Recent Literature

Miss NORA PERRY, like Miss Lucy Larcom, has a name so gracefully like the musical pseudonyms which ladies affect in literature, that when, a great many years ago, one of the first numbers of this magazine made her known as the author of After the Ball, most people said, “ Nora Perry ? Yes, yes. But what’s her real name ?” Since that time she has tried much to make her real name remembered ; and if she is still chiefly known as the author of that poem, it is not because her other pieces are not very well, or for the most part less than good. She cheerfully and wisely honors After the Ball as the public favorite, and calls her new book—which we believe is also her first book—after it; and indeed it is her most characteristic effort. It is not easy, we find on reading it over, to say in just what its charm lies ; but it is perhaps in its skillful suggestion of a very sweet, natural situation. Two young girls sit down before the fire in their night-gowns, and comb out their hair and talk over the delights of the ball from which they have just come, till the fire dies out, and then they go prettily to bed, and dream of the dances and the favored partners. We are sorry to say that one of them dies before the year is out; this seems a very unnecessary bereavement of the reader, which Miss Perry would have spared him if she had had the artistic courage to stop when her poem was really done. But this courage belongs only to the highest artists, and it must be owned in her behalf that she does not make such a mere morgue of her book as ladies are apt to do. Very few of her young girls die; not many come off with broken hearts from their love-affairs ; not above two, we think, are of doubtful character ; all which is vastly comforting to such old fashioned people as believe that no woman is so fascinating as a pure, happy, and reasonably well one. We do not mind that such a girl should like waltzing and flirtation, or should be a little deadly with her gloves or her rings or her eyes, and mortal at short range with her fan ; she may even sip pink champagne in moderation without serious blame from us, though we prefer perhaps another brand ourselves. It is of these innocent wickednesses that Miss Perry’s heroines are guilty, and the best of them are not even so bad as that. For example, one of the best is not:—

JANE.

Here, very delicately suggested character is added to the charmingly suggested situation, and the poem is really an advance upon After the Ball, in this. It is mighty pretty also, as Master Pepys would say, to observe with what playful tenderness Miss Perry touches in the likeness of her heroine, and as it were caresses her into a bewitching reality. We notice that women very commonly have this fashion with their literary inventions, and seem to fall in love with the pretty girls of their fancy, just as women in life have pets of their own sex and must be kissing them; whereas men do but seldom embrace the creatures of their brains. On the whole, we like this way of most authoresses; it is at any rate better than George Eliot’s, who seems often to hate her handsome women as far as she can see them, and is apt to bring them to some bad end or other. Tying her Bonnet under her Chin is another of the poems in which Miss Perry notably has this way with her heroine ; and there are but few in which she has it not. That little ballad is very famous, and is probably in as many scrap-books, and destined to as much undying immortality of newspaper republication, as any other poem of the sort. It merits the favor it enjoys, for it is one of the most winning of those pictures, or situations, for which Miss Perry has shown such a singular gift, and in which her amiable volume abounds. Here is another of them, which our readers will be the better for seeing a second time in The Atlantic : —

OUT OF THE WINDOW.

This we think sweet and musical and finished, without being more than finished —as, by the way, The Romance of a Rose has been since it appeared in these pages. The two new stanzas added to the poem rub in a not necessary inference with a very heavy hand. However, they do not spoil the ballad, which the reader may read, omitting them.

In fine, we cannot help openly wishing good fortune to this little book. Its mood is so good, and its art on the whole so blameless, that we do not care if it is not very lofty or profound. The pieces often seem to us written in the atmosphere of a young lady’s first year in society, and we mean that they are the more pleasing for this reason. They are full of faith in the importance of glances and of gloves, of attitudes and of tones—and doubtless these things are important. They certainly are so to all the youth of the world, and were so once to all its middle-age; and who would not breathe again that lamp-lit or moon-lit air, and go about to a golden gittern’s tune ? Not that we know what a golden gittern is, but at twenty one does not stop to measure phrases; and as we turn over Miss Perry’s pages, we seem distinctly to have recovered that epoch.

—We sometimes fancy that the peremptory mood of criticism is not the best for valuing certain gentle, negative kinds of poetry, and that the true estimate of a book like Songs of Two Worlds would be made by the leisure that reads books without the latent intention of reviewing them. To us these Songs appear in great part rather slow and pale and thin, but we have come upon passages here and there that make us think an ampler patience would find them better. They seldom move outside of a pretty definite circle of quiet meditation upon various earthly conditions, with a gentle, somewhat mystical rise toward faith in better things after death ; and when they do leave this circle, it is hardly to their advantage, or ours. Yet in one poem, The Organ Boy, there is a glimmer of humor, which makes us doubt whether the author might not have enlarged his range in the direction of a light, pensive satire. He is looking at a Roman organ-hoy, as the final result of Roman supremacy in arts, wars, and politics, and he wonders what shall be the outcome of English supremacy utter as long a time.

' Not English, but angels ’ —
Shall this tale be told
Of Romans to be
As of Romans of old?
Shall they too have monkeys
And music ? Will any
Try their luck with an engine
Or toy spinning-jenny ? ”

We are bound to say, however, that in such more deliberate satires as we find in his book, the author’s touch is anything but light or skillful. In most of his work are a tenderness and a sweetness that to be sure do not greatly move, but which nevertheless appeal to kindred feelings in the reader, and if his sentiment is never keen, it is always delicate. The last poem in the book is so much better than the rest that in quoting it we feel obliged to guard the reader against inferring too much.

A REMONSTRANCE.

