REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

The Thoughts of the Emperor M. Aurelius Antoninus. Translated by GEORGE LONG. London: Bell & Daldy.

Dulness is usually reckoned the prescriptive right of kings; at least, they are supposed to be officially incapable of literary eminence. And yet it is a curious fact, that, of those idiomatic works which literature will not "let die," of those marked productions which survive by their individuality, three, at least, bear the impress of royal names.

Devotion has found, in the contributions of three thousand years, no utterance so fit as the lyrics of a Hebrew king; satiety has breathed no sigh so profound as "The Words of the Preacher, the Son of David, King of Jerusalem"[31]; and the wisdom of the Stoics has no worthier exponent than the meditations of a sovereign who ruled the greatest empire known to history, and glorified it with his own imperial spirit,—the noblest that ever bore the burden of state.

Our third example, unlike the other two, has not been adopted by ecclesiastical authority, and is not incorporated in any Vulgate of sacred lore; but its place in the canon of philosophy has long been established, and is often confirmed by fresh recognition. A new translation of this celebrated work, of which several versions already existed, has just been given to the English public by Mr. George Long, a well-known scholar and critic, with the title above named. We should have preferred the old title, "Meditations," so long endeared; but we are none the less grateful to Mr. Long for this needful service, for which no ordinary qualifications were required, and which has never before been performed by such competent hands.

Gibbon has said, that, "if a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus." This period comprises, together with the four concluding years of the first century of the Christian era, four-fifths of the second. The last of these fifths, deducting one year, (A.D. 161-180,) was occupied by the supreme rule of Annios Verus, better known by his assumed name of Marcus Ælius Aurelius Antoninus, fifteenth emperor of the Romans, nephew and successor of another Antoninus, whose virtues, and especially his grateful remembrance of his predecessor and benefactor, procured him the agnomen of "Pius." In a line of sovereigns which numbers a larger proportion of wise and good men than most dynasties, perhaps than any other, M. Antoninus ranks first, so far as those qualities are concerned. A man of singular and sublime virtue, whose imperial station, so trying to human character, but served to render more conspicuous his rare and transcendent excellence. With an empire such as never before or since the Augustan dynasty has fallen to the lot of an individual, lord of the civilized earth, he lived simply and abstemiously as the poorest citizen in his dominions, frugal with unlimited means, humble with unlimited sway. Not a Christian by profession, in piety toward God and charity toward man he was yet a better Christian in fact than any of the Christian emperors who succeeded him. He governed his life by the Stoic discipline, the most hardy, in its practical requirements, of ancient systems, so rigorous in its ethic that Josephus is proud to claim an affinity with it for the "straitest" of the Jewish sects, and so pure in its spirit that St. Jerome ranks its best-known writer as a Christian,—a philosophy which taught men to consider virtue as the only good, vice as the only evil, all external things as indifferent. "His life," says Gibbon, "was the noblest commentary on the precepts of Zeno. He was severe to himself, indulgent to the imperfections of others, just and beneficent to all mankind. He regretted that Avidius Cassius, who had excited a rebellion in Syria, had by a voluntary death deprived him of the pleasure of converting an enemy into a friend. War he detested as the disgrace and calamity of human nature; but when the necessity of a just defence called upon him to take up arms, he readily exposed his person to eight winter campaigns on the frozen banks of the Danube, the severity of which was at last fatal to the weakness of his constitution. His memory was revered by a grateful posterity, and above a century after his death there were many who preserved the image of Marcus Antoninus among their household gods."

The learned Casaubon, after placing him above Solomon, "as being lord and master of more great kingdoms than Solomon was of towns," speaks of him as a man "who, for goodness and wisdom, was had by all men during his life in such honor and reputation as never man was either before him or after him." "There hath ever been store enough of men," he says, "that could speak well and give good instructions, but great want of them that could or so much as endeavored to do as they spake or taught others to do. Be it therefore spoken to the immortal praise and commendation of Antoninus, that as he did write so he did live. Never did writers so conspire to give all possible testimony of goodness, uprightness, innocence, as they have done to commend this one. They commend him, not as the best prince only, but absolutely as the best man and best philosopher that ever lived."

