Part 2 — REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

The Seer, or Commonplaces Refreshed. By Leigh Hunt. In Two Volumes. Boston: Roberts Brothers.

Among the books most prized, in our modest private book-room, are some which bear the delicate and graceful autograph of Leigh Hunt, having floated from his deserted library to these American shores. There is the Apollonius from which came the text of his poem of "The Panther";—this is his mark against the legend, on page sixty-nine; and here is the old engraving of Apollonius, which he no doubt inserted as a frontispiece to the book. Here again is his copy of Rousseau's "Confessions," Holyoake's translation, annotated through and through with Hunt's humane and penetrating criticisms on nature with which his own had much in common, though purer and sweeter. This volume of Milton's "Minor Poems" was his also, with the rich and varied notes of Warton, the edition of whose literary charms he somewhere speaks with such delight. Here also is Forster's "Perennial Calendar," a book of rural gossip, such as Leigh Hunt thoroughly enjoyed; and this copy of Aubrey de Vere's Poems was a present from the author. Above all, perhaps, one dwells with interest on a volume of Hennell's "Christianity and Infidelity," riddled through and through by pen-and-ink underscorings, extending sometimes to every line upon a page. The book ends with a generous paragraph in assertion of the comfort and sufficiency of Natural Religion; and after it comes, written originally in pencil, then in ink again, always with the same firm and elegant handwriting, the indorsement, "Amen. So be it. L. H. July 14th, 1857." This was written in his seventy-third year, two years before his death, and this must have been about the time of Hawthorne's visit to him. Read the "Amen" in the light of that beautiful description of patient and frugal old age, and it is a touching and noble memorial.

Americans often fancied that they noticed something American in Leigh Hunt's physique and manners, without knowing how near he came to owning a Cisatlantic birth. His mother was a Philadelphian; and his father, a West-Indian, resided in this country until within a few years of his death. It is fitting, therefore, that our publishers should keep his writings in the market, and this is well done in this handsome edition of "The Seer." These charming essays will bear preservation; none are more saturated with cultivated taste and literary allusion, and in none are more graceful pictures painted on a slighter canvas. If there is an occasional impression of fragility and superficiality, it is yet wholly in character, and seems not to interfere with the peculiar charm. Hunt, for instance, writes a delightful paper on the theme of "Cricket," without ten allusions to the game, or one indication of ever having stopped to watch it. He discourses deliciously upon Anacreon's "Tettix,"—the modern Cicada,—and then calls it a beetle. There is apt, indeed, to be a pervading trace of that kind of conscious effort which is technically called "book-making," and one certainly finds the entertainment a little frothy, at times, compared with the elder essayists. Nevertheless, Leigh Hunt's roses always bloom, his breezes are always "redolent of joy and youth," and his sunny spirit pervades even a rainy day. Chaucer and Keats never yet have found a more delicate or discriminating critic; and his paper on Wordsworth, beside the fine touches, has solider qualities that command one's admiration. The personal memorials of the author's literary friends have a peculiar charm to us in this land and generation, for whom Hazlitt and Keats are names almost as shadowy and romantic as Amadis or Lancelot; but best of all is his noble tribute to Shelley. After speaking (Vol. II. p. 38) of the deep philanthropy which lay beneath the apparent cynicism of Hazlitt, he thus continues:—"But only imagine a man who should feel this interest too, and be deeply amiable, and have great sufferings, bodily and mental, and know his own errors, and waive the claim of his own virtues, and manifest an unceasing considerateness of the comforts of those about him, in the very least as well as greatest things,—surviving, in the pure life of his heart, all mistake, all misconception, all exasperation, and ever having a soft word in his extremity, not only for those who consoled, but for those who distressed him; and imagine how we must have loved him. It was Mr. Shelley."

Such an epitaph writes the character not only of him who receives the tribute, but of him who pays it. And if there ever lived a literary man who might fitly claim for his funeral stone the inscription, "Lord, keep my memory green," it was the sweet-tempered, flower-loving Leigh Hunt.

Christ and his Salvation. In sermons variously related thereto. By Horace Bushnell. New York: Charles Scribner.

These sermons are distinguished from the ordinary discourses of the pulpit by being the product not merely of religious faith and feeling, but of religious genius. They embody the thought and experience of a life, and the ideas they inculcate are not so much the dogmas of a sect as the divinations of an individual. "This is Christianity as it has been verified in my consciousness," might be taken as the motto of the volume. The result is, that the collection is an addition to religious literature, and will be read with satisfaction for its stimulating effect on the religious sense by hundreds who may disagree with its direct teachings.