— In Mr. Taylor’s tragedy of The Prophet (wherein he follows many lines of the familiar Mormon history), every one must perceive the clearness and fineness with which the character of David Starr, the prophet, is presented. He is the only son of a hard-headed farmer, who never believes in his son’s vocation, and of a wife long barren, who, when David came, looked oh him as peculiarly from the Lord, yet who, while she gave him all the pride and tenderness of her heart, never gave his gift implicit belief. It was for a younger woman, the girl who became his wife, to do this, and it is her loving faith, and the simple, inspiring credulity of his neighbors, that work upon David till ho feels himself a prophet indeed. How do the religious impostures arise ? Mr. Taylor, without answering this question, has dealt with it wisely and suggestively. David to the very last never perhaps wholly believes in himself, but he accepts the self-delusion of his followers as proof of his prophetic mission, while they wait in patience for proof from him ; he is simple, devout, anxious, and earnest throughout. Even Nimrod Kraft, the designing high-priest, who actively promotes the imposture, we do not feel to be wholly false. These characters are treated by the poet as we believe the historian must finally treat the founders of Mormonism, with large allowance for the tricks that fervent hope, religious enthusiasm, and sacerdotal ambition play upon human nature. When the prophet and his followers quit their native region for their city of refuge in the West, a beautiful and willful woman of the world joins them, having fallen, in love with David ; and through her desire and the cunning of the high-priest, a revelation sanctioning polygamy is juggled out of the prophet. This alarms some of the believers, who plot with the Gentiles of the backwoods against the hierarchy: one of the believing conspirators is murdered by order of Nimrod Kraft; the Gentiles attack the city, and David is killed, upon whom dying a self-knowledge falls too late for him to utter it. He can only recognize the supremacy of love in the face of his first wife, the faithful and devoted bride of his youth.

Here, the reader sees, is material for mighty effects ; but it is a curious trait of this drama that there is so little drama in it. The situation is there again and again ; the points are clearly made; but there is no passion, no exalted feeling to avail of them. So it seems to us. There is suggestion of the great tragedy that might be where a woman like Livia loves so much that she is willing to see her sex thrust back into patriarchal barbarism, if so she may share the heart of another’s husband, and where Rhoda suffers a bereavement a thousand fold worse than widowhood, but the tragedy is somehow absent. By some mischance the poet’s performance falls short of his thoroughly good intention; he amplifies and expatiates where he should have been brief and sharp, and he labors out his suggestion. On the whole, it affects us like work begun, dropped, and then returned to after a long interval, and finished in haste too great for condensation. The art declines after the first act, which we think good, solid work, well felt, if not fervently felt, and remarkable for the subtly managed conversion of David to full selfbelief through the half-feigned faith of Nimrod Kraft in him. The characters of David’s father and mother are here extremely well sketched. When Mr. Taylor makes the hard old man say such a thing as—

In fine, the drama strikes us as embodying the materials of a poem, a tragedy, and not as being a poem. But after his Lars, Mr. Taylor can afford for once to make a failure.

— A new and enlarged edition of Mrs. Thaxter’s poems is something to be glad of, though we are not sure but it would have been better to print separately a new volume of verse than to add the fresh pieces to those already collected. The additions do not affect the general character of the volume. The strings of this shell are few, and the tones are not many : sometimes the instrument seems not different from the shell that one picks up on the shore, and putting to his ear hears in it forever the hollow murmur, the remote, faint sobbing of the sea. What gives such poetry its charm is its unfailing truthfulness within its narrow range. Never a false note is struck ; neither ship nor ocean is painted, but an air fresh and pure and wholesome breathes from the very sea as you read. It is true that Mrs. Thaxter before her song is done is very likely to tell you the moral of it outright; but this is the fault of nearly all American poets, from the greatest to the least. Among the newly collected poems here, we like especially In Kittery Churchyard, which our readers have seen, and May Morning, which they have not seen. In the latter poem the very spirit of the weather seems to be caught, and expressed:—

MAY MORNING.

This is almost pure song, and it shows the poet at her best, in full Sympathy with nature, and with nerves keenly responsive to the mood of wind, rain, sea, blossom, and leaf.

— Few poems that Mr. Longfellow has made seem to us of so perfect a strain as the last he has given us. He calls it The Hanging of the Crane, in allusion to the old French custom of placing that now obsolete contrivance in the kitchen chimney of a young couple at their house-warming; but it is really a pensive imagination of the life that expands with the family table as the children come one after another, to demand its enlargement, and that contracts as they grow up and pass one by one out of the old home, till the father and mother sit at last as they sat at first, and face each other across the table alone. It is one of those very simple and easy fancies that the reader thinks to have been always in his own mind, but of which he may be trusted to feel the originality, presently. We do not know why we have been reminded in reading it of Xavier de Maistre’s exquisite Journey round my Room ; but perhaps because the poem is like that pretty essay of the Frenchman’s in its simplicity of motive, and in the wisdom with which it is treated : in the spared color and story, the clear melody, the delicious style, the truly classic repose and reserve. There is no further likeness, and the poem moves sympathies infinitely beyond the reach of the essay ; the likeness is strictly in the pleasure given by the common perfection of literary form. There is a perfume of humor pervading the poem so faint and fine, so very faint and fine, that it is like a waft of fragrance from a bank of violets, which, having passingly caught, you must go back and breathe again to make sure of, and there is the light of a vanishing or recurring smile on all its pathos. How delicate is the playfulness of this little picture, one of the best in the whole poem: —

The poem is not long, and it is not at all our purpose to reduce the reader’s interest in the whole, by offering it him piecemeal; as is its playfulness, so is its sadness; a light, a shadow, a solitary note presently blent into one charm of sweet and tender resignation.

