Recent Literature

THE leisurely character of Mr. Flagg’s volume ¹ well befits the subject of which he treats. An unaffected lover of nature, he has rambled about New England, especially near the sea-coast, stopping by the side of a brook or an overgrown stone wall, lifting the leaves of the sheltering burdock, listening to the notes of birds, which he vainly tries to repeat in musical form, standing still it may he to feel the gentle susurrus of nature tremble over his nerves. In a pretty sketch of the delights of the _botanist he gives in a single sentence a picture which has a homely beauty of form and suggestion : “ He listens to the muffled drum [of the ruffled grouse] while he cools his heated brow under a canopy of maples overarched with woodbine, and picks the scarlet berries that cluster on the green knolls at his feet.” Thus it is that in recording the result of his rambles and observations Mr. Flagg has apparently followed no exigencies of book-making, but has set down in almost negligent order his notes on the birds to which he has listened, and the characteristics of the months as they follow one another through the year. In reading his book, one is almost persuaded that the months themselves move more leisurely than we are wont to know them. Certainly the entire impression which this delightful book makes upon one is of a cool retreat from the bustle and nervous hurry of common life. The reason of this is in the sincerity of the author. The very sluggishness of the literary current of the book attests the entire occupation of the writer with his subject. There is at times an old-fashioned air about his style which has something to do with the remoteness from our daily life so characteristic of the book. We should he impatient of it, were it not so naturally a part of the whole temper in which the work is conceived. Mr. Flagg’s observations are acute, and, like those of all patient naturalists, set down with reserve. He seems always waiting for some later news from the forest. What he tells now is true, but like John Robinson he is confident “ that the Lord has more truth yet to break forth out of his holy ” woods. By the aid of the index one may easily use the work as a handbook for testing the notes of birds, and a careful reading will stimulate many to watch more closely the life that goes on about them. It would be easy to quote single passages which show the gentle spirit of the book ; we copy one only because of the plea which the author makes for a genuine and homely bit of New England scenery :

“ The New England stone wall, as a feature in landscape scenery, is generally considered a deformity; yet it cannot ho denied that the same lines of wooden fence would mar the beauty of our prospect in a still greater degree. On account of the loose manner in which the stones are laid one upon another, as well as the character of the materials, this wall harmonizes with the rude aspects of nature better than any kind of masonry. It seems to me less of a deformity than a trimmed hedge or any other kind of a fence, except in ornamental grounds, of which I do not treat. In wild pastures, and lands devoted to common rustic labor, the stone wall is the most picturesque boundarymark that has yet been invented. A trimmed hedge in such places would present to the eye an intolerable formality. One of the charms of the loose stone wall is the manifest ease with which it may be overleaped. It menaces no infringement upon our liberty. When we look abroad upon the face of a country subdivided only by long lines of loose stones, and overgrown by vines and shrubbery, we feel no sense of constraint. The whole boundless prospect is ours. An appearance that cherishes this feeling of liberty is essential to the beauty of landscape; for no man can thoroughly enjoy a scene from which he is excluded. Fences are deformities of prospect which we are obliged to use and tolerate. But the loose stone wall only is expressive of that freedom which is grateful to the traveler and the rambler.” And in another place, “ We seldom see one [a stone wall] that is not covered on each side with roses, brambles, spirea, viburnum, and other native vines and shrubs, so that in some of our open fields the stone walls, with their accompaniments, are the most attractive objects in the landscape. Along their borders Nature calls out, in their season, the anemone, the violet, the crane’s-bill, the bellwort, the convolvulus, and many other flowers of exceeding beauty, while the rest of the field is devoted to tillage.”

The heliotype illustrations which are scattered through the book are in harmony with the contents. There is nothing striking about them, but always the same placid beauty, the calm suggestion of afternoon sauntering and hidden graces of flower and stone. One who reads the book and looks at the pictures, and discovers the respect which the author pays to other observers, though their names are not among the lettered and great ones, begins to discover, if he has not before known it, how large a world lies about him, through which he passes almost with closed eyes. We sometimes speak of the veil being lifted and a hitherto unseen spiritual world disclosed to us; but there is such a thing as a veil which shuts from us the physical world of beauty in which we live. When it is lifted, as by the interpretation of this book, there is real gain.

— Count Krasinski’s book is a monument of enthusiasm.² The author during his life was known only as " the anonymous poet,” and died without the satisfaction of connecting his name with the cause to which he had dedicated himself. The translator, who has laboriously collected in a volume of five hundred pages not only the greater part of his compositions, but all the information she could gather upon the subject, did not live to see her work published. The appearance of a book under such circumstances indisposes one for fault-finding ; whatever the defects of the original or the translation, one would rather dwell upon the new and strong interest they offer. Few of us realize how living and intense are the love and hopes which the Poles cherish for their country. The romantic and rather theatrical attitude in which they are generally represented inclines us to think of their sorrows and schemes much as our forefathers must have looked upon those of the last Jacobites. Their hopes may be the flimsiest of illusions, but they cling to them from generation to generation as the Jews did to the coining of the Messiah. The book before us gives an insight into tins undying passion, and opens a new alcove in the library of universal letters.