Merivale, who concludes with the reign of M. Antoninus his "History of the Romans under the Empire," adds his testimony to that of the cloud of witnesses who have trumpeted the great Imperator's praise. "Of all the Cæsars whose names are enshrined in the page of history, or whose features are preserved to us in the repositories of art, one alone seems still to haunt the Eternal City in the place and the posture most familiar to him in life. In the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, which crowns the platform of the Campidoglio, Imperial Rome lives again.... In this figure we behold an emperor, of all the line the noblest and the dearest, such as he actually appeared; we realize in one august exemplar the character and image of the rulers of the world. We stand here face to face with a representative of the Scipios and Cæsars, the heroes of Tacitus and Livy. Our other Romans are effigies of the closet and the museum; this alone is a man of the streets, the forum, and the capitol. Such special prominence is well reserved, amid the wreck of ages, for him whom historians combine to honor as the worthiest of the Roman people."

Mr. Long, in his biographical introduction, examines at length the evidence for Marcus's alleged persecution of the Christians. Lardner, and other writers in the Christian ecclesiastical interest, assuming the fact, denounce it as a blot on the Emperor's fame. The translator devotes more space to the consideration of this matter than, perhaps, in the judgment of the historical critic at this day, it will seem to deserve. That Christians, in the time of M. Antoninus, in Asia Minor and in Gaul, suffered torture and death on account of their faith, admits of no reasonable doubt. That Marcus authorized these persecutions, in any sense implying the responsibility of an original decision, does not appear. The imperial power, it must be remembered, was not absolute, but constitutionally defined. The Augusti, for the most part, were but the executors of existing laws. The punishment of Christians, who refused to sacrifice, and persisted in contravening the religion of the State, was one of those laws. In some places, especially at Lyons and Vienne, the Christians were the victims of popular riots; but where they suffered by legal authority, in the name of the imperial government, it was under the well-known law of Trajan, a law which had been sixty years in operation when Marcus came upon the throne. The only blame that can be imputed to him in this relation (if blame it be) is that of failing to discern and acknowledge the divine authority of the new religion which was silently undermining the old Roman world. But no one who puts himself in the Emperor's time and place will think the worse of him for not adopting a view of this subject which educated and serious minds were precisely the least likely to adopt. To such, Christianity presented itself simply as a novelty opposed to religion and threatening the State. The case of Justin may be cited as an instance of a thoughtful and philosophic mind embracing Christianity in spite of the strong presumption against it in minds of that class. But, not to speak of the very wide difference between the steady, conservative Roman and the volatile Greek, all the life-circumstances of Justin, a Palestinian by birth, favored his adoption of the Christian faith; everything in the life of Antoninus tended in the opposite direction. Justin embraced the religion first on its philosophic side, where Antoninus was especially fortified against it, having early come to an understanding with himself on the deepest questions of the soul. His decisions on these questions did not differ materially from those of the Gospel; they might, unknown to himself, have been modified by a subtile atmospheric influence derived from that source and acting on a nature so receptive of its spirit. But the very fact, that he had in a measure anticipated the teachings of the Gospel, precluded the chance of his being surprised into acquiescence with the new religion by its moral beauty, if brought fairly before him, which perhaps it never was; for it does not appear that he read the Christian apologies framed in his day. What was best in Christianity, as a system of doctrine,—its ethical precepts,—he had already embraced; its substance he possessed; its external form he knew only as opposition to institutions which he was bound by all the sanctities of his office, by all the dignity of a Roman patrician, and by all the currents of his life, to uphold. For the rest, the relation of a mind like his to polytheism could be nothing more than the formal acceptance of its symbols in the interest of piety, implying no intellectual enslavement to its myths and traditions.

De Quincey calls attention to one merit of Antoninus, which, he says, has been "utterly unnoticed hitherto by historians, but which will hereafter obtain a conspicuous place in any perfect record of the steps by which civilization has advanced and human nature been exalted. It is this: Marcus Aurelius was the first great military leader who allowed rights indefeasible, rights uncancelled by misfortune in the field, to the prisoner of war. Others had been merciful and variously indulgent, upon their own discretion, and upon a random impulse, to some, or possibly to all of their prisoners; ... but Marcus Aurelius first resolutely maintained that certain indestructible rights adhered to every soldier simply as a man, which rights capture by the sword, or any other accident of war, could do nothing to shake or diminish.... Here is an immortal act of goodness built upon an immortal basis; for so long as armies congregate and the sword is the arbiter of international quarrels, so long will it deserve to be had in remembrance that the first man who set limits to the empire of wrong, and first translated within the jurisdiction of man's moral nature that state of war which had heretofore been consigned by principle no less than by practice to anarchy, animal violence, and brute force, was also the first philosopher who sat upon a throne. In this, and in his universal spirit of forgiveness, we cannot but acknowledge a Christian by anticipation.... And when we view him from this distant age, as heading that shining array, the Howards and the Wilberforces, who have since then, in a practical sense, hearkened to the sighs of 'all prisoners and captives,' we are ready to suppose him addressed by the great Founder of Christianity in the words of Scripture, 'Thou art not far from the kingdom of God.'"[32]

