Looking Toward Sunset
By . Boston : Ticknor & Fields.
FOR forty years it has been the good fortune of Mrs. Child to achieve a series of separate literary successes, whose accumulated value justly gives her a high claim to gratitude. Every one of her chief works has been a separate venture in some new field, always daring, always successful, always valuable. Her “ Juvenile Miscellany” was the delight of all American childhood, when childish books were few. Her “ Hobomok “ was one of the very first attempts to make this country the scene of historical fiction. In the freshness of literary success, she did not hesitate to sacrifice all her newly won popularity, for years, by the publication of her remarkable “ Appeal for the Class of Americans called Africans,” a book unsurpassed in ability and comprehensiveness by any of the innumerable later works on the same subject, — works which would not even now supersede it, except that its facts and statistics have become obsolete. Time and the progress of the community at length did her justice once more, and her charming “ Letters from New York” brought all her popularity back. Turning away, however, from fame won by such light labors, she devoted years of her life to the compilation of her great work on the “ Progress of Religious Ideas,” a book unequalled in the English language as a magazine of the religious aspirations of the race. And now, still longing to look in some new direction, she finds that direction in “Sunset,” — the only region towards which her name and her nature have alike excused her from turning her gaze before.
This volume is a collection of essays and poems, old and new, original and selected, but all bearing on the theme of old age. Her authors range from Cicero to Dickens, from Mrs. Barbauld to Theodore Parker. The book includes that unequalled essay by Jean Paul, “ Recollections of the Best Hours of Life for the Hour of Death”; and then makes easily the transition to that delicious scene of humor and pathos from “ Cranford,” where dear Miss Matty meets again the lover of her youth. Some trifling errors might be noticed here and there, such as occur even in books looking this side of “Sunset”: as when Burns’s line, “But now your brow is beld, John,” is needlessly translated into “But now your head’s turned bald, John,” — where the version is balder than the head. It is singular, too, how long it takes to convince the community that Milton did not write the verses, “ I am old and blind,” and that Mrs. Howell of Philadelphia did. Mrs. Child discreetly cites for them no author at all, and thus escapes better than the editor of the new series of “ Hymns for the Ages,” who boldly appends to the poem, “ Milton, 1608-1674” Yet Mrs. Child’s early ventures in the way of writing speeches for James Otis and sermons for Whitefield should have made her a sharper detective of the ingenuity of others. Those successful imitations, published originally in her novel of “The Rebels,” have hardly yet ceased to pass current in the school elocution-books.
Nothing occurs to us as being omitted from this collection, which justly belongs there, unless she could have rescued from the manuscript that charming essay, read by President Quincy at a certain Cambridge dinner, wherein that beloved veteran — Roscius sua arte — taught his academic children to grow old.