The father of the anonymous poet, Count Vincent Krasinski, a young man of talents, courage, wealth, after raising great expectations by his early distinction, proved recreant, though not actually traitor, to his country. His son Sigismund was about thirteen when this occurred; his mother, a princess of the house of Radziwill, had died when he was but three years old, and his father, who was inconsolable for her loss, had devoted himself to the education of their only child. The boy, although his health was feeble from infancy, was beautiful and precocious, showing the quick wit and courteous, chivalric instincts of his race. He had already given proofs of extraordinary gifts and attainments, when the political crisis in which his father ranged himself with the oppressors of his country closed the boy’s untrodden career. He had lately entered the University of Warsaw with great distinction; one day he was mobbed by his fellow-students, who tore the college badges from his breast, taunted him with his father’s backsliding, and rejected him as a comrade; his conduct on this terrible occasion was singular and indicative; he did not quail before the storm of youthful fury, but stood firm and offered them his pardon for insulting an innocent person. But his existence was blighted from that hour. He resolved to devote himself to his father and to his country ; never to desert or distress the former, yet to give all his powers to the service of the latter. His biographer considers the secrecy with which he guarded his authorship as an act of expiation for his father’s faithlessness, but this seems too high-flown; it was more probably filial respect and loyalty, the delicacy of a refined and hightoned nature, which induced him to forego, not fame alone, but the sweet sense of his country’s gratitude and sympathy, that his patriotism might not he a tacit reproach to his father. He was not without consolation and compensation; the poet Mickiewicz and other justly celebrated countrymen of his were his friends, as well as the painter Ary Scheffer, and many other eminent men of the various countries in which he lived ; he married at thirty a young Countess Branicka, a woman in every way fit to be his companion; he had the consciousness of possessing the heart of his nation, though unknown to it; his father, whom he loved devotedly, lived almost as long as himself, and was made governor of Russian Poland, an appointment which was so well received by the people as to give hopes that the bitterness of past years was forgotten. But his own health was wretched, he became almost blind, he lost his fortune by the failure of a banking-house, his only daughter died ; he was a marked man, the Russian government constantly ordering him back from the milder climates, whither he had been sent in search of health, to Warsaw, where he was under its eye ; and added to all this, he had to witness the miseries of his country without the comfort of sharing them by overt act or expression. The conflict of feeling with which, when a lad of sixteen, he heard of the rising of 1830 caused the first breaking down of his system : the news reached him in Italy, and he was struck down by illness which kept him in bed for a year. His painful existence came to an end at the age of fortyfive, in Paris, February, 1859 ; his funeral services were performed at the church of the Madeleine. His body was taken back to Poland by his countryman, Count Zamoyiski, and laid among his ancestors at his family place, Opingora. He and his father having both passed away, there was no further motive for concealment, and the pride and affection with which his nation treasures his name form a precious heritage for his sons.

He left some unfinished compositions which are not included in Mrs. Cook’s collection. Those which she has given us are from French or German versions, and thus we are removed so far from the original that it is impossible to judge of the style and diction. In her part of the work she has given proof of considerable poetic feeling and talent. There is a violence and extravagance in the ideas and images, a wildness and distortion in the plot or story, a use of the supernatural, totally at discord with the western imagination; here is plainly a different key-note, another pitch ; we cannot apply our own canons of art to it any more than to the temple of Denderah or the sculptures of Nineveh. The leading thought is always the same, in one form or another, a struggle between humanity and the powers which grind it down, whether brute force, the might of money, or the tyranny of caste, with the invariable moral that it is not by the weapons furnished by earthly passions, hatred, revenge, that the victory will ever be won; the evil must be met, the foe overthrown, in another spirit, by a higher power, M. Julian Klaczko, whose name is known to the readers of the Revue des Deux Mondes, says in an essay on Polish poetry in the nineteenth century, of which the indefatigable Mrs. Cook has given a translation, “ There is assuredly something imposing in this perseverance in upholding an idea so completely out of keeping with the general modes of thought in the times in which we live. It required the greatest courage, and a faith no less great, to attempt to convert one of the most ardent, impulsive, highmettled, and fiery people on the face of the earth to such a doctrine.” This idea is brought out with great distinctness in The Undivine Comedy, — an unfortunate rendering of the original title, but intended to suggest unmistakably the reference to Dante’s poem. The hero, Count Henry, a noble, high-souled dreamer, allows himself to be led astray by the demon of pride, first, in the shape of a long-lost love more capable of understanding his aspirations than the affectionate but commonplace woman he has married; his estrangement, his wife’s instant perception of it and gentle, feminine attempts to bring him back, — failing in which she becomes insane, — in themselves furnish material for a very moving domestic tragedy; the count, having discovered that his ideal love is only a phantom animated by an evil spirit, returns humbled and penitent to his wife ; he finds her in a mad-house; she tells him she is there to become worthy of him, that site is a poet: —