Born to be a thinker rather than an actor, by nature framed for the life of a recluse, by temperament inclined to private study and contemplation, this best of emperors and of men by Providential destiny was doomed to spend the greater part of his days in the tumult of affairs, and, like a true Roman, died at last a soldier's death in his camp on the banks of the Danube, where, in after years, another line of "Roman Emperors," the sovereigns of the "Holy Roman Empire of Germany," had their seat. For more than a century after his death, and so long as Rome retained a remnant of her old vitality, a grateful people adored him as a saint, and he who "had no bust, picture, or statue of Marcus in his house was looked upon as a profane and irreligious man." To this day, beside the equestrian statue named by Merivale, in the heart of modern Rome, a few steps from her principal thronged thoroughfare, a column which time has spared still commemorates the last of the Romans. The Emperor's statue which once surmounted it was destroyed, and centuries after the statue of St. Paul exalted to the vacant place, as if to show that the "height of Rome" is not quite the perfection of all humanity, and that even the purest of ancient philosophies is incomplete without the supplement of a more humane and universal wisdom.

Mr. Long's preliminary dissertation on "The Philosophy of Antoninus" is thorough and satisfactory, so far as that specific subject is concerned, but presents a very inadequate view of the Stoic philosophy in general, and strikes us as unjust in its incidental disparaging notice (in a footnote) of Seneca, who, after all, will ever be regarded as the greatest literary product of that school.

The book itself to which this essay introduces us is one of the few monuments that remain to us, and by far the best monument that remains to us, of the interior spiritual life of the better class of that Græco-Roman world of whose exterior life we know so much. Not to have read it is not to know the deepest mind of the ancients. Two things in it are prevailingly prominent: first, a noble nature; secondly, an extreme civilization, already faltering, turned to decline, expecting its fall. On every page lies the shadow of impending doom; on every page shines forth the great, heroic soul equal to every fate. The work—if work it can be called—is entirely aphoristic, with no apparent plan; in fact, a note-book or diary of thoughts and fancies, set down as they occurred from time to time, and as leisure favored the record. In its structure, or rather want of structure, and in some of its suggestions, it reminds one of the Book of Ecclesiastes. Yet the difference between them is immense. The prevailing tone of Ecclesiastes is skepticism, that of the "Thoughts" is faith. The one is morbid, the other sane; the one relaxes, the other braces; the one is steeped in despondency and gloom, the other is redolent of manly courage and cheerful trust. The Emperor, like the Preacher, has much to say about death; but he views the subject from a higher plane, and envisages the final event with a better hope. He does not think that a living dog is better than a dead lion.

"What, then, is that which is able to conduct a man? One thing, and only one, philosophy.[33] But this consists in keeping the dæmon within a man free from violence and unharmed, superior to pains and pleasures, doing nothing without a purpose, nor yet falsely and with hypocrisy,... and besides accepting all that happens, and all that is allotted, as coming from thence, wherever it is, from whence he himself came, and finally waiting for death with a cheerful mind, as being nothing else than a dissolution of the elements of which every living being is compounded. But if there is no harm to the elements themselves, in each continually changing into the other, why should a man have any apprehension about the change and dissolution of all the elements? For it is according to Nature, and nothing is evil which is according to Nature."[34]

"Thou hast embarked, thou hast made the voyage, thou art come to shore; get out. If, indeed, to another life, there is no want of gods, not even there. But if to a state without sensation, thou wilt cease to be held by pains and pleasures, and to be a slave to the vessel which is as much inferior as that which serves it is superior; for the one is intelligence and deity, the other is earth and corruption."[35]

"Man, thou hast been a citizen in this great state [the world]; what difference does it make to thee whether for five years or three? for that which is conformable to the laws is just for all. Where is the hardship, then, if no tyrant or unjust judge sends thee away from the state, but Nature who brought thee into it? The same as if a prætor who has employed an actor dismisses him from the stage. 'But I have not finished the five acts,—only three of them.' Thou sayest well; but in life the three acts are the whole drama; for what shall be a complete drama is determined by him who was once the cause of its composition, and now of its dissolution; but thou art the cause of neither. Depart, then, satisfied, for he who dismisses thee is satisfied."[36]

