitration and the distinct revolt of the International Society against the crushing war system of Europe have revived the faith of sanguine philanthropists in the possibility of a speedy partial disarmament of the great powers. It is terrible to think what a very large portion of the revenues of every country — about four fifths is the usual average— is expended in maintaining armies and navies. Mr. Field’s work contemplates and hastens the coming of a period when the differences that now arise between nations will be, for the most part, prevented by a general knowledge and acceptance of what justice requires of each in all the common instances of collision, and when the more serious and complicated questions will be referred to tribunals similar to that which recently closed its labors at Geneva. We are gratified that the United States is the first of the nations to be ready with an offering toward the international code which the jurists of Christendom have it in charge to construct.

— We are inclined to believe, with Mr. Whittier, in his note prefixed to Mrs. Woolson’s book, that the volume will “find favor with a large class of readers.” The writer’s aim, as stated by herself, is “to depict, as truthfully as may be, the successive stages of woman’s life, as she passes from girlhood to mature age.” For six thousand years, she says, “woman has been man’s constant companion on this little planet; yet he seems to regard her as an unknown quantity in his present calculations ; and has set himself to studying her, of late, with as fresh an interest as if she had just dropped from the skies.” However recent the discussion of woman’s affairs, it has been vigorous enough to stale its variety for many of us; but the papers which compose this little book are of a character to remind us that the subject is still fresh and full of suggestion. We begin with a spirited little sketch of the schoolgirl, and, after being told about orname tal young ladies, have rehearsed for us the prevailing fashions of getting married. In a chapter on The Better Way, the writer maintains that women should be allowed to make proposals of marriage, as well as men,—the proposal being left freely to come from whichever of the parties circumstances may impel to speak. Invalidism as a Pursuit is the happy title of one of the chapters. These brief essays were originally printed separately in a Boston newspaper ; but they are quite above the average of newspaper writings, in their freshness, pliant grace of expression, and epigrammatic conciseness ; and hardly anyone, whatever his or her views, can fail to find some profit in so calm yet ardent a treatment of the questions they discuss as is here supplied. No particular measure of reform is insisted upon with such force as to disturb the placid literary tone of the papers. A change is needed in woman’s physical training; she must be enabled, through higher education, to lead a dignified life, valuable to the world whether blessed with conjugal love or not; the feminine feeling about marriage must be enlightened and dignified before we can have “ queens of home ” enough in this country to insure, in another generation purer morals, a more vital Christian humanity, than the present one possesses. Such is approximately the train of thought followed in this modest and agreeable little volume.

— The Red Cotton Night-Cap Country is the antic name of that strange last performance of Mr. Browning’s, to which, for reasons of his own, he has given the outward form and typographical mask of poetry ; but why he should have called it Red Cotton Night-Cap Country, sooner than The Man in the Moon, or Ding-Dong Bell, does not finally appear to the distracted reader of the work. The story is, if we do not misstate the parenthetical nightmare, founded on the case of a certain Monsieur Léonce Miranda, son of a rich jeweller of Paris, who lives out of wedlock with a Madame Clara Muhlhausen, a lady accustomed to a variety of protection, till his mother suddenly dies, when, being at heart ascetic as well as sensual, he is stricken with such terrible remorse that he renounces his mistress, appoints a time to meet his relations and pass over his father’s now-inherited business to them, and is discovered, through the key-hole, reading his loveletters, which he finally puts into a chest and holds in the fire till it is consumed and his guilty hands with it. He fights with the burning stumps the cousins who rush in to save him from himself; he lies weeks in a mad joy at his sacrifice, and with the first return of health drives straight to his mistress, and resumes his old relations with her. He sells out the jewelry business at an extremely good price to his kinsfolk, and retires with his leman to his country-place in Normandy, where they become the devoutest benefactors of a particular Madonna in a certain church ; he gives jewels, and madame bestows laces ; and at last one fine morning, after twenty years of adultery winked at by the Church, the devout Miranda leaps from the top of his château, in the persuasion that the Virgin of La Ravissante will bear him safely up and set him safely down in front of her shrine. This of course does not happen. M. Miranda is killed, his cousins come to break the will and turn out Madame Muhlhausen ; but that notable woman had previously caused Miranda to leave his substance to the church of La Ravissante, and to give herself only a lifeuse of the estate. The church sustains her, and so does the court, deciding that as the cousins have done business with Miranda all these years, they can now allege no proof of his insanity ; and there Madame Muhlhausen still lives till the church inherits her. Such is the story, not otherwise than horrible and revolting in itself; and it is so told as to bring out its worst with a far-reaching insinuation, and an occasional frantic rush at expression of its unseemliness for which the manure-heap affords the proper imagery of “dung,” and “devil’s dung.” We suppose we shall be told of power in the story ; and power there undeniably is, else no one could be dragged through the book by it. The obscurity of three fourths of it — of nearly all, one might say, except the merely narrative passages— becomes almost amusing. It seems as if Mr. Browning lay in wait, and, lest any small twinkling or glimmer of meaning should reach his reader, sprang out and popped a fresh parenthesis on the offending chink that let it through. Fifty-six mortal pages explain why the story is called Red Cotton Night-Cap Country, but without making the reader understand why, and he is left dancing upon nothing for many pages more, till his aching foot is glad to rest even on the uncleanly history of M. Miranda’s intrigue and lunacy. The poem — if it is a poem— is as unhandsome as it is unwholesome ; it is both bad art and bad taste, and is to be defended, it seems to us, neither as a lesson from a miserable fact, nor as a successful bit of literary realism.