This scene is very striking, especially in its conception ; the poor, distracted wife dies of exhaustion at its close. The count is left with his son, who fulfills his father’s hopes and his mother’s prayers by being a poet, but he is a poor, sickly, abnormal little creature, though a winning and pathetic. apparition, who, after dragging out his childhood in pain and dejection, becomes blind; the father, through his inquiries and endeavors to have his son cured, becomes involved in scientific and metaphysical speculations, and a second time falls into the snares of pride : — “ I 've sought through many weary years to find
The last word of all science, feelings, thoughts,
To solve the problem of our destiny ;
And in the depths of mine own heart I've found
The tomb’s dark nothingness.”

His guardian angel whispers how to find the way out of the abyss, but he hardly hears the voice ; the angel floats away, and ambition, in the shape of a huge eagle, flies by, rousing in him a desire for glory and command. It is a fine touch in this scene that after tlie guardian angel departs, Mephistopbeles appears, but is disconcerted by the count’s habitually elevated tone of thought ; he cannot be directly approached by the devil; the latter goes and sends his messenger. The last part which the count plays is that of leader of the nobles against the proletaries. Here a new character comes in, Pancras, the chief of the communists, the reverse of the count in all the latter’s fine impulses, but equally given over to Satan for pride and presumption. The war is a sort of allegory, that is, allegory, symbolism, reality, and mere raving are mixed in a tangle of which it is impossible to separate the threads. The monstrosity of some of the scenes and choruses can be conveyed by no words but their own. It is a Saturnalia of horror. The count is not only revolted by the people’s excesses, he has no sympathy with their cause, although he has always denounced injustice and despotism. He utters the confession of thousands of so-called liberals when he says, —

Sentiment and association are too potent in this chivalric disposition; nothing has practically any hold upon it; he has lost all religions conviction, yet the sight of a desecrated cathedral stirs old attachments and remembrances, and shows that if his skepticism separates him from one party, his proclivities divide him as surely from the other. He is, as Pancras tells him, not

In the simply human aspect of Count Henry, Krasinski has given us, we fancy, an impersonation of the Polish nobility, and touched an ulcer in the vitals of his people which may be the secret of their inability to rise, despite their desperate and incessant efforts. The mystic side is quite distinct, and recalls Faust, as do some of the situations in Iridion. The last act of this appalling tragedy is the siege of the noble’s last stronghold, the fortress of the Holy Trinity, which, inclosing castle, palace, court-yard, and minster on its embattled heights, recalls the fine feudal mass of the Hradschin. Here the character of the hero breaks down through exaggeration ; he has been the devotee of pride, but there is no consistency in representing him as a mere human Lucifer. The castle falls at last, taken by assault, the count’s son is killed by a stray shot, he casts himself headlong from the battlements; the survivors are ordered to wholesale execution by Pancras, who himself expires mysteriously in the hour of victory, on beholding a vision of Christ in the clouds, with the dying words, “ Vicisti, Galilæe ! ”

The other long work is a drama called Iridion, of which the action passes principally in Rome during the reign of Heliogabalus, although sometimes transferred to Scandinavia and Greece. The story is of a conspiracy of a son of Hellas to avenge the destruction of his beautiful and beloved country, not by the overthrow of the emperor, but by the actual annihilation of Rome herself, by turning all parties against each other. Jews, Christians, gladiators, prætorians, all play independent parts in this comprehensive scheme, and the result is equally fatal to the success of the design and the dramatic unities. Iridion fails and dies for having trusted to the arm of flesh; Heliogabalus too must perish, alike in the interest of history and of the moral; while Alexander Severus, who figures as the Christian hero, is borne in triumphant on the wave which swallows them up.

The shorter poems refer directly to the sufferings and fate of Poland. There is an allegorical tale called Temptation, in which the secret sure and grief of the author’s life is embodied in a strange, fantastic form ; one cannot but be reminded of Cherbuliez’s terrible story, Ladislas Bolski; the incidents differ only as those of real life do from fabulous events, and the moral experience described is identical. This story was published in Paris, and through an oversight of the censor allowed to appear in a newspaper in Lithuania ; the students of that province subscribed to have it reprinted separately ; their resolution was reported at St. Petersburg, and resulted in the exile of several hundred of them to Siberia. The author’s life may well have been shortened by such refinements of torture as his position entailed upon him.