What will add to the reader’s pleasure in the book are the illustrations of Miss Mary A. Hallock and Mr. Thomas Moran ; really, those whom a sad experience has taught to shudder at the thought of having any favorite author illustrated may approach this book without fear. It is in the conception us well as the execution of her work that Miss Hallock will delight the appreciative reader. She has exactly expressed in her pictures the general and impersonal sense of the poem ; any definiteness of character in the people would be a mistake ; they are to be a handsome, happy young couple, pretty children, lovely girls and comely youths, and fine-looking elders — all beautiful with the beauty that is of types rather than persons; and they are to be richly costumed and adequately circumstanced. These ideas Miss Hallock has realized with a delicacy and perfection worthy of the poem, into which she has entered not only with intelligence but with divination. It is charming to see how she remembers and records the changing fashions, as the family grows up and the years pass; but perhaps we ought not to praise her for sparing us the kind of pain that the carelessness or stupidity of illustrators so commonly gives in such matters of fine instinct. Where there is a poignant touch in the poem, as

she can draw a face in which all the pathos is subtly reflected, and which is nevertheless not in the least overcharged with it. Every picture indeed is suffused with the light of a quick and refined, sympathy; and this is reinforced by a skillful pencil which has, so far as we can observe, no unpleasant tricks or mannerisms. Miss Hallock’s gentlemen are perhaps sometimes a little too lady-like ; but her women are always fascinatingly feminine, and her children very children.

In their way the landscape bits of Mr. Moran are as good as Miss Hallock’s pictures. They interpret and supplement the poem with the same poetical feeling, and make us glad of another touch as sweet and tender as Mr. Harry Fenn’s without that danger of conventionality which seems to hover about Mr. Harry Fenn’s work. We find Mr. Harley’s little caprices and conceits in the vignettes very good indeed; and it would be doing the book scant justice not to speak of the excellence of the engravings, in which Mr. Anthony and Mr. Linton are, thanks to the admirable printing, seen at their best.

— It has been more than once remarked that, on the whole, the penalties attached to bearing an eminent name are equal to the privileges. To be the son of a man of genius is at the best to be born to a heritage of invidious comparisons, and the case is not bettered if one attempts to follow directly in the paternal footsteps. One’s name gets one an easy hearing, but it by no means guarantees one a genial verdict; indeed, the kinder the general sentiment has been toward the parent, the more disposed it seems to deal out rigid justice to the son. The standard by which one is measured is uncomfortably obtrusive ; one is expected ex officio to do well, and one finally wonders whether there is not a certain felicity in having so indirect a tenure of the public ear that the report of one’s experiments may, if need be, pass unnoticed. These familiar reflections are suggested by the novel lately published by Mr. Julian Hawthorne, a writer whose involuntary responsibilities are perhaps of an exceptionally trying kind. The author of The Scarlet Letter and Twice-Told Tales was a genius of an almost morbid delicacy, and the rough presumption would be that the old wine would hardly bear transfusion into new bottles; that, the original mold being broken, this fine spirit had better be left to evaporate. Mr. Julian Hawthorne is already known (in England, we believe, very favorably) as author of a tale called Bressant. In his own country his novel drew forth few compliments, but in truth it seemed to us to deserve neither such very explicit praise nor such unsparing reprobation. It was an odd book, and it is difficult to speak either well or ill of it without seeming to say more than one intends. Few books of the kind, perhaps, that have been so valueless in performance have been so suggestive by the way; few have contrived to impart an air of promise to such an extraordinary tissue of incongruities. The sum of Bressant’s crimes was, perhaps, that it was ludicrously young, but there were several good things in it in spite of this grave error. There was force and spirit, and the suggestion of a perhaps obtrusively individual temper, and various signs of a robust faculty of expression, and, in especial, an idea. The idea — an attempted apprehension, namely, of the conflict between the love in which the spirit, and the love in which sense is uppermost — was an interesting one, and gave the tale, with all its crudities, a rather striking appearance of gravity. Its gravity was not agreeable, however, and the general impression of the book, apart from its faults of taste and execution, was decidedly sinister. Judged simply as an attempt, nevertheless, it did no dishonor to hereditary tradition; it was a glance toward those dusky psychological realms from which the author of The Scarlet Letter evoked his fantastic shadows.

After a due interval, Mr. Hawthorne has made another experiment, and here it is, rather than as applied to Bressant, that our remarks on the perils of transmitted talent are in place. Idolatry, oddly enough, reminds the perspicacious reader of the late Mr. Hawthorne’s manner more forcibly than its predecessor, and the author seems less to be working off his likeness to his father than working into it. Mr. Julian Hawthorne is very far from having his father’s perfection of style, but even in style the analogy is observable. “ Suppose two sinners of our daylight world,” he writes, “to meet for the first time, mutually unknown, on a night like this. Invisible, only audible, how might they plunge profound into most naked intimacy, read aloud to each other the secrets of their deepest hearts! Would the confession lighten their souls, or make them twice as heavy as before ? Then, the next morning, they might meet and pass, unrecognizing and unrecognized. But would the knot binding them to each other be any the less real, because neither knew to whom he was tied ? Some day, in the midst of friends, in the brightest glare of the sunshine, the tone of a voice would strike them pale and cold.” And elsewhere: “ He had been accustomed to look at himself as at a third person, in whose faults or successes he was alike interested; but although his present mental attitude might have moved him to smile, he, in fact, felt no such impulse. The hue of his deed had permeated all possible forms of himself, thus barring him from any Stand-point whence to see its humorous aspect. The sun would not shine on it!” Both the two ideas, here, and the expression, will seem to the reader like old friends; they are of the family of those arabesques and grotesques of thought, as we may call them, with which the fancy that produced the Twice-Told Tales loved so well to play. Further in the story the author shows us his hero walking forth from the passionate commission of a great crime (he has just thrown a man overboard from the Boston and New York steamer), and beginning to tingle with the consciousness of guilt. He is addressed caressingly by a young girl who is leaning into the street from a window, and it immediately occurs to him that (never having had the same fortune before) her invitation has some mysterious relation to his own lapse from virtue. This is, generically, just such an incident as plays up into every page of the late Mr. Hawthorne’s romances, although it must be added that in the case of particular identity the touch of the author of The House of the Seven Gables would have had a fineness which is wanting here. We have no desire to push the analogy too far, and many readers will perhaps feel that to allude to it at all is to give Mr Julian Hawthorne the benefit of one’s good-will on too easy terms. He resembles his father in having a great deal of imagination and in exerting it in ingenious and capricious forms: but, in fact, the mold, as might have been feared, is so loose and rough that it often seems to offer us but a broad burlesque of Mr. Hawthorne’s exquisite fantasies. To relate in a few words the substance of Idolatry would require a good deal of ingenuity; it would require a good deal on our own part, in especial, to glaze over our imperfect comprehension of the mysteries of the plot. It is a purely fantastic tale, and deals with a hero, Balder Helwyse by name, whose walking costume, in the streets of Boston, consists of a black velveteen jacket and tights, high boots, a telescope, and a satchel; and of a heroine, by name Gnulemah, the fashion of whose garments is yet more singular, and who has spent her twenty years in the precincts of an Egyptian temple on the Hudson River.

