REVIEW OF NEW BOOKS.

The Salamander: Found amongst the Papers of the late Ernest Helfenstein. Edited by E. Oakes Smith. Second Edition. New York: George P. Putnam. 1 vol. 12mo.

Mrs. Smith has written nothing so well calculated to convey to the majority of readers a clear sense of the richness, originality, and elevation of her genius, as this wonderful little story. It evinces a high degree of creative power, being an organic product of the mind, with a central principle of life, and vital in every part. The scenery, events and characters have all a living connection with the leading idea of the work, and illustrate each other. The form is the ever facile and yielding instrument of the plastic spirit within, and varies with the variations in the story and the changes in the thought or feeling expressed. By a felicity of nature, Mrs. Smith appears instinctively to subordinate the material to the spiritual; and thus by making the former simply the symbol by which she expresses the latter, she spiritualizes matter, and makes it the living body of the soul. She vivifies and vitalizes the form until it becomes o’er informed with spirit. Natural objects as used by the poet, derive all their effect from being the pictorial language of impassioned thought, the visible image being but the embodiment to the eye of the viewless force which penetrates and animates it; and fitly to employ objects as exponents of thoughts, a firm, decisive grasp of spiritual realities, of something lying back of all expression, is necessary. The moment the material predominates over or precedes the spiritual, it becomes so much dead matter, without significance, because without life. A great excellence of the present story is the constant dominion exercised by the soul over or through its forms of expression, and the physiognomical character of the style and imagery. When we thus speak of it as pre-eminently spiritual, we of course imply that it is thoroughly alive.

But the wonder of the book, and the quality which will give it a permanent place in American literature, is the sure and fine audacity with which it brings the supernaturally beautiful and the supernaturally terrible into vital relations with human life, without any shock or jar of the unnatural to disturb the exquisiteness of the combination; and this is done in a manner purely original, awakening no reminiscences of German or English supernaturalism, and giving unmistakable evidence of being drawn from the writer’s own life and mental experience. Indeed, by the very constitution of her mind, Mrs. Smith seems to see things in their spiritual relations; consequently she not only looks at things and into things, but she looks through them, and discerns the supernatural region from which they proceed and on which they depend. This vision into a sphere above sense, is accompanied by an imagination of sufficient force to shape what she sees into a form palpable to sense, and thus to reach the mystical elements in other minds through their sensuous imagination. This vision and this faculty are possessed by all high and powerful natures, and the test of the reality of the powers is in the originality of the products. Similarity, even when it does not approach plagiarism, indicates the intervention of another mind, and by suggesting spectacles casts ominous conjecture on the soundness or reach of the eyes. Now the supernatural, as it appears in this volume, is strictly individual and peculiar, evidencing that the authoress has herself contemplated, face to face, the spiritual truths she has embodied.

While the present story is thus eminently a work of creative imagination, working in the region of the supernatural, and ranking “strange combinations out of common things,” it is at the same time intensely human, touching at every step on some affection or aspiration of the human heart, and full of the glee and gloom of our common life. As every thing is realized to the eye and imagination, and the vital relation between the natural feeling and the preternatural agencies is clearly represented, the reader is conscious of no unharmoniousness in the general impression left on his mind by the whole work, but simply feels as though he had been brought nearer to the life of things, and discerned evil and good in their spiritual natures. With a power of thought, as felicitous in its delicacy as in its strength, moral beauty and moral deformity are both seized in their intrinsic principles, and embodied in such a manner that the material form ceases to be the veil and becomes the vehicle of the nature it encloses.

To the shaping imagination which this work indicates, we must add that form or expression of the imaginative faculty, by which things inexpressible in images are suggested by cunning verbal combinations, or which escape in the peculiar turn of a period, or which are breathed to the inner ear of the mind in the rhythm of a sentence. This mystical charm, this elusive, dreamy, ever vanishing and yet ever appearing grace, gives to the whole work a character of strangeness almost bewitching, and produces that fine and faint intoxication of the imagination which makes it ready to receive and accredit wonders with as much faith as it commonly awards to possibilities. It is this quality also which makes it impossible to convey the moral of the story in any didactic proposition. It has a profound moral, but it is a moral which refuses to be comprehended in an ethical axiom, being felt in the brain and “felt along the heart.”