Besides the interest and merit which we have sought to touch upon in this rapid sketch of these poems and dramas, they contain exceedingly fine passages, too long and numerous for quotation. In The Dream, a fragment, there are descriptions of a ghastly under-world, as sombre and grandiose as Martin’s illustrations to Milton: and in the same composition the vision of Poland as a boundless, blasted pine forest, on every tree of which a man is crucified, is fall of savage picturesqueness. There are scenes in which the conflict between the most complex psychological torments and a palpitating human passion wrench us with some of the power of the prison scenes in Faust. In short, although the radical difference between these productions and all that ancient or modern European literature has taught us to admire will make them more an object of curiosity than a source of enjoyment to the general reader, they show genius, and possess a deep pathos as the expression of a life-long sorrow and aspiration.

— A Sheaf of Papers ³ comprises a score of essays, reminiscences, sketches, leaves from journals, and one or two slight romances. The subjects are such as occur to a Boston gentleman, whose, experience reflects an affectionate interest in his native town and certain exceptional advantages in foreign travel and observation. He is a philosopher of a very kindly sort, a connoisseur in art, a humorist, and altogether a very companionable man. The reminiscences of Round Hill School and Dr. Cogswell and of Old Boston strike us as the most agreeable contributions, and in general the personal sketches have the most effectiveness, while here and there passages in the essays have a witty and serious suggestiveness, sure to give one an appetite for reflection ; the whole hook, if we may apply a term borrowed from the table, is a relish. Indeed, to any one interested in literature as an art, it has a peculiar value, as helping to determine the somewhat shadowy boundaries between amateur and professional work. The reader who has only pleasure in view will find the book light and entertaining, but if he goes a step beyond, he is tempted to ask in what consists the difference between these reminiscences and such papers, for example, as Lamb’s Recollections of Christ’s Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago, or Lowell’s Cambridge Thirty Years Ago, in his Fireside Travels. There is a likeness and a difference; the wit is in both, the playfulness, the lingering with an easily forgiven partiality over personal trifles, yet consciously or not there is in the book before us a certain hesitation of art, as if the sketcher were uncertain sometimes how much or how little he must bear on. The papers provokingly stop short of giving thorough satisfaction. It is the difference, we may say, between the light sketch of a man who has secured freedom of handling by constant use of his pencil in serious, determinate work, and that of one who has never done anything save jotting down bits for his own personal gratification. The main difference between the work of an amateur and a professional writer lies, we suspect, iu the degree in which the work done is made foreign from the worker. The amateur finds it cleaving to him; he cannot disengage himself wholly from it, and he betrays more or less selfconsciousness. Nevertheless there is a charm and a freshness often attaching to amateur work, akin to that discovered in familiar letters, which deliberate writers miss; and this hook, judged as the pastime of one who does not make literature a profession, suggests a wish that fate might have interfered to turn so much fine feeling and good nature into a formal literary channel.

— Mr. Eggleston’s little treatise on How to make a Living ⁴ must not be inconsiderately counted in the class of charlatan books that deceive the unwary by pretending to point out short cuts to wealth and prosperity. It is an honest and modest effort to state plainly a few laws of economy which are incontrovertibly established, but need to be repeated again and again in the homeliest phrases for the benefit of those who have common-sense enough to see the right way when it is shown them, but not quite enough to make the discovery for themselves. It is out of this general subject that countless proverbs and maxims have sprung, and it seems that every clearheaded man who writes upon it is impelled to express himself in sentences. We think, for example, that a sentence could be found in each of Mr. Eggleston’s chapters embodying the wisdom of the whole chapter. There are seven chapters, and we proceed to give their headings, with an illustrative sentence from each: I. The Value of Money. “ Money is an article of varying value, worth what it will bay, and no more.” 2. The Duty and the Danger of Making Money. “ It is the duty of every one to make money enough to supply the reasonable wants of himself and of those dependent upon him ; it is his privilege to make as much more as he can without sacrificing worthier ends.” 3. The Choice of a Business. “ Learn a regular business and learn it well.” 4. Marriage and Money. “ Married men save more money than single men.” 5. How to Live on your Income. “ Sanguine people live upon the money they intend to make, rather than upon that which is already made.” 6. What to do with Savings. “ However brief the time, and however small the interest may be, your money should be made to work while it waits.” 7. Life Insurance. “You may be abundantly able to purchase insurance, and yet not able, with justice to those dependent upon you, to buy with it an endowment for yourself.” This last chapter is one of the most useful in the book, since it discriminates with singular clearness the several kinds of life insurance, and furnishes the young man who may fall into the hands of “ agents ” with a complete armor of common-sense. We heartily commend the book as a straightforward and frequently very suggestive handbook, refreshingly free from cant of every kind.

— Sanitary science was forced upon the attention of our people by bitter experience during the war of the rebellion, and has been growing in popularity ever since ; we have now a new and gigantic national museum, State boards of health, improved and extended courses of medical study, radical changes in the construction of hospitals, vigorous attacks upon abuses in the public schools and upon nuisances which afflict the common air; and finally, we have in this book 1 a solid and incontrovertible proof that the medical profession are deeply interested in public hygiene. As the first public production of a society which claims to be national, it deserves an unusual degree of attention ; as proving the tendency of public thought in America.it has a value quite independent of the purely scientific merit of the contributions.