This is a singular couple, but there are stranger things still in the volume, and we mean no irony whatsoever when we say they must be read at first-hand to be appreciated. Mr. Hawthorne has proposed to himself to write a prodigiously strange story, and he has thoroughly succeeded. He is probably perfectly aware that it is a very easy story to give a comical account of, and serenely prepared to be assured on all sides that such people, such places, and such doings are preposterously impossible. This, in fact, is no criticism of his book, which, save at a certain number of points, where he deals rather too profusely in local color, pursues its mysterious aim on a line quite distinct from reality. It is indiscreet, artistically, in a work in which enchanted rings and Egyptian temples and avenging thunderbolts play so prominent a part, to bring us face to face with the Tremont House, the Beacon Hill Bank in School Street, the Empire State steamboat, and the “sumptuous residence in Brooklyn” — fatal combination ! —of Mrs. Glyphic’s second husband. We do not in the least object, for amusement’s sake, to Dr. Glyphic’s miniature Egypt on the North River; but we should prefer to approach it through the air, as it were, and not by a conveyance which literally figures in a time-table. Mr. Hawthorne’s story is purely imaginative, and this fact, which by some readers may be made its reproach, is, to our sense, its chief recommendation. An author, if he feels it in him, has a perfect right to write a fairy-tale. Of course he is bound to make it entertaining, and if he can also make it mean something more than it seems to mean on the surface, he doubly justifies himself. It must be confessed that when one is confronted with a fairy-tale as bulky as the volume before us, one puts forward in self - defense a few vague reflections. Such a production may seem on occasion a sort of reductio ad absurdum of the exaggerated modern fashion of romancing. One wonders whether pure fiction is not running away with the human mind, and operating as a kind of leakage in the evolution of thought. If one decides, as we, for our part, have decided, that though there is certainly a terrible number too many novels written, yet the novel itself is an excellent thing, and a possible vehicle of an infinite amount of wisdom, one will find no fault with a romance for being frankly romantic, and only demand of it, as one does of any other book, that it be good of its kind. In fact, as matters stand just now, the presumption seems to us to be rather in favor of something finely audacious in the line of fiction. Let a novelist of the proper temperament shoot high by all means, we should say, and see what he brings down. Mr. Hawthorne shoots very high indeed, and bags some strangely feathered game; but, to be perfectly frank, we have been more impressed with his length of range than with his good luck. Idolatry, we take it, is an allegory, and the fantastic fable but the gayly figured vestment of a poised and rounded moral. We are haunted as we read by an uncomfortable sense of allegorical intention ; episodes and details are so many exact correspondences to the complexities of a moral theme, and the author, as he goes, is constantly drawing an incidental lesson in a light, fantastic way, and tracing capricious symbolisms and analogies. If the value of these, it must be said, is a measure of the value of the central idea, those who, like ourselves, have failed to read between the lines have not suffered an irreparable loss. We have not, really, the smallest idea of what Idolatry is about. Who is the idol and who is the idolizer ? What is the enchanted ring and what the fiddle of Manetho? What is the latent propriety of Mr. MacGentle’s singular attributes, and what is shadowed forth in the blindness of Gnulemah ? What does Salome stand for, and what does the hoopoe symbolize ? We give it up, after due reflection; but we give it up with a certain kindness for the author, disappointing as he is. He is disappointing because his second novel is on the whole more juvenile than his first, and he makes its wonder whether he has condemned himself to perpetual immaturity. But he has a talent which it would be a great pity to see come to nothing. On the side of the imagination he is distinctly the son of his illustrious father. He has a vast amount of fancy ; though we must add that it is more considerable in quantity than in quality, and finer, as we may say, than any use he makes of it. He has a commendable tendency to large imaginative conceptions, of which there are several noticeable specimens in the present volume. The whole figure of Balder Helwyse, in spite of its crudities of execution, is a handsome piece of fantasy, and there is something finely audacious in his interview with Manetho in the perfect darkness, in its catastrophe, and in the general circumstances of his meeting with Gnulemah. Gnulemah’s antecedents and mental attitude are a matter which it required much ingenuity to conceive and much courage to attempt to render. Mr. Hawthorne writes, moreover, with a conscience of his own, and his tale has evidently been, from his own point of view, elaborately and carefully worked out. Above all, he writes, even when he writes ill, with remarkable vigor and energy ; he has what is vulgarly called “ go,” and his book is pervaded by a grateful suggestion of high animal spirits. He is that excellent thing, a story-teller with a temperament. A temperament, however, if it is a good basis, is not much more, and Mr. Hawthorne has a hundred faults of taste to unlearn. Our advice to him would be not to mistrust his active imagination, but religiously to respect it, and, using the term properly, to cultivate it. He has vigor and resolution; let him now supply himself with culture — a great deal of it.