The book is one which scarcely admits of analysis, and of which it is impossible to convey an idea by any discussion of its contents. In characterizing the man we have characterized the "Thoughts" as the commentary of personal experience on the virtues of fortitude, patience, piety, love, and trust. They have a history, and have been the chosen companion of many and very different men of note. Our own native Stoic, the latest, and, since Fichte, the best representative of that school, fed his youth at this fountain, and shows, in his earlier writings especially, the influence of his imperial predecessor. Mr. Long reminds us that this was one of the two books which Captain John Smith, the hero of young Virginia, selected for his daily use. Unlike the generality of John Smiths and of modern Virginians, the brave soldier found here a kindred spirit.

The Christian world possesses in its Bible a record of Semitic piety whose genuine utterances will never be surpassed; but when the Vulgate of the Aryan races shall be published, these confessions of a noble soul will claim a prominent place among its scriptures.

Levana; or, The Doctrine of Education. Translated from the German of JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. Boston: Ticknor & Fields.

We call to mind certain phrases wherein the critic may honestly express satisfaction that a portion of the world's plastic stock of useful knowledge has been skilfully manipulated into a volume. Truly, none of them will do for this sweetest household blossom of a commanding intellect. We have poetry too discursively brilliant for the trammels of verse, eloquence which has drawn its materials from the purest sources, and instructiveness running into sparkling effusions or soaring in aërial fancies. It is hard to speak adequately of this delicious, accidental "Levana." It is no schoolmaster's manual, no elaborated system set to snap like a spring-trap upon the heads of incautious meddlers,—it is only the very aroma of the married life of a wise and tender poet.

Those early years which held Richter in the grasp of their miseries and perplexities had passed away. Bravely had he struggled through temptations which at all times and in all places beset young men, added to such as are peculiar to one of the highest inspirations steeped to the lips in poverty. Through all perils he had borne the purity of his youth, the freedom and simplicity of his deep soul. And so he is privileged to bring to marriage and the delicate nurture of children the fine insights of a man of genius who has been wholly true to the costly gift he possessed. Of the domestic fragrance of a well-ordered family no savor eludes him. The wife and children, the vigorous and rich life which they offer to a good man,—those are touched with keenest analysis and in festal spirit. Most thoroughly does the author possess that rare combination of mind which seeks speculative truth no less than ideal beauty; with him emotion is nothing, unless it leads to principle.

"Levana," as we have said, is no iron system for the education of children; it is rather a most readable text-book for the education of parents. It sustains a relation of spiritual fathership to common fathers, and offers choicest counsel to those who would assume the office of family-teacher honestly and in the fear of God. And it seems to us that of these subtle influences of home-culture, whose gospel Richter here declares, our American parents have been too neglectful. The world knows that we are proud, and justly so, of our public educational apparatus. But that our legislation in this direction produces nothing but good, no observing man can admit. This elaborate reading-and-writing machine of which the State turns the handle, while it induces a certain average sharpness in the children, leaves rusting some of the noblest privileges as well as the highest duties of the parent. Yet citizens will cry that they feel their responsibilities for educating, and, to their better fulfilment, work daily for dollars. This is well; but let us not throw our dollars in a parabolic curve over the house, on the chance of their making a happy descent in some distant school-room. The bringing-up of children is something very different from pickling cucumbers or salting fish,—it cannot be done by contract and in the gross. But, ah, there is no time for anything else! Then reduce your way of living to anything above the food-and-shelter point, and so make time. Richter was always poor, always a man of great labor and great performance, and here is what he says:—"I deny myself my evening meal in my eagerness to work; but the interruptions by my children I cannot deny myself."