In attempting to estimate the actual value of this large and heavy volume, we have made a sort of rough classification of the forty-eight distinct articles which compose its contents. There are a large number (at least one third of the whole) which strike one at first sight as intended to be practically useful, rather than profoundly original ; the matter is excellent, and not trite, but is presented for the most part as the result of the observations of other men, chiefly English and Germans. Such are some of the articles on hospitals, quarantine, cholera, small-pox, yellow fever, immigration, sailors as propagators of disease, the utilization of refuse of cities, disinfectants, health laws, registration. Next comes an equal number (sixteen) of articles which to the general public must be nearly unreadable, but which have their value as material for study, comprising reports upon the progress of cholera, yellow fever, and the horseepizootic, in the United States. Half a dozen papers are scientific in a high sense of the term, exhibiting original research which passes beyond the mere amassing of huge bulks of facts; but in general, a much more prominent feature of the book is the fluent skill with which interesting compilations of facts are made. A certain number, say half a dozen, are purely literary in their tone, full of those paragraphs which tempt the scissors of the semi-weekly press, and quite free from original scientific matter. There is a voluminous but very clear table of statistics of boards of health, and a great deal of useful information upon all kinds of sanitary subjects. (We would note, by the way, some exaggerated statements about carbonic acid, in an article on architecture, which are quite unworthy of a carefully edited and authoritative publication like this.) The subjects of mortality, climate, epidemics, ships and quarantine, etc., are illustrated by twenty-one maps and cuts. Before dismissing the book, we will point out certain articles which we believe will prove of interest; it is almost a pity they should have been thrown in with the general mass of matter. Such are that by John Stockton-Hough, on the harmful effects of residence in cities; one by Lorin Blodget, on non-periodic changes of heat as an element in sanitary climatology ; and others respectively by Austin Flint, on the relations of water to the propagation of fever, by Stephen Smith, on the local means of prevention and relief to be adopted during the prevalence of epidemic cholera, by John C. Peters, on a similar subject, by S. Oakley Van der Poel, ou quarantine, and Prof. C. F. Chandler, on the sanitary chemistry of waters, and suggestions with regard to the selection of the water-supply of towns and cities. Those of our readers who take but an average interest in sanitary matters may be safely directed to these (and some others) as very clear, spirited, and readable, besides being of great value for the facts contained in them. And if we were to make one summary criticism of the whole book, it would be done by expressing our regret that a dozen papers could not have been chosen out and printed in a form adapted to take the popular attention, making a book which would be read by many a man who will hardly care to search through the present bulky volume. Nevertheless, the good meat is there, and we advise our readers to look for it.

— The Bulletin of International Meteorological Observations⁵ taken simultaneously at 7.35 A. M., January 20, 1875, in a large number of stations both in the old and the new hemisphere, has just been published. We see in this the fulfillment of the hope held forth by General Myer in his report on the United States signal service for 1874, that we should soon be able to draw conclusions from a larger area of the earth’s surface, and therefore be able to prognosticate with greater certainty of truth. In a note appended to the bulletin we learn that “this bulletin sets on foot, for the tirst time in history, a regular international exchange of weather reports. It is the object of the exchange to render practicable the preparation of a daily weather map, which may embrace within its limits the whole northern hemisphere, and permit a study of atmospheric movements which, not limited to any one continent or sea, may enable storms and disturbances to be traced from wherever they arise, through their course until they disappear. The limits of any one continent are too small to allow the proper study of the atmosphere which, surrounding the earth, revolves in its whole extent with it once in twenty-four hours. The observations in the bulletin are taken everywhere at the same instant of physical time ; for instance, when the observers at New York and San Francisco are reading their instruments daily, it may be safely assumed those in Siberia or the Pacific, the West Indies or Northern Canada, are at that moment also reading theirs. The readings reported are thus simultaneous and valuable. The bulletin is inexpensive, the readings being taken in every country by the observers of that country, and forwarded by mail to Washington in packages on the fifteenth and last days of each mouth; the United States observations being sent as an equivalent. The most distinguished meteorologists in the world have approved the undertaking. The congress at Vienna in 1873 having given it their approval, it has fallen to the United States to be the first to give the work practical shape, and to establish a form which aims to bind together, in a work for a common good, the labors of every country.”