— There is not the least harm in the novel called Opening a Chestnut Burr, and probably there are those who will find much good in it. The writer kindly tells us, in his preface, that this is his fourth volume ; and one can readily believe that the other three were animated by just as sincere and palpable a moral purpose as the present. It is a serious tale without plot. The most romantic incident in the volume has a note appended in which the conscientious author assures us that the circumstances are not wholly imaginary; and when he makes use of the novel quotation,

he is careful to cite Wordsworth as his authority. But the character of the selfish, morbid, cynical hero, and his gradual transformation under the influence of the sweet and high-spirited heroine, are portrayed with a masculine firmness which is near akin to power, and some of the conversations are animated and admirable. The hero seems in the beginning not very wellbred, and trespasses upon the hospitality of the man who bought his father’s estate, with remarkable coolness. But his manners improve as the story advances, while the heroine, although actively pious and somewhat didactic, is not namby-pamby. The most original and amusing character in the book is Thomas Luggar, the “ wellmeanin' man.” Mr. Roe’s style is unequal, at times rough and obscure, but usually nervous, and never verbose. It is defaced by a few innocent vulgarisms like “ stay home,” and by a great confusion of the auxiliary verbs, insomuch that when Walter, being about to drop from the limb of a tall tree upon Annie, who will extend her arms to save him, exclaims, “ If I fall, I will kill you,” his state of mind is really considerate and not vindictive. The author has also an entirely original use of connectives, particularly of the words though and although, which confuses the logic strangely. For example: “ Though tall, he was thin ; ” and “ Even the nonchalant Mr. Godfrey could not ignore her in his customary polite manner, though a quiet refinement and peculiar unobtrusiveness seemed her characteristics.”And what does he mean by saying that a “ Concord grape is the type, in nature, of a juicy steak”? And what is a “ votress of nature ” ?

— A novel of a very different, and certainly a higher order is Toinette. There is plot enough here, and, one might say, to spare; but that is a matter of taste. The story is far more than commonly interesting, and the dénouement remains doubtful up to within a very few pages of the end. These final pages, are, from a literary point of view, the least praiseworthy in the volume. They are somewhat gratuitously sensational. There is a sort of hesitation about them, and a repetition of calamities, very unlike the simplicity and rapidity of action which characterize the greater part of the story; and we must enter our protest against the cruel old custom of putting out the hero’s eyes. It is sanctioned by high and abundant authority, but it is barbarous all the same.

It is, however, as a picture of the last years of negro-slavery, and of the inevitable attitude of the irreconcilable Southerner after his overthrow, that Toinette, is chiefly significant and valuable. We have not met before so sincere and successful an endeavor to portray the “ peculiar institution from the artist’s point of view, and in no spirit of partisanship; and we are impressed anew by the exhaustless material which it affords for unhackneyed tragedy. Toinette also furnishes a fresh illustration of that curious law whereby incidental effects surpass those which are intended. Plainly, as we have said, the author’s chief aim was not a moral one; but no novel with an antislavery purpose, or burning tract for the times, ever showed slavery under more revolting aspects than are revealed by the side-lights of this unbiased narrative. The two most important characters in the book, Manuel Hunter and his son Geoffrey, have been very carefully studied, perhaps from life itself. They are as unlike as possible to the typical Southerner of old romance, with his aristocratic features, cambric ruffles, and “ arrogant old plantation strain,” but they are very real men. Both the coarser father and the more polished son show that strange blending of generosity and brutality, self-devotion and greed, with which the experiences and annals of the war have made us tolerably familiar. The women of the story, including the heroine whose name it bears, are all of the lower orders, and somewhat less clearly individualized than the men. They are less interesting as characters than through their sad and intricate fate.

—As a book about boys, whether or no as a book for them, Anthony Brade ranks very near the inimitable Tom Brown, and closely resembles that memorable book in its hearty sympathy with boyish fun and folly, in the high standard of honor which it sets up, and most of all in the chivalrous and manly type of piety which it inculcates. In school-forms and in religious tenets also, the American school of St. Bartholomew’s resembles Rugby. Is this inevitable ? And must we concede to the church of England a degree of tact in shaping a high style of boyish character and bearing, which even the noblest and most intellectual forms of dissent have never attained ? The chapter entitled A Young Reprobate, and the story of the life and death of Peters, the solitary “ Rosicrucian,” whose physical timidity and awkwardness were in the end surmounted by so sublime a moral courage, are powerful and affecting. But if the boy readers of the book fail to appreciate these finer passages, they cannot help reveling in the tales of adventure and the absolutely life-like and boy-like conversations. Mr. Lowell makes quick work with the rather vexed question whether the boys and girls in books ought to be made to talk dictionary English, for the sins in that line of their youthful readers. He knows that they never do talk so, and that young people of wit will at once, under such circumstances, recognize good English as bad art, whether they call it by that name or no, and contemn accordingly the book which contains it. We make room for an extract illustrating the singular simplicity and beauty of Mr. Lowell’s narrative style. It is a description of the boys’ dormitory.