"Levana" is peculiarly adapted to cause those who have to do with children to feel all the emancipating and renovating power of their trust. It cannot leave us satisfied with any conventional arrangement which brings to plausible maturity a limited per cent. There are, indeed, minds strong enough to pass through the bitter years of unlearning what has been taught amiss, and then, bating no jot of heart or courage, to begin education for themselves in middle life. But often it is far otherwise. Too often, owing to the indolence or immaturity of those who assume the responsibility of parents, the child is cast into a terrible moral perplexity, which is at last moral corruption. Our duties toward different children are as eclectic and irregular as Nature herself. There is a need to study and respect the individual character, which claims from parents the daily use of their mental powers,—and this without a compelling external stimulus. Now it is easy and not unpleasant to work in a routine. Schiller used to say that he found the great happiness of life to consist in the discharge of some mechanical duty. He was in the right. Nevertheless, for the worth and blessedness of life we must look to the discharge of duties which are not mechanical. Of mechanical teaching the highest result proposed is the multiplication of photographs from the teacher's negative, or, in the words of Richter, "to fill our streets with perpetual stiff, feeble copies of the same pedagogue type." But the parent's office demands courage,—courage not so much to originate as to accept the wisdom of thinking men, some of whom have spoken more than a hundred years ago. The folly of cramming a child with words representing no ideas, instead of giving him ideas to find themselves words, is no new discovery. Milton, in his letter to Master Hartlib, assails that "scholastic grossness of barbarous ages" from which we nineteenth-century citizens have by no means escaped. "We do amiss," exclaims the eloquent scholar, "to spend seven or eight years in scraping together so much miserable Latin and Greek as might otherwise be learned easily and pleasantly in one year." He denounces this "misspending our prime youth at schools and universities as we do, either in learning mere words, or such things chiefly as were better unlearned." We quote the words of Milton rather than those of other eminent men to the same effect, because the poet cannot be accused of objecting to Latin and Greek taught at the right time and in the right way. A man whose mighty English was always fast anchored to classic bottoms had surely no sentimental preference for modern sciences. Indeed, in this very essay he seems to demand what at present we must consider as a too early initiation into the ancient languages, no longer the exclusive keys to knowledge. But Milton realized that there was a natural development to the imitative and perceptive powers of man, and he knew that a mere tasking of the verbal memory blighted the diviner faculties of comparison and judgment. We hold that the ideal system of education, to which through coming centuries men can only approximate, must present to the child the precise step in knowledge which he waits for, and upon which he is able to raise himself with that glow of pleasurable activity which God gives to exertion directed to a comprehensible end. The feeblest mind is capable of assimilating knowledge with a satisfaction the same in kind as that which rewarded the maturest labors of Humboldt or Newton. There are sequences of facts every one of which, imparted in its natural order, brings an immediate interest. It is no nebulous scheme of combining instruction with amusement which is to be sought. One might as well look after the Philosopher's Stone or the Elixir of Life. Good things are to be had upon no easier terms than privation and work. But there is a wide difference between a man toiling to gain material comforts for those who are dear to him, or laboring to enlighten and reform his own spirit that he may give good gifts to his generation, and a beast whipped round a treadmill to the din of its own everlasting clatter. It is only work whose end shall, in some faint degree, be intelligible, which is demanded for the child; and with this sort of work we believe that it is very possible to furnish him. But our philanthropies in this direction may not be wrought by deputy; they must be aimed at the few, and not at once at the many.

The reader of "Levana" will find much incidental commendation of those true relations of intellectual sympathy and confidence between parents and children which in this country are far rarer than they should be. Seldom do we hear the average American citizen speak of either parent in that tone of tender and respectful companionship with which the average Frenchman pronounces "ma mère" or "mon père." Seldom do we see that relation between an eminent man and his mother which, in the Old World, has been exemplified from Augustine to Buckle. Some of the causes of this have been admirably set forth in a recent essay in these pages. The article by Gail Hamilton in the April number of the "Atlantic" contains much uncommon sense, which our lady-readers cannot ponder too often. All honor to those mothers who, meeting extreme and unexpected poverty, turn themselves into drudges that their children may be decently clothed and wholesomely fed! But dishonor to those women who stunt their own intellectual powers, which should educate and accompany the immortal souls of their sons and daughters through this world and perhaps another,—and this, in order that their bodies may be fed luxuriously, or dressed in lace and ruffles to vie with the children of richer neighbors! There can be no tolerance for the indolence—we emphasize the word—which elects a mechanical routine instead of those harder mental efforts through which a mother's highest duties may be comprehended and performed. And what shall be said for the despicable vanity which would barter opportunities of forming and directing a human character for the sake of trimmings and fancy buttons? We cannot possess the confidence and friendship of our children without taking pains to deserve them. If the father chooses to be "the governor" of his family, then the ex-governor, and nothing more, can he be to his grown-up children,—an official once set over them by some Know-Nothing or other fatality, at length happily shelved with the rubbish of the nursery. Nowhere are the external sanctities of domestic life more respected than in our Northern States, and here should its fairest promises be bountifully fulfilled. Above all things, it is to be remembered that whatever moral power a man would have his children possess, that must he especially demand and exercise in himself. The Law of the household must afford the luxury of a Conscience; for if ever the maxim "Summum jus, summa, injuria" be worthy of remembrance, it is in the management of children. Well for those who realize that education is no merely lineal advancement, but a spreading and flowering in many directions! well for those who cultivate all the capabilities of love and trust in their children! "When I think," says Jean Paul, "that I never saw in my father a trace of selfishness, I thank God!" There comes the time when young men go forth to battle in the world, and the father prays bitterly for the power to endow them with the results of his own experience. But only to him who has borne himself truthfully and honorably before his family can that good gift be given.