The bulletin consists of a large pamphlet of four pages, giving opposite each station the height of the barometer, temperature of the air, relative humidity, force, velocity, and direction of wind, amount of clouds, rain-fall, and general observations on the weather, such as, rain, fog, snow, clear, etc. It is accompanied by a large map, which gives at one view, in projection, the location of the observing stations in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. From the lists of stations printed on this map we learn that there are one hundred and twenty-seven American stations, one hundred and fortyfive European, and thirty-three African and Asiatic. It is therefore perfectly possible for one in possession of such a bulletin, with its accompanying map, to draw a line of storm or of fair weather through all the stations similarly affected. The passage of great atmospheric waves can be traced ; and in the astronomical work of the future, such as the next transit of Venus, in 1882, the value of simultaneous observations will he appreciated. Other sciences will gain greatly by this advance in meteorology. It is probable that the labors of the observers will be extended so as to note magnetic variations and electrical conditions of the atmosphere.

The amount of time and study that has been wasted in taking observations on the weather in the past is enormous. “ The two hundred thousand observations made by Dalton during a period of fifty years, and the fifty-four thousand seven hundred and fifty observations taken at Stockholm during an equal term of years, are not available for the settlement of preliminary questions in meteorology for want of comparative observations in other parts of the earth.” To keep a record of the weather has been in all ages a favorite occupation of many, but the science of meteorology has risen greatly in the dignity and importance of its investigators.

The day has gone by for almanacs. We shall not see, probably, in the future, productions like the “ meteorological journal kept by Hosea Sprague one mile from the sea, in Hingham, Massachusetts, by a thermometer made in Boston,” from which we learn that in April, 1836, on the 6th of the mouth there was a snow-storm, 7th was Fast Day, on the 9th frogs peeped, on the 10th there was rain, and on the 27th swallows came. Science prescribes in future the kind of observations which will be of value, and the day for amateur desultory observations on the weather has passed. In this centennial season, Americans can congratulate themselves on the impulse they have given to the extension and improvement of the signal service.

— To call The Physician’s Wife⁶ the silliest novel that ever was written would perhaps sound uncritical, and would be moreover unfair and needlessly complimentary to a great many other stories of the same sort. It may not be the silliest, but it is very silly, delightfully so. The author has laid the scene of her story in England, translating dollars into pounds, and clergymen into rectors, to aid in the deception, but leaving on every page the most unmistakable traces of the American origin of the novel. To be sure, we have on page 77 the servants’ hall, and the butler; why then should the reader, lulled into the belief that he is reading a tale of the English aristocracy, find mention made of “ wheeling a large chair to the register” ? Again, do physicians in England, even if members of

the Academy of Medicine, have urns containing coffee on their dining-tables, behind which the lady of the house sits ? Here again is the conventional English breakfast: “Just then the butler came in with the cof fee, and after he had retired, Doctor Alvord, without seeming in the least to observe my emotion, began praising the cook’s skill, and discussing the delicious beef and unrivaled fritters. I managed to recover sufficiently to placidly eye my husband askance, as he unsentimentally appropriated strip after strip of tenderloin, . . . and caused fritter after fritter to disappear, whilst I sat silently and persistently nibbling at a bun, unable to eat a bite.”

“ Will we walk to church. ? ’ inquired my husband, after conducting me to the foot of the stairs, where I, on pretense of warming my feet at the register, paused a moment.” This may also serve as an example of the disrespectful and uncertain way in which the author treats the English language. Examples, however, may be found on every page. The plot is ingeniously improbable ; the heroine is engaged to a man who jilts her a week before she was to marry him, and she marries his brother, whom she had seen but once before, instead of him. They go to live in an impossible part of London. She sings under an assumed name at the opera for three or four nights ; at the close of the last performance the gas gives out and there is total darkness throughout the whole city, A Frenchman mistakes her “ for one of the sans souci women ” of his native country, and tries to flirt with her; she is jealous of her husband; and peace is finally made between them. It is a curious medley Mrs. or Miss Spangler has given us, a hodge-podge of familiar and impossible incidents, not the least amusing part of the book being the transparent veneer of English life which covers the whole story.

FRENCH AND GERMAN. ⁷

Rather more than three years ago notice was made in these pages of the Journal et Correspondence do Andre-Marie Ampere, a book which told with delightful simplicity the sad youth of an eminent man. It contained the journal in which he made brief record of his courtship, and gave the letters passing between the husband and wife during the time of their involuntary separation. They were married in August, 1799, and in August, 1800, their only child, Jean-Jacques Ampere, was born; from that time Julie, his mother, became weaker and weaker until she died, July 14, 1803. For three years she had remained in Lyons on account of her ill-health, while her husband was almost continually employed in teaching at Bourg, and able to pay his wife only rare and brief visits. That volume closed with her death. The two volumes now before us⁸ narrate the remainder of A.-M. Ampère’s lonely life, and give us that of his son, Jean-Jacques, until his death in 1864. We learn to know these two men and their friends, not by didactic information, but through their full and interesting letters, the greater number of which have fortunately escaped destruction. In consequence we have put before us almost from day to day the chronicle of their lives, told with all the freshness of its original novelty.