— One of the most illustrious names in the later era of Danish literature is Wilhelm Bergsöe. He was born February 8, 1835, and devoted his early life to the study of zoölogy. At the age of twenty-nine he had already made several discoveries which gained him a wide local fame and the degree of Doctor Philosophiœ. Some ten years ago his eyesight began to fail him, and a long and severe illness still further disqualified him for the pursuit of his favorite study. But while the body languished the imagination was only the more active ; his early love for literature, which had, indeed, never deserted him, revived; and in the year 1866 he surprised the world by the publication of Fra Piazza del Popolo, a masterly romance, embodying his reminiscences of Italy, whither his sickness had compelled him to resort. The ingenious complications of the plot, the delightfully fresh and original handling of old themes, and, above all, that deeply poetical tone which pervades every scene of the book immediately established the author’s claim to universal attention ; and since the publication of Fra Piazza del Popolo his fame has been rapidly advancing beyond the boundaries of his native land, until at present no work of his is issued from the press at Copenhagen without being at once translated into the languages of the neighboring nations.

In the Sabine Mountains is a series of letters purporting to have been written to a friend in Denmark during the author’s residence in the village of Gennazzano in the Papal territory. They contain the writer’s impressions of the scenery and people among whom his daily life is thrown, and gradually form themselves into a plot of absorbing interest. The characters are drawn with consummate skill, and with a calm decision which strongly reminds one of Turgénieff. Some of them are actual revelations, — persons whom you recognize as realities as soon as you meet them, although you may never have happened to see them before ; but they continue to haunt your memory long after their connection with the story has been forgotten. Such characters are the old, cruel, and superstitious cancelliere, who weeps at the memory of his “sainted wife,”whose death he had hastened by his own brutal behavior ; the curious old monk,— the “mail-box,”—with his passion for postage-stamps ; and the revolutionary apothecary, whose ludicrous traits have almost the dignity of pathos, when coupled with his patriotic devotion to Garibaldi, his hatred of the Pope, and his sublime yearnings for “ a united Italy.” Nothing can be more charming than the little autobiographical sketch by means of which the author introduces this interesting household to our acquaintance. On a rainy spring morning he starts from Rome with the vetturino, and after various mishaps reaches Gennazzano. In the house of his hostess, Anna Maria, live Signor Carnevale, the revolutionary apothecary, and the old cancelliere with his beautiful daughter, Adele. Other members of the household are Marietta, a servant-maid, blackeyed, jealous, and fickle ; and her lover, Tommaso, a square-built, honest lad, who has charge of the vineyards. The apothecary is strongly attracted by the charms of Marietta, who is haunted by the prospect of becoming a signora, although Carnevale’s dyed whiskers and loose wig continually repel her. Padre Eusebio, a fierce, scowling monk and Adele’s confessor, has offered the cancelliere a handsome reward for having her educated for the convent, and the cancelliere, with whom money is all-powerful, has concluded the bargain. But the author by accident becomes possessed of the secret that Adele has a lover; and other discoveries confirm him in the belief that she cannot be the cancelliere’s daughter. Near Gennazzano he witnesses an engagement between a detachment of French troops and a band of Italian robbers ; the robbers are defeated ; and among them we meet for the first time a mysterious person, who, in various disguises, figures throughout the book. His real name is Leone Righetti, but he is usually spoken of as II condannato. His brother, Paolo Righetti, has written a drama, II Triregno, protesting against the temporal power of the Pope ; and Leone, who is an actor, plays the hero’s rôle supplies from memory the passages which the censors have stricken out, and consequently before long finds himself in the dungeons of St. Angelo. Soon, however, he makes his escape and openly joins the friends of Italian liberty. Again he is captured, and again his ingenuity baffles the watchfulness of his keepers. His life is a never-ending tale of suffering and privation. The Papal spies hunt him from place to place ; but his courage never fails him, and he never loses his faith in “ the united Italy.” He is the ideal hero of Italian liberty. Righetti, as might be expected, proves to be Adele’s father. By the aid of Carlo, her lover, the secretary of the governor, he once more escapes from prison, but soon returns in a new disguise, and, after many difficulties, succeeds in carrying off his daughter to Ischia, where she marries Carlo. Padre Eusebio is killed, and the cancelliere drinks himself to death. In the mean time Carnevale, the apothecary, has not spent his time in idleness. His heart has been constantly wavering between his two mistresses, Italy and Marietta, whom he finds it difficult to reconcile ; for Marietta is a good Catholic and firmly believes in the existing order of things. Finally, in consequence of Marietta’s faithlessness, he deserts his other mistress, compromises with his enemies, and emigrates to Ischia. Here he attends mass regularly, venerates the priests, and rises to be a great man in the community. Five years later the author finds him so much changed as hardly to recognize him. His sallow cheeks have swelled to a pleasant rotundity, his waist has at least doubled its dimensions, and there is a certain venerable tranquillity in his bearing, very different from the mysterious restlessness of the revolutionist of Gennazzano. Highly characteristic is the way in which Carnevale appeases his conscience, whenever it accuses him of being a hypocrite and a coward.