We have been so much engrossed by the merits of this story that we have little space left to notice some faults. The notes should not be retained at the bottom of the page, but should be transferred to an appendix. Occasionally the imagination of the authoress stutters in its sublime talk, and gives fragments of gigantic images instead of wholes. Here and there the philosophic prevails over the imaginative, and discourse monopolizes a sentence which should be strictly sacred to representation. But the sweetness, the tenderness, the beauty, purity and majesty, with which the work is so replete, hardly allow even the critical reader to be captious; and to the uncritical, the absorbing interest of the story would be sufficient to hide even prominent defects.

Poems. By James F. Fields. Boston: Wm. D. Ticknor & Co. 1 vol. 16mo.

Book-writing and book-publishing, according to the most approved doctrines of the division of labor, are to be kept strictly apart, and commonly there yawns a natural gulf between the two, as wide and deep as that which separated Lazarus and Dives. The present volume, however, illustrates this seemingly impossible combination, the author being also one of the publishers, and it must be confessed that the intellectual and mechanical execution reflect credit on each other. Mr. Fields has a mind of great flexibility and fertility, and occasionally he has compressed within the limit of this volume a large variety of matter, answering to the mirthful, the pathetic, the satirical, the tender, and the impassioned. He not only does not repeat himself, but the work is too small adequately to express the whole range of his poetic faculty. The two longest poems in the collection are the “Post of Honor” and “Commerce,” both of them originally pronounced before the Boston Mercantile Library Association, and each including many topics under the general subject. These evince a keen, shrewd eye for practical life and character, and the satirical portions are characterized by a mingled wit and humor unexcelled for general sharpness. “The Post of Honor” is by far the best, and its pictures of life, both serious and mirthful, are exceedingly vivid and true. The versification evinces a complete mastery of the heroic couplet, in all its ease, energy and harmony of flow, and it is spangled with fine felicities of fancy and original verbal combinations. The passages relating to Lamb and Grey, are replete with a quiet searching pathos, which touches the inmost nerve of sensibility.

Many of the shorter poems have already had a wide circulation through the newspapers. “Fair Wind,” originally published in “Graham,” and “The Dirge,” we have seen in the poetical corner of at least a hundred journals. The new ballads and lyrics, now first published, are among the best in the whole collection. “The Ballad of the Tempest,” the “Pair of Antlers,” and “Common Sense,” are very brilliant and beautiful. “Life at Niagara,” and the “Alarmed Skipper,” are good specimens of mirthful poetry as distinguished from versified mirth. “Children in Exile,” and “A Bridal Melody,” have an intensity of deep and sweet feeling, which wins its way into the very core of the heart. We might refer to others as worthy of notice as these, but we must be content with quoting one instead of naming many, and we accordingly present our readers with a most beautiful specimen of blank verse, addressed to Rogers:

ON A BOOK OF SEA-MOSSES,

SENT TO AN EMINENT ENGLISH POET.

To him who sang of Venice, and revealed

How Wealth and Glory clustered in her streets,

And poised her marble domes with wondrous skill,

We send these tributes, plundered from the sea.

These many-colored, variegated forms

Sail to our rougher shores, and rise and fall

To the deep music of the Atlantic wave.

Such spoils we capture where the rainbows drop,

Melting in ocean. Here are broideries strange,

Wrought by the sea-nymphs from their golden hair,

And wove by moonlight. Gently turn the leaf.

From narrow cells, scooped in the rocks, we take

These fairy textures, lightly moored at morn.

Down sunny slopes, outstretching to the deep,

We roam at noon, and gather shapes like these.

Note now the painted webs from verdurous isles,

Festooned and spangled in sea-caves, and say

What hues of land can rival tints like those,

Torn from the scarfs and gonfalons of kings

Who dwell beneath the waters.

Such our gift,

Culled from a margin of the western world,

And offered unto Genius in the old.

Raphael; or Pages from the Book of Life at Twenty. By Alphonse de Lamartine. New York: Harper & Brothers.