“ Generally the faces are lying most restfully, with hand under cheek, and in many cases looking strangely younger than when awake, and often very infantile, as if some trick of older expression which they had been taught to wear by day had been dropped the moment the young, ambitious will had lost control. The lids lie shut over bright, busy eyes; the air is gently and evenly fanned by coming and going breaths; there is a little crooked mound in the bed ; along the bed’s foot, or on a chair beside it, are the day’s clothes, sometimes neatly folded, sometimes huddled off in a hurry; bulging with balls, or, in the lesser fellows’, marbles; stained with the earth of many fields where woodchucks have been trapped, or, perhaps, torn with the roughness of trees on which squirrels’ holes have been sought; perhaps wet and mired with the smooth black or gray mud from marshes or the oozy banks of streams where muskrats have been tracked. Under the bed’s foot, after a hard share in all the play and toil of the day, lie the shoes, — one on its side,—with the gray and white socks, now creased and soiled, thrown across them ; a cross is at the head, some illuminated text at the side; and there in their little cells, squared in the great mass of night, heedless how the earth whirls them away or how the world goes, who is thinking of them or what is doing at home, the busiest people in the world are resting for the to-morrow.”

To THE EDITOR OF THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY : -

DEAR SIR, — I find in a criticism of my Universe, in your pages, some matters which need correction; and I ask of your justice and courtesy brief space for the purpose.

Your critic describes my Saturn as a success which led me “to attempt to earn a large sum by writing similar works.” Saturn had cost me up to May, 1865 (when it was published), a year and a half of work and £310 in money; up to May, 1874, I had received back £235, or thereabouts. There have been yearly expenses since 1865, and interest on arrears would mount up to another considerable item. But you see that, apart from these matters, Saturn has brought me a loss of £75 at the end of nine years, or ten and a half years since I began it. I submit that this can hardly be considered a very tempting success.

The Moon, which your critic is good enough to like, was not quite so unfortunate ; but Rutherford’s photographs made the work very costly to me, and it has not yet (or had not when I last heard from Longmans) even cleared its expenses.

(As your critic pleasingly compares me to a highway robber, and may therefore reasonably consider me a liar also, I would refer him as respects what I have said about Saturn to Messrs. Longmans. The expenses, etc., of The Moon cannot be so easily verified, as the work was not placed in Messrs. Longmans’ hands until all bills had been paid. But Saturn is the more marked case.)

My chart of three hundred and twentyfour thousand stars has thus far brought back about one fifth the cost of publishing; and I expect it to repay me for the four hundred hours of labor it cost me by about the time when critics — but no, two wrongs will not make one right.

It has been a matter of duty with me for more than eight years to devote a certain proportion of my time to writing popular works; and so far is it from being the case that the public buy my popular works because I have written more solid treatises, that on the contrary it was only when people found I was the author of light essays which had interested them, that they began to buy my more solid books.

It is not true that “ the Astronomer Royal made it a fundamental principle not to consider stations ” on the Antarctic Continent. On the contrary, he repeatedly advocated the use of such stations, and in December, 1868, he brought half the admiralty chiefs to a meeting of the Astronomical Society to support his schemes for occupying Antarctic stations. That this thoroughly misled me, I readily admit.

Your critic may be right in condemning Other Worlds than Ours, but scarcely in extending his condemnation to Other Suns than Ours, and adding that “ its contents confirm the evil prognostic of its title;" for though I announced three years ago my intention of writing such a work, I have not yet had leisure to complete it. Cannot your critic wait even till a work is written, before denouncing it?

In reply to the question how often I have quoted Richter’s dream, I may reply that I have twice done so (in books), and this only because I could not conveniently do so thrice or oftener.

RICHARD A. PROCTOR.

WORTHING, August 31, 1874.

In some respects Mr. Proctor has not done the review to which he takes exception full justice : for example, we did not state that his book on Saturn was a “ success ” on our own responsibility, but referred to “the too candid biographer” as authority. In several of the sketches of Mr. Proctor’s life which appeared during his brief stay with us, the statement was made that the success of his early books induced him to earn a large sum of money to pay certain debts, etc., by writing similar works. All of Mr. Proctor’s friends will regret to learn that the too candid biographer was mistaken ; and we regret this still more as he himself tells us that the success of his bad books created a sale for his “more solid” ones, thus demonstrating the existence of a vicious public taste.

With regard to the Astronomer Royal’s views as to the selection of stations for observing the Transit of Venus, we quote from a report of an address made by him to the Royal Astronomical Society on this subject (see Monthly Notices R. A. S., Feb. 1874, p. 176): “ The general principle in the selection of these stations has been that no party of astronomers should be sent to a station where there were no human beings, and where a boat could not land once in a month.”

We will not refer to Mr. Proctor’s idea of our views of his veracity further than to suggest that it lends no weight to his objections.

His chart of three, hundred and twentyfour thousand stars we have, never included among his popular works.

The mentioning of Other Suns than Ours as a published book and as a bad book was an undoubted slip, for which Mr. Proctor has our apology. But in exteunaction, we submit that since 1868 Mr. Proctor has published at least twenty different volumes, and that a striking peculiarity of many of these is that their titles are like the parts of a Waltham watch, “ warranted mutually interchangeable ; ” and however unsatisfactory this may be to Mr. Proctor, we confess that we take great comfort in the contemplation of the fact.

OTHER PUBLICATIONS.

Scribner, Armstrong, & Co., New York: A Floating City and the Blockade Runners. From the French of Jules Verne. Illustrated. — Manual of Mythology : Greek and Roman, Norse and old German, Hindoo and Egyptian Mythology. By Alex. S. Murray. Second Edition, rewritten and considerably enlarged. With forty-five Plates.—The English in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century. By James Anthony Froude. Vols. II., III.—The Mistress of the Manse. By J. G. Holland.