At the opening of these volumes we find Andre-Marie Ampere a man still young in years, but saddened and aged by his misfortunes. Lyons was no longer agreeable to him, full as it was of reminiscences of his recent afflictions; he soon went hence to Paris, which moreover was the more fitting field for his marvelous powers. There he plunged heartily into metaphysical study, in company with Maine de Biran, Cabanis, and Tracy. This for a time filled his mind and lifted him out of too constant brooding on his sorrows. His former friends, however, bewailed his straying from the paths of the exactor sciences into these more uncertain mazes. Ballanche early foresaw the great danger his religious principles ran, and warned him off this perilous ground. His advice was timely, but it shared the fate of most advice in not being followed. Ballanche’s proposal to Ampere that he marry again met, however, with very different fate. In 1807 he was formally introduced to a Mademoiselle P—, whose name is withheld, whom he shortly married. This second attempt at securing domestic happiness failed most disastrously. His wife treated him very cruelly, and after the birth of a daughter, he was obliged to separate from her, he retaining the child. Naturally these sad experiences made his cheerless life seem unhappier than ever, and new doubts had begun to undermine his former religious certainty. He wrote to his friends, bewailing his sad lot, and urging them to send on convincing arguments of the authenticity of the Christian religion ; he even asked one of them for the demonstrations of Christianity he had himself successfully employed a few years before in converting him to religious faith. Meanwhile, however, his researches in the mathematics and in chemistry went on busily, so that almost every moment of his time was employed.

In 1816 Jean-Jacques, who had only before been incidentally mentioned by his father or aunt, makes his appearance as a boy in great uncertainty about his future profession. His father, who when eighteen had known all the mathematics then taught, was disappointed at not finding the same tastes in his son. He tried to persuade him to become a manufacturing chemist, but Jean-Jacques finally decided to study philosophy and literature. In carrying out this plan he attended the lectures of Victor Cousin with a troop of his young friends, to most of whom he became warmly attached. In their society he went through the various phases of youthful cynicism and hatred of the world. To one friend he wrote, “ Last week the feeling of bearing a curse was upon me, around me, within me. I owe it to Lord Byron, whose Manfred I read through twice in succession. Never, never in my life has any reading so taken hold upon me as that; it has made me sick. Sunday I went to see the sunset; it looked as threatening as the fires of hell. I went into a church where the faithful were peacefully singing the Hallelujah of the resurrection. Leaning against a column, I regarded them with disdain and with envy,” etc. What cured him of these fantastic griefs, by giving him genuine cause for unhappiness, was his acquaintance with Madame Recamier; this began on New Year’s day, 1820, when he was nineteen years old, and she forty-three. It was not long before he was one of her many ardent admirers, and from almost the very first moment he saw her there was no one who had more influence over him than she. For some years he passed nearly every summer in her neighborhood; during the winter, too, he was a constant visitor at her salon, and when he was separated from her his letters were very frequent. In the autumn of 1823 she confided to him that she felt obliged, for the sake of her peace of mind, which was threatened by Chateaubriand’s attentions, to leave Paris for a time, and it was with great joy that he accepted her invitation to accompany her to Italy. His father was averse to his going. The poor man, who had cheerfully resigned all hopes of his son’s distinction in the physical sciences, nourished great ambition for his eminence in literature. In accordance with this wish of his father, Jean-Jacques wrote and re-wrote tragedies, which André-Marie warmly admired, and which indeed were accepted by theatre managers, though no one of them has ever been put on the stage. Almost every letter to his father gives some information about his progress in his poems, but at the best they received only a divided attention ; Madame Récamier appropriated the most of his time and affection. This year in Italy in her society was full of enjoyment to him, and it was with great regret that in November, 1824, he parted from her in order to return to Paris and his lonely father. He found the change dispiriting, and for consolation he plunged ardently into work, reading history, studying Hebrew and Chinese, while at the same time not neglecting his poetical work. All his letters to Madame Récamier written at this period are full of the profoundest melancholy, but in May of the next year, 1825, she returned to France, and Jean-Jucques spent the summer near her in the country. Thus matters went on, he devoting himself to Madame Récamier, and his father trying to preserve him from these entanglements by urging him to marry some young woman of a suitable age, until August, 1826, when he made a bold strike for freedom by suddenly leaving France and betaking himself to Germany. He settled down for the winter in Bonn, and devoted himself to study under Niebuhr and Schlegel. His letters hence are very entertaining. In the spring he started off again to travel through Germany and in Norway and Sweden. On his way he stopped at Weimar, where Goethe, then a man seventy-eight years old, welcomed him very kindly, for Ampere had already distinguished himself by his profound and battering criticism of Goethe’s dramatic writings. This visit was the cause of an unpleasant incident. He wrote to Madame Récamier about his frequent meetings with Goethe, and in one letter with a little spice of irreverence, quite proper in a letter to an intimate friend, but not suited for the eye of the public. To his horror, soon after leaving Weimar, he saw it printed almost entire, in the Globe. He wrote very humble apologies to his friends in the town he had just left, and after a short delay a letter to Madame Récamier which she must have read with sorrow and burning blushes. Without wrath, without forgetting his politeness, he pointed out to her the error she had been guilty of in letting it get into print.