“ Yes,” says he, “ I have at last found a way. While the sheep of faith bleated and bellowed around me, while the priests prayed and the monks sniffled, I kept singing as my litany, E pur si muove ! — E pur si muove! And I remembered that the thought, the free, unbounded thought, will continue to move, until it shall have broken every barrier which opposes its progress.”

Mr. Bergsöe’s work is a great improvement on the old romantic fiction in which monks, nuns, and peasants figure. Not a single scene is overdrawn, not a single character toned above nature. The material seems to be so abundant, the incidents so varied, and the dramatic power so inexhaustible, that one might justly apply to it what has been said of Jean Paul’s Hesperus,— it contains solid metal enough to fit out whole circulating libraries were it beaten into the usual filigree.

The Bride of Rörvig is a story of Danish peasant life. Marie, the heroine, is one of those tender, delicate natures which owe none of their charms to the artificial culture of society. Her father, Lars Hansen, is a plain alderman of the pilot guild, and lives in a little fishing-port on the coast of Jutland. In her childhood she has an invisible companion, Mitra, who forewarns her of Coming events, and gives her a ring which plays an important part in the development of the story. In her lonely wanderings on the strand she sees strange visions, and her childish imagination personifies the cliffs, the fir-trees, and every object of the surrounding landscape. Her fancies estrange her from the neighbors, and even her parents find her odd. She grows to womanhood, and her rare beauty gains her many admirers, among whom a youngsailor, Halvar Johnson, is the favored one. But her father has already promised her hand to Niels Ilde, a man who has returned from China with his purse filled with Spanish piasters, and with the suspicion of having murdered the captain of his vessel. On the heath, not far from Lars Hansen’s house, is a dangerous swamp called the Cow-Kettle, where the bubbling water is in continual disturbance, and of which many dark legends are told. One night when Halvar comes from an interview with Marie, his rival attacks him, and precipitates him into the depths of the Cow-Kettle. Halvar escapes with the loss of his coat and his betrothal ring, which for security’s sake he had fastened to the sleeve. Knowing the character of Niels Ilde, and having but little to hope from the leniency of Lars Hansen so long as he is only a poor sailor, he determines to go abroad to better his fortunes, ships on a Russian schooner, and sails before daybreak. He sends amessage to Marie, which never reaches her. Niels Ilde presses his suit, but meets with no more favor than before. Marie spends the years wearily, brooding over her sorrow, until at last she becomes so strange and bewildered as to appear hopelessly insane. Night and day she sits at her distaff, spinning at her bridal linen ; her physical health begins to fail; and her father too late regrets his hardness. During this state of things the author makes a naturalist’s excursion along the coast of Jutland, and takes up his abode with Lars Hansen. Soon after his arrival he surprises Niels Ilde in the act of throwing a large boulder into the Cow-Kettle; his curiosity is excited, and, having searched the swamp, he draws out a coat with a gold ring attached to it. Three years pass, during which Marie’s state has been changing from bad to worse. At the end of this period the author again visits Jutland, and finds Lars Hansen and his family at the tomb of St. Helena, to whom the legends attribute supernatural powers of healing. In the clear summer night, while the young girl sleeps upon the tomb, he places the ring upon her breast. She wakes, and accepts it as a blessed assurance from heaven that her lover is safe and will return to her. A year later Halvar is rescued from a burning vessel, and celebrates his wedding with Marie. Niels Ilde finds his death at sea on the very day of his rival’s return. We are not prepared to say whether the author has done well in tracing the further course of their wedded life, which apparently runs smoothly, but still fails to satisfy our just expectations. Halvar, in the character of a ruthless reformer, is an altogether new and somewhat harsh element, which accords ill with that tranquil pensiveness which pervades the earlier part of the book. He loves his wife ; but there is a radical difference in their dispositions ; their love is totally devoid of any spiritual element; and the reader cannot but question whether, from the outset, at least on Marie’s part, it has been anything more than that indefinite craving for affection which, at some time or other, will make itself felt in every youth’s and maiden’s heart. Halvar, after the death of his wife, continues to break down all the old landmarks so dear to her, fills up the Cow-Kettle, mines the cliffs, and at last leaves his old, heartbroken father-in-law to mourn the loss of all that he had loved and cherished.

As a whole, the story is wonderfully well told ; the portrayal of passion is vivid and powerful ; and every page gives evidence of the author’s profound knowledge of the human heart. The descriptions of the dismal heaths and barren coast scenery of Jutland are strikingly picturesque; the style is luxuriant and yet graceful, rising at times into an impassioned strength and dignity. To anyone who desires to acquaint himself with the real nature and genius of Denmark we know of no work we could more heartily recommend.