Lamartine, with many of the high qualities of genius, is deficient in one of the most important—Common Sense. He is a fine and eloquent singer of his own idealized and idolized self, but is gifted with very imperfect powers of objective perception. He sees nothing as it is, but every object is more or less a mirror of self. This is equally true whether the object be Mont Blanc or a Paris mob. All his descriptions of scenery, though often rising to a strain of rapturous eloquence and beauty, are never accurate, even in an elevated poetical signification of accuracy. Different scenes, in different climes, are all enveloped in one atmosphere, and all stand for one tyrannizing class of emotions. Lamartine is a sentimentalist, and no sentimentalist can celebrate any nature but his own, or consider the universe as worth any thing in itself. The excellence of the present volume consists in its subject admitting of a strictly lyrical treatment, and it accordingly is full to running over of Lamartine’s strong but narrow genius, and is resplendent with glittering sentiment and decorative imagery. The work is not long enough to tire by its egotism and fine writing, and is closed before admiration has subsided from the interjection into the yawn of satisfaction. A nature so rich as Lamartine’s might fill even a larger book without exhausting its wealth of sentiment or thought.

The Moral, Social, and Professional Duties of Attorneys and Solicitors. By Samuel Warren, F. R. S. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1 vol. 16mo.

Mr. Warren’s works on Law are almost as entertaining as his novels. The present book is full of matter important to the young lawyer, and interesting to the general reader. All who are accustomed to have dealings with the profession, can obtain from this little volume many useful and some lucrative hints. The two points on which Mr. Warren expends his sense and his eloquence are knavery and incapacity, as those qualities exist among lawyers. As many lives and more fortunes depend on the existence of the opposite qualities in the profession, this volume will be equally valuable if it succeed either in expelling rogues and dunces from the law, or in enabling clients to detect them.

Aurifodina; or Adventures in the Gold Region. By Cantell A. Bigby. New York: Baker & Scribner. 1 vol. 16mo.

The author of this little volume has availed himself of the interest excited by the late disclosures in California, to construct a story of marvelous adventures in that region. In regard to probability the work is half way between Gulliver’s Travels and the Arabian Nights. As every thing wonderful relating to California is greedily devoured, the disclosures of this work will undoubtedly receive their due attention. They are nearly as much entitled to belief as many of the newspaper accounts.

A New Spanish Reader: Consisting of Passages from the Most Approved Authors, in Prose and Verse. By Mariana Velasquez de la Cadena. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1 vol. 12mo.

The editor of this volume is Professor of the Spanish Language and Literature in Columbia College. He has so arranged his matter as to remove all possible obstacles in the way of the learner, and to conduct him, step by step, into the heart of the noble language of Castile. The selections are admirably made. The volume is not only well adapted for schools and colleges, but for the private student, and we trust it will induce many to study a language which will give them a key to the versatile and fertile genius of Lope de Vega, the mystical beauty of Calderon, and the profound and genial humor of Cervantes.

Essay on the Union of Church and State. By Baptist W. Noel, M. A. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1 vol. 12mo.

This work has produced a considerable sensation in England, being a well-written protest against the Church Establishment, supported by a long array of facts and arguments. The author was for twenty-two years an Episcopal clergyman, and was at last forced by his reason and conscience into his present position. Mr. Noel does not attack the doctrines of the Church, but its union with the State, and he attempts to prove that this union is condemned by the letter and spirit of the Bible, is unjust, inexpedient, and productive of a host of evils, from which free churches are exempt.

History of Hannibal the Carthagenian. By Jacob Abbott. With Engravings. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1 vol. 16mo.

This is one of a series of historical books for the people, prepared by Mr. Abbott with his usual felicity of condensation and simplification. The series so far includes the Life of Mary, Queen of Scots, Alexander the Great, Charles I. and the present volume, and others are to follow. The author manages his matter with much art, and while few can read his volumes without an addition to their information, they must be invaluable to a large class of minds almost altogether deficient in historical knowledge.

A Catechism of the Steam Engine, Illustrative of the Scientific Principles on which Its Operation Depends, etc. By John Bourne, C. E. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1 vol. 16mo.

Here, in the space of one small volume, is condensed a large amount of available information on the steam engine, its principles, the practical details of its structure, and its application to mines and mills, as well as steam navigation and railways. The author evinces an intimate practical acquaintance with his subject, and his work, while it is invaluable to the engineer, possesses great interest to every reader desirous of fathoming the mystery of the structure and operation of the steam engine.