REVIEW OF NEW BOOKS.

The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey. Edited by his Son, Rev. Charles Cuthbert Southey, M. A. To be completed in Six Parts. New York. Harper & Brothers.

The Harpers are printing this entertaining work as fast as the volumes are received from England. The English price is about three dollars and a half a volume; the American twenty-five cents. As a record of Southey’s life, character, and opinions, and as conducting us into the workshop of the greatest of book-makers, the work has great value, apart from its attractive qualities of literary and personal gossip. The impression it leaves of Southey is, on the whole, a favorable one. It makes him appear as an honest, just, active, persistent, independent man,—one who can “toil terribly,”—a staunch friend, a direct and open opponent,—with a good deal of bigotry but no deviltry,—and altogether a person with few of the vices which most commonly beset writers by profession. His letters are admirable, both in themselves and as true specimens of epistolary composition. They show Southey just as he was, quick in forming opinions, confident in expressing them, thoroughly convinced that he had no intellectual superior in England, freed from envy by self-esteem, and ready to settle every question that is started, by a few dogmatic sentences, which sparkle “like salt in fire.” The singular perfection of his character, considered in respect to its capacity for active intellectual labor, came from his almost miraculous confidence in his faculties and content with himself. He has so high an opinion of Robert Southey as to be unconcerned about any thing which lies beyond the grasp of his powers, and, accordingly, however much we may find reason to doubt or deny many of his statements, they ever have a joyous raciness which tingles pleasantly on our perceptions.

The present work commences with a delightful autobiography, which Southey carried down to the age of fifteen. His son then takes up the narrative. This, however, is little more than arranging the correspondence, and explaining allusions in it. The great charm of Southey’s style is its stimulating simplicity; and this is felt throughout the present “Life.” We have marked, in reading the work, a number of passages, which seem to us especially characteristic, and cannot refrain from quoting a few of them. He tells us, in his autobiography, that his elder brother was very beautiful; “so much so, that, when I made my appearance on the 12th of August, 1774, I was sadly disparaged by comparison with him. My mother, asking if it was a boy, was answered by her nurse, in a tone as little favorable to me as it was flattering, ‘Ay, a great ugly boy!’ and she added, when she told me this, ‘God forgive me! when I saw what a great red creature it was, covered with rolls of fat, I thought I should never be able to love him.’” This is the most perfectly dramatic statement of the most important event which can happen to a person, ever given in a biography; and it conciliates the reader at once.

The record of his early life is given with much amusing details. His parents were rather illiterate, and he depended on chance to gratify his thirst for books, with nobody to select what were proper to his age. He read Beaumont and Fletcher through before he was eight years old,—a most curious book for a child, when we consider the obscenity, licentiousness, and slang which mingle with the romantic beauty of those dramatists. He says they did him no harm, for the reason that he was so young. In Mrs. Rowe’s Letters he read her version of the stories of Olendo and Sophronia, and the Enchanted Forest, from Tasso, and despaired at the time of ever reading more of the poem until he was man, “from a whimsical notion that, as the subject related to Jerusalem, the original must be in Hebrew;” and there was not learning enough in his father’s house to set him right on the point.

Perhaps the most interesting peculiarity of books like the present, is their expression of the private opinions which their subjects entertained of contemporary men and events. This certainly is the raciest element in the Correspondence of Southey, and his letters are next in attractiveness to a cosy chat with himself. Of Bentham, he remarks—“It has pleased the metaphysico-critico-politico-patriotico-phoolo-philosopher Jeremy Bentham, to designate me, in one of his opaque works, by the appellation of St. Southey, for which I humbly thank his Jeremy Benthamship, and have in part requited him.” His hatred of Jeffrey, and contempt of Reviews, provoke many a sardonic remark, replete with his peculiar humor. “Turner,” he writes to Rickman, “complained heavily of Scotch criticism, which he seems to feel too much. Such things only provoke me to interject Fool! and Booby! seasoned with the participle damnatory; but as for being vexed at a review—I should as soon be fevered by a flea-bite! . . . I look upon the invention of reviews to be the worst injury which literature has received since its revival.” Of Coleridge he says—“His mind is in a perfect St. Vitus’s dance—eternal activity without action.” Jeffrey, according to Southey, is a bad politician, a worse moralist, and a critic, in matters of taste, equally incompetent and unjust. It is unfortunate that his criticism on himself and on others, in these letters, is not of a kind to entitle him to condemn the editor of the Edinburgh Review. “Cowper,” he asserts, “owed his popularity to his piety, not to his poetry, and that piety was craziness.” His opinion was altered, of course, when he afterward edited an edition of Cowper’s works. Of Walter Savage Lander’s poem of Gebir, he says—“I look upon Gebir, as I do upon Dante’s long poem in the Italian, not as a good poem, but as containing the finest poetry in the language.” His power of appreciating Wordsworth may be estimated by his remark, in a letter to Scott, on the “Ode on the Intimations of Immortality from the Recollections of Childhood.” “The Ode on Pre-existence,” he says, “is a dark subject darkly handled. Coleridge is the only man who could make such a subject luminous. The Leech Gatherer is one of my favorites.” We might quote many other critical judgments, “equally incompetent and unjust,” but if the last does not satisfy the reader, it is impossible to quote any thing that will.