Upon the subject of religious education "Levana" is finely suggestive. All cobweb-makeshifts which obscure the beautiful substance of a holy life are swept aside. To the young, not what others say, but what they do, is right. Children, like their elders, will resist all mere reasoning upon the disadvantages, whether temporal or spiritual, of actions to which they are tempted. But they are ever ready to absorb the faith of the household, and to be nourished by it. "For those who wish to give anything," exclaims our author, "the first rule is, that they shall have it to give; no one can teach religion who does not himself possess it; hypocrisy and mouth-religion will bring forth only their like." The hardly noticeable habits of unrestrained intercourse, the indulgence of petty selfishness not acknowledged to ourselves,—these are seeds of evil quick to germinate in a virgin soil. No iteration of pedagogical maxims can annul the influence of some little mean or graceless act. Let every parent take heed lest, through his own weakness and folly, he lose the divine privilege of obedience through confidence. In the world, obedience through discipline must indeed come; but let it be unknown in the family as long as it may. And of "mouth-religion" what fatal abundance! To a child, it is no more than the creaking and rattling of a vehicle, which is of a certain worth, doubtless, to the weary, sinful adult,—but to one who feels his life in every limb, incomprehensible, and an offence. Of the vulgar superstition which would confuse the nursery with creeds and vain prayer-repetitions of the heathen there is far too much. We have known parents, reputed pious and church-going, who delighted to pour crushing enigmas into infant ears, and then to make a sorry household jest of the feeble one's grotesque attempts to extend or limit the Unspeakable. As the highest concerns of man can be known only by the spirit, so they can be taught only by the spirit. It is not the words we repeat, but the temper in which we daily live, that moulds the family to honor or dishonor. It is the spirit of the father and mother which produces results mistaken for intuitions by the superficial. And, truly, youth, thus warmly rooted in generosity and nobility, will, in its own good time, stretch tender leaves up to the Higher Light. And when Nature is ready for worship, mark how wisely Richter directs it:—"The sublime is a step to the temple of religion, as the stars are to that of infinity. Let the name of God be heard by the child in connection with all that is great in Nature,—the storm, the thunder, the starry heavens, and death,—a great misfortune,—a great piece of good-fortune,—a great crime,—a greatly noble action: these are the sites on which to build the wandering church of childhood."

In conclusion, we can only repeat, that the greatest charm of "Levana" is its suggestion of a possible household, from what the reader feels was once an actual household. The cheap sentimentalism of parental relations has often been a favorite property with men of imaginative genius. Rousseau and Byron knew how to use it as a fictitious background before which they might posture with effect. But, until the world's literature shall mercifully forget them, the "Enfants Trouvés" and the Venetian bagnio strip these writers of their fine words, and hold them before the generations in scandal and disgrace. No reader of "Levana" can miss the refutation of that poisonous lie, that men of genius, because of their mental endowments, have a natural inaptitude for domestic relations, or are unhappy therein from any other cause than their own foolishness or guilt. We hear the tender strains of a deep poet, privileged by acquired worthiness to return to those divine instincts which were vivid in the simplest condition of the family. To all who can bring the writings of Richter within their range we commend this book. Those who have learned to enjoy his strong-darting language, his complex constructions, his kindly humor, will find these working together with noblest aim. In these times of our country's peril, there is some sanative virtue outside of treatises upon strategy or Union pamphlets. It is well to print and circulate the literature of war. But it is also a sweet and a timely mission to impart a new inspiration into that life of the family to-day which shall become the life of the nation to-morrow.

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