For a time his letters to her are rarer and fuller of his adventures than of his customary protestations of affection. Another matter which had a great influence upon him was the information he received of the illness and death of Mademoiselle Cuvier, the young woman his father had been anxious to have him marry, who seems to have had an attachment for him, which his devotion to Madame Réecamier prevented him from returning. After his departure from Paris she sickened and died; and AndreMarie’s letters describing the last few times he saw her are most pathetic reading. When he returned to France he was a maturer man than when he had left ; he had so far overcome his love for Madame Recamier that he could treat her as a friend, and in that capacity he remained devoted to her until the end of her life.

Both the father and the son, after the expiration of their romantic loves, became almost equally ardent in their affection for their friends. Andre-Marie’s correspondence with Bredin, especially, and with Ballanche and others, shows us clearly how loving and simple-minded a man he was, and his son inherited from him the same generous, sympathetic nature. All through his youth he had many warm friends, hut none of them held so high a place in his affection as Alexis de Tocqueville, whom he first met after his return to Paris from his northern journey. It was at this time, too, that he began to devote himself to the serious business of life, and that he received a professor’s chair in the College of France. Andre’s health was beginning to fail him, and almost the only consolation of his life, outside of that which his unceasing work brought him, was the sight of his son’s success. In June, 1836, the father died. After his death Jean-Jacques lived for seventeen years with Mold, the Orientalist, whose letters, unfortunately few in number, will be found very amusing. In almost every vacation, or whenever he could get a longenough respite from his duties, he made journeys, often to remote quarters of the world, to less visited countries of the East, and once to this country. Canada, and Mexico. Whenever troubles came too thickly upon him, it was in this way that he sought relief, by visiting new scenes and new people When he was at home he was frequently visiting Alexis de Tocqueville, at whose house a room was always kept in readiness for him. De Tocqueville’s letters to him are remarkable for their gentle courtesy and unfailing politeness; they have an aroma of refinement which makes them charming reading.

In 1850 he first made the acquaintance of the family of the lady who has edited these volumes of his correspondence. They were obliged to live in Rome, and consequently he made that city his home for the later years of his life. He was there when De Tocqueville was dying at Cannes. He made an unsuccessful attempt to reach his friend before it was too late. All his time was busily occupied in his work, until his death at Pau, March 6, 1864.

What makes those volumes so especially entertaining, so nearly worthy to be kept for reading when all but the best books fail, is the full light they throw upon interesting men, and on the candor and respectful politeness that marks all the letters. They were not written for publication ; they nowhere show the writer’s consciousness of performing well a difficult literary feat; they are genuine expressions of the writer’s feeling at the moment. And no novel is fuller of various emotions than these two, or if we include, as we should, the first one of the series, which appeared in 1872, these three volumes. The earliest one tells of the romance of Andre-Marie’s life ; the next shows us his unhappy widowhood and his vain attempt again to secure domestic happiness. Then comes Jean-Jacques’ love for Madame Recamier, and his passionate letters, outdo most novels; the interesting series of his friendly correspondence follows, containing, besides what we have mentioned, letters from Sainte-Beuve, Mérimée, Deloménie, Ozanam, Châteaubriand, Thiers, Lacordaire, the Abbé Perreyve, and others. These certainly make a rich treat. Besides all the interest to be derived from their discussion of what is really the history of yesterday, there are lessons to be learned from what is shown of the domestic life of Andre and his son.

The father’s affection for Jean-Jacqucs and his pathetic resignation when his son grows away from him and devotes himself to new interests are very touching. He had always hoped to find in his sou something to replace what he had lost, but his wish was only half fulfilled. Not that Jean-Jacques was not an affectionate son ; he was that, but then he was also another human being of just as decided tastes and wants. He did his best in the first years of his manhood to convince his father of his agreement with him, and maturer years brought him, in fact, nearer than he had been in his youth; but for a time he had grown to take a great interest in what his father must have thought very wild notions about Byronism and the like.

André-Marie was simplicity and candor by the side of his complexer son. So great is the difference between the two men that generations seem to have lived and died between them, but yet they had many qualities in common. Both were hard-working, affectionate to their friends, and honest; but with Jean-Jacques these qualities were tempered by delicacy of perception, tact, and a flavor of worldly wisdom, for which probably Madame Récamier found him an apt pupil. But with all their faults and virtues both were most attractive men, and there is no more interesting recently published French book than this which completes the story of their lives. It contains material for every taste. It is a book which may be fairly enough compared with Boswell’s Life of Johnson for its generous abundance of human interest.