The following passage, from a letter written in 1812, gives so vivid an impression of Shelley in his enthusiastic youth, that we cannot refrain from extracting it. The style is very characteristic of Southey’s manner throughout the letters.

“Here is a man in Keswick, who acts upon me as my own ghost would do. He is just what I was in 1794. His name is Shelley, son to the member for Shoreham, with £6000 a year entailed upon him, and as much more in his father’s power to cut off. Beginning with romances of ghosts and murder, and with poetry at Eton, he passed, at Oxford, into metaphysics; printed half-a-dozen pages, which he entitled “The Necessity of Atheism;” sent one anonymously to Coplestone, in expectation, I suppose, of converting him; was expelled in consequence; married a girl of seventeen, after being turned out of doors by his father; and here they both are, in lodgings, living upon £200 a year, which her father allows them. He is come to the fittest physician in the world. At present he has got to the Pantheistic stage of philosophy, and, in the course of a week, I expect he will be a Berkleyan, for I have put him upon a course of Berkley. It has surprised him a good deal to meet, for the first time in his life, a man who perfectly understands him, and does him full justice. I tell him that all the difference between us is that he is nineteen and I am thirty-seven; and I dare say it will not be very long before I shall succeed in convincing him that he may be a true philosopher, and do a great deal of good with £6000 a year; the thought of which troubles him a great deal more at present than ever the want of sixpence (for I have known such a want) did me. God help us! the world wants mending, though he did not set about it exactly in the right way.”

This Life of Southey promises to be an important addition to the biographical treasures of English literature, and we look with great expectation for the remaining volumes, which will record his quarrels with Byron, his coldness to Coleridge, and the publication of his most important works.

Historic View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic Nations: with a Sketch of their Popular Poetry. By Taloi. With a Preface by Edward Robinson, D. D., LL.D. 1 vol. 12mo.

This work is a real addition to English literature, containing a succinct view of a subject which has heretofore been treated by those English scholars, who have treated of it at all, in a fragmentary and unsatisfactory manner. The Slavic nations contain a population of seventy millions, and it is strange that a work like the present has not been produced before, the subject being rich in matter both to interest and instruct the better class of readers.

“Taloi,” as we presume is well known, is the name assumed by Mrs. Robinson, the learned wife of the learned gentleman who prefaces the present history. Few living women can be said to excel her in the rare combination of erudition with heartiness. This volume owes much of its attractiveness to the feminine qualities which sometimes guide and sometimes relieve her erudite researches. Her selection of anecdotes, illustrative of national character, is very happy. In speaking of the submission with which the Slavic Nations received Christianity, the people readily following their superiors, she remarks, that “Vladimir the Great, to whom the Gospel and the Koran were offered at the same time, was long undecided which to choose; and was at last induced to embrace the former, because ‘his Russians could not live without the pleasure of drinking.’”

There are many poetical translations in the volume of much excellence, some of them having such a marked peculiarity that, without knowing the originals, a critic might pronounce them to be true versions. Two or three poems, relating to the desolate condition of motherless orphans, are introduced by a reference to a Danish ballad, which we trust that Longfellow will search after and translate. “The Danes,” says Taloi, “have a beautiful ballad, in which the ghost of a mother is roused by the wailings and sufferings of her deserted offspring, to break with supernatural power the gravestone, and to re-enter, in the stillness of the night, the neglected nursery, in order to cheer, to nurse, to comb and wash the dear little ones whom God once entrusted to her care.” The following translation of a ballad, written in the Upper Lusatian language, we extract:

THE ORPHAN’S LAMENT.