Roberts Brothers, Boston : Life and Labors of Mr. Brassey. 1805-1870. By Sir Arthur Helps. With a Preface to the American Edition by the Author. — Quiet Hours. A Collection of Poems. — My Sister Jeannie. A Novel. By George Sand. Translated by S. R. Crocker. — The French Humorists from the Twelfth to the Nineteenth Century. By Walter Besant, M. A.

J. R. Osgood & Co., Boston : The Building of a Brain. By Edward H. Clarke, M. D. — Songs of Many Seasons. 1862-1874. By Oliver Wendell Holmes.—Hazel-Blossoms. By John Greenleaf Whittier.—Fast Friends. By J. T. Trowbridge. With Illustrations.— The Schoolmaster’s Trunk, containing Papers on Home-Life in Tweenit. By Mrs. A. M. Diaz. Illustrated.

Harper and Brothers, New York : A System of Logic, Ratiocination, and Induction. By John Stuart Mill. — A History of Germany from the Earliest Times. Founded on Dr. David Müller’s History of the German People. By Charlton T. Lewis.— Prairie and Forest: A Description of the, Game of North America, with Personal Adventures in their Pursuit. By Parker Gilmore, “Ubique.” — Notes, Explanatory and Practical, on the Epistles of Paul. By Albert Barnes. — Life of Andrew Hull Foote, Rear Admiral U. S. Navy. By Prof. James Mason Hoppin.—Lorna Doone. By

R. D. Blackmore.— Sylvia’s Choice. By Georgiana M. Craik.— Squire Arden. By Mrs. Oliphant.—My Mother and I. By the Author of John Halifax.

Henry Holt & Co., New York: First Book in German for Young Pupils. By Dr. Emil Otto. — Democracy and Monarchy in France. By Prof. Chas. Kendall Adams. — A Winter in Russia. From the French of Théophile Gautier. By M. M. Ripley.

D. Appleton & Co., New York : The Science. of Law. By Sheldon Ames, M. A. —Science Primer. Physiology. By M. Foster, M. A. Illustrated.

William F. Gill &, Co., Boston: The Frozen Deep. By Wilkie Collins. — The Old Woman who lived in a Shoe. By Amanda M. Douglas.

J. B. Ford & Co., New York: Yale Lectures on Preaching. By Henry Ward Beecher. Third Series. — American WiIdFowl Shooting. By Joseph W. Long.— Field, Cover, and Trap Shooting. By Adam H. Bogardus, Champion Wing-Shot of America. Edited by Chas. J. Foster.

Little, Brown, & Co., Boston : History of the United States. By George Bancroft. Yol. X.

Robert Clarke & Co., Cincinnati: Manual of Universal Church History. By Rev. Dr. John Alzog, Professor of Theology at the University of Freiburg. Translated with Additions from the last German Edition. By Dr. F. J. Pabisch, and Rev. Thos.

S. Byrne, of Mt. St. Mary’s Seminary. In Three Vols. Vol. I.

Hurd and Houghton, New York : Architecture for General Students. By Caroline W. Horton. With Descriptive Illustrations.

Robert Carter and Brothers, New York : The Scottish Philosophy, Biographical, Expository, Critical, from Hutcheson to Hamilton. By Dr. James McCosh.

Porter and Coates, Philadelphia: Bec’s Bedtime. Being Stories from The Christian Union. By Mrs. Joshua L. Hallowell.

G. W. Carleton & Co., New York: The Identity of Primitive Christianity and Modern Spiritualism. By Eugene Crowell, M. D. Vol. I.

Dodd and Mead, New York: What might have been Expected. By Frank R. Stockton. Illustrated. — Captain William Kidd, and other Pirates. By John S. C. Abbott.

Rural Home Publishing Company, Rochester, New York: His Prison Bars; and the Way of Escape. By A. A. Hopkins.

Lee and Shepard, Boston : Thurid, and other Poems. By G. E. O. — The Lily and the Cross. A Tale of Acadia. By James DeMille.

Noyes, Holmes, & Co., Boston : Sermons and Songs, of the Christian Life. By Edmund H. Sears.

FRENCH AND GERMAN.<FNREF>1</FNREF>

Among recent German publications the first number of a review which aims at being the leading literary organ of the new empire certainly claims our attention. The number of periodicals, each of which confines itself pretty closely to its own line of investigation, is as great in Germany as one would expect from the thoroughness of the investigators who contribute to them, and the vast variety of the subjects to which their attention is given. There are two or three papers or magazines reporting the latest discoveries, and discussing the latest books in every branch of study. Literary criticism has by no means gone begging, but there has been no organ which could stand as the vehicle of communication between the best writers and those readers who demanded the latest results of study, without an ardent curiosity about the methods of investigation. This vacant place it is intended that the Deutsche Rundschau shall fill. It is modeled after the admirable Revue des Deux Mondes, being intended to contain short stories, literary and scientific essays, notices of new books, theatrical and musical news from both Berlin and Vienna, and a retrospect of the political news of the month.

The first number contains a good list of articles from well-known writers. Auerbach and Theodor Storm contribute short stories. Anastasius Grün has a poem; Heinrich von Sybel an historical article on the First Partition of Poland; Professor Cohn, of Breslau, an article called Botanical Problems; Friedrich Kreyssig reviews a few books, and the other parts of the Rundschau are well filled.

Auerbach’s story, Auf Wache (On Guard), has the place of honor as the first article. It opens as if it were the beginning of a long novel, and it is with considerable disappointment that the reader finds the threatening complications of the poverty, the almost certain imprisonment, and the probable death of the hero upon the gallows wiped away by a few strokes of the pen. It is like a play in which the green curtain falls as soon as the actors have come forward and told who they are and what their past lives have been. It may be considered by some readers to be a sign of the new “ departure ” in German literature that the whole story is taken up with people of the highest social position. Counts, officers, and their congenial companions fill the places of the familiar peasants, and then, too, the opening scene is laid in a ball-room. Do we detect here the corrupting influences of an empire ? The story is worth reading. Theodor Storm’s story is also entertaining, although in some ways unattractive. It treats of the familiar story of the old man falling in love with the young woman who runs off with a youth of her own age. The poorest part of the story is that about the love-making, and the best, the description of the lonely spot in which the scene is laid. This, it will be seen, is a very respectable amount of light literature for a solid review. Spielhagen and Paul Heyse are announced for the next numbers.

Anastasius Grün’s poem is an extract from a longer work. Its title is Zum Concil, 1414, and it has, doubtless, considerable historical value. Von Sybel’s article on the Partition of Poland begins with showing how the common version of the story of the wrongs inflicted on that unhappy country received a color from the fact that it has always been told by Poles or their sympathizing friends. Then, too, what Frederick the Great in his memoirs said about it, that the division was made for the purpose of preventing a general European war, has never been doubted, and great efforts have been made by the Russians to throw the whole blame on the Prussian king. At the present time, Von Sybel says, there is less prejudice in favor of Poland, and, what is more important, we have more definite historical information by means of which to form an accurate opinion. Starting in this way, he proceeds to give an exact account of the way it happened. He is not an advocate undertaking to free his country from any taint of blame; he acknowledges that the conduct of the German rulers was of a sort that would he exceedingly repugnant at the present day; but, he asks, what other course was possible ? He shows that the division was not the result of a deliberately laid plan, but, as Frederick says, a hasty determination to prevent the outbreak of a European war. “ For the general policy of Europe that act signified the preservation of Turkey, a check both to the advance of Russia on the Danube and to the undivided authority of that country in Poland, and the beginning of an understanding between German powers. For the provinces annexed to Russia and Prussia, it brought the restoration of national feeling and religious freedom; for the others it secured a settled government, even if it was despotic and incomplete, in the place of the anarchy which was destroying the whole of society, for, long before the proposals of 1770, the Poles had already undermined their own government. . . . The only point in which they had agreed was in the persecution of Greeks and Protestants. For a hundred and fifty years, under the guidance of the Jesuits, they had given themselves up to the wildest religious fanaticism, to the neglect of what they owed their country and their government. Of the nations of Europe which have lost their might through the influence of the Roman hierarchy, the Poles have the first place.”

In other words, an odious deed was done, and these excuses are found for it. Still, the article deserves to be read; it is itself so concise an abridgment of facts that it is capable of no further compression.

For what concerns the recent war, we have some interesting extracts from the diary of an officer who, apparently, was upon General von Moltke’s staff. The article is called Der Zug nach Sedan (The March to Sedan). The writer had good opportunity to see much that was interesting, and he describes well what he saw. He gives the particulars of the surrender of Napoleon III., but there is nothing new in his report. One sentence, however, may be quoted : “ General von Moltke gave me a place in his wagon; we drove back in silence to Donchery, where new work awaited me.” This was immediately after the surrender, whence we may judge that the popular statement is true that that great general is averse to prattle.

Some letters of Kaulbach’s to a friend of his make up another article. The famous painter was as inactive with his pen as he was active with his brush, and eight letters alone formed his part of a correspondence of eleven years. They have but little interest except as they show their writer to have been a man full of his work, of a calm nature, industrious, and very well satisfied with all that he did. In one or two of the letters he refers to his Era of the Reformation, now on exhibition in this city.

In the musical part is to be found a criticism of the performances of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde at Weimar, in the month of June of this year. This writer’s verdict concerning Wagner’s poetry will command cordial assent. He says — and, as it will be seen, he is no idle scoffer, but rather an ardent admirer of the new light — that the words of the opera cannot be read by any one without laughter, in which respect it resembles some better known rivals. As for the element of Schopenhauer’s philosophy which the more earnest disciples detect in the music, the critic laughs at it. When he gets to the music, however, his tone changes. He is willing to allow that a musician cannot necessarily be judged accurately by his poetry, and he is lavish in praise of the music. He throws off all critical reserve, and, after speaking of the Divine Comedy, Lear, the tomb of the Medicis, and some of the last quartettes of Beethoven, he goes on to say that “ they resemble immortal problems, in contemplating which a delicious awe fills the soul, and the shades of the abnormal and the monstrous dim the pure reflection of contemplation, so that all our admiration is mingled with astonishment, our enjoyment is disturbed by terror and by that stormy awe which has its root in our consciousness of a mighty force of nature, which rules us without our fully comprehending it. Wagner’s Tristan is a work of this sort. In regarding the score it is impossible to keep possession of one’s five senses. . . . The Tristan must be pronounced a great, or, certainly, a grand work, because, apart from its musical significance, it is the most complete embodiment of Wagner’s theory, namely, the placing drama and music in immediate contact. . . . The Tristan is Wagner tout crû.” After this outburst he gives the reader a carefully detailed account of the opera, and of the performance, having for both nothing but enthusiastic praise.

The political retrospect contains nothing especially noteworthy.

The review promises well; there are certainly enough writers in Germany who are capable of making it a very valuable publication, and it will doubtless be the means of educating a great many more. It is to be hoped that in time the softer grace of civilization, which consists in stitching together the sheets of an unbound book, may be cultivated in Germany. The usual excuse for omitting it has been that the book being speedily bound, no harm was done, but it is impossible to bind separately the different numbers of the review.

The first number is that for October of this year, and it is to appear once a month. Readers of German will find it a useful and agreeable companion.