Far more unhappy in the world am I,

Than on the meadow the bird that doth fly.

Little bird merrily flits to and fro,

Sings its sweet carol upon the green bough.

I, alas, wander wherever I will,

Everywhere I am desolate still!

No one befriends me wherever I go,

But my own heart full of sorrow and wo!

Cease thy grief, oh my heart, full of grief,

Soon will a time come that giveth thee relief.

Never misfortune has struck me so hard,

But I, ere long, again better have fared.

God of all else in the world has enough;

Why not then widows and orphans enough?

The naïveté of this is similar to a little quotation which the author gives from a Servian elegy. A poor girl sings: “Our Lord has of every thing his fill; but of poor people he seems to have greater plenty than of anything else!”

The following description, from a Servian lyric, we commend to contributors to Albums. It will keep them in comparisons for a life-time:

Never since the world had a beginning,

Never did a lovelier flow’ret blossom,

Than the flow’ret in our own days blooming;

Haikuna, the lovely maiden flower.

She was lovely, nothing e’er was lovelier!

She was tall and slender as the pine-tree;

White her cheeks, but tinged with rosy blushes,

As if morning’s beam had shone upon them,

Till that beam had reached its high meridian.

And her eyes, they were two precious jewels,

And her eyebrows, leeches from the ocean,

And her eyelids, they were wings of swallows;

And her flaxen braids were silken tassels;

And her sweet mouth was a sugar casket,

And her teeth were pearls arrayed in order;

White her bosom, like two snowy dovelets,

And her voice was like the dovelet’s cooing;

And her smiles were like the glowing sunshine;

And her fame, the story of her beauty,

Spread through Bosnia, and through Herz’govina.

The simplicity of the ballads which Mrs. Robinson has so copiously translated, will win many readers who take but little interest in intellectual history. But it is as a history of literature that the book is deserving of most attention, and as a historian the author displays great learning, gracefully managed. The criticism is conducted on enlarged principles of taste, and the diction is uniformly clear, condensed, and elegant. The publisher has done his part towards making the volume attractive, by printing it in large type on good paper.

Indiana. By George Sand. Translated by one of the Best French Scholars in this Country, a member of the Philadelphia Bar. Philadelphia. T. B. Peterson. 1 vol. 12mo.

We cannot divine the publisher’s object in engaging the services of “one of the best French Scholars in this Country,” and moreover “a member of the Philadelphia Bar,” to translate this miserable trash into bad English. Some of the later works of George Sand, undoubtedly evince genius, but the novel under consideration, one of the first products of her unregulated passions and speculative profligacy, has nothing in plot, character, incident, or style, to give piquancy to its coarseness. It is licentious, but then it is so stupid, that its perusal would be a penance to a roué. Its immorality and falsehood might have a charm to some minds, but the raciness of these qualities is spoiled by the detestable and yawn-provoking sentimentality by which they are pervaded. The publication of such books is an offence equally to taste and morals, and tends to corrupt the intellect as well as the conscience of such readers as are foolish enough to buy them, and bad enough to read them. One of the worst signs of the times is the systematic degradation of literature into a mere handmaid of profligacy, as exhibited in the numberless manufactories of cheap damnation spread all over the land—manufactories which send out an incessant stream of ugly looking pamphlet novels, whose leading claim to notice is their brazen brainlessness and stupid indecency. We have been informed that these things are read, but on what principles of human nature the assertion is made is a mystery to us. They are so absolutely unreadable, according to the worse view ever taken of the human mind by misanthrope or metaphysician, that we must be allowed to doubt the fact, and to congratulate the philanthropist that the devil, in this case, has underrated the taste even of our blackguards and flats. We do hope for the credit of the species, that if the popular heart and conscience are doomed to be corrupted by a cheap literature, it will not be done by such wretched stuff as forms the staple of George Sand’s “Indiana.”

Women in America: her Work and her Reward. By Maria J. McIntosh. Author of “To Seem and To be,” etc. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1 vol. 12mo.

The author of this volume has already distinguished herself as the writer of two popular novels, in which a distinct moral purpose is connected with well drawn characters and interesting events. In the present work she makes woman the reformer of social evils, and views her as she appears at the North, the South, and the West. There are many opinions expressed for which Miss McIntosh can only give what logicians call “the lady’s reason,” but, as a whole, the book is calculated to do good, and can be safely commended to the attention of “Women in America.”