The two most striking and characteristic sermons in the volume are the first and the last, respectively entitled, "Christ waiting to find Room," a masterly analysis of the worldliness of the so-called Christian world, and "Heaven Opened," a plea equally masterly for the existence in man of a supernatural sense to discern supernatural things. Between these come the sermons entitled, "The Gentleness of God," "The Insight of Love," "Salvation for the Lost Condition," "The Bad Mind makes a Bad Element," and "The Wrath of the Lamb," which illustrate so well the union in Dr. Bushnell's mind of practical sagacity and force of thought with keenness and reach of spiritual vision, that we select them from the rest as particularly worthy of the reader's attention. Indeed, to have written these discourses is to have done the work of a ministry.

The peculiarity of the whole volume, and a singular peculiarity in a collection of sermons, is the absence of commonplace. The writer's method is to bring his mind into close contact with things instead of phrases,—to think round his subject, and think into his subject, and, if possible, think through his subject to the law on which it depends; and thus, when his thinking results in no novelty of view, it is still the indorsement of an accepted truth by a fresh perception of it. Truths in such a process never put on the character of truisms, but are as vital to the last observer as to the first. There is hardly a page in the volume which is not original, in the sense of recording original impressions of objects, individually seen, grasped, and examined. There are numerous originalities of a different kind, which may not be so pleasing to some classes of Christians,—as when he aims to show that an accredited spiritual form does not express a corresponding spiritual fact, or as when he splits some shell of creed which imprisons rather than embodies the kernel of faith, and lets the oppressed truth go free.

This power of penetrating thought, so determined as at times to wear a look of doggedness,—this analysis which shrinks from no problems, which is provoked by obstacles into intenser effort, and which is almost fanatical in its desire to get at the idea and reason of everything it probes,—is relieved by a richly sympathetic and imaginative nature,—indeed, is so welded with it, that insight and analysis serve each other, and cool reason gives solidity to ecstatic experience. Perhaps as a seer Dr. Bushnell may be more certain of recognition than as a reasoner. Whatever may be thought of the orthodoxy of the doctrines he has rationalized, there can be no doubt as to the reality of the spiritual states he has described. His intellectual method may be wrong or incomplete, but it in some way enables him to reach the substance of Christian life and light and love and joy. There are passages in the volume which are all aglow with the sacred fire of that rapture which rewards only those souls that soar into the regions where the objects that kindle it abide; and this elevation which touches ecstasy, this effluence from the spiritual mood of the writer, is not limited to special bursts of eloquence, but gleams along the lines of many a clinching argument, and flashes out from many an uncadenced period.

The style of the book is what might be expected from the character of the author and the processes of his thinking. The mental state dictates the form of the sentence and the selection of the words. Thought and expression, so to speak, breed in and in. There is a certain roughness in the strength of the man, which is ever asserting itself through his cultured vigor; and in the diction, rustic plainness of speech alternates with the nomenclature of metaphysics, rugged sense with lifting raptures, and curt, blunt, homely expression with vivid, whatever may be his form of words, he always loads them with meaning, and with his own meaning. He is not a fluent writer, but his resources of expression ever correspond to his richness of thought. And if his style cannot be said to bend gracefully to the variations of his subject, it still bends and does not break. In felicity and originality of epithet, the usual sign of a writer's genuineness of perception, he is excelled by no theologian of the time. He also has that power of pithy and pointed language which so condenses a statement of a fact or principle that it gives forth the diamond sparkle of epigram. The effect of wit is produced while the purpose is the gravest possible: as when he tells some brother religionists, who base their creeds on the hyperboles of Scripture, that they mistake interjections for propositions,—or as when he reproves those pretenders to grace who count it apparently "a kind of merit that they live loosely enough to make salvation by merit impossible."

The animating spirit of the volume is a desire to bring men's minds into contact with what is vital in religion, and this leads to many a sharp comment both on the dogmatism of sects and the rationalism of critics. Dr. Bushnell always seeks that in religion which not merely illumines the mind, but invigorates the will. It is not the form of a doctrine, but the force in the believer, which engages his attention. In pursuing this method he displays alternately the qualities of an interpreter and of an iconoclast; but his object is the same, whether he evolves unexpected meanings from an accredited dogma, or assails the sense in which it is generally received. And so tenacious is his hold on the life of Christianity, and so vivid his mode of presenting it, that both dogmatist and rationalist must feel, in reading his volume, that he has given its proper prominence to much in Christianity which their methods tempt them to overlook.

The Morrisons, a Story of Domestic Life. By Mrs. Margaret Hosmer. New York: John Bradburn.

Full of improbabilities, and becoming lurid with domestic tragedies at the end, this story has yet a sincerity and earnestness of style that may entitle it to be called respectable, among the mass of American stories. Novels are being sold by the five thousand which have far less ability in characterization or in grouping. The persons remain in one's memory as real individuals, which is saying a good deal; the dialogue, though excessive in quantity, is neither tame nor flippant; and there is an attractive compactness in the plot, which is all comprised within one house in an unknown city. But this plot soon gets beyond the author's grasp, nevertheless; she creates individualities, and can do nothing with them but kill them. The defects, however, are those of inexperience, the merits are the author's own. The value of her next book will probably be in inverse ratio to the success of this: should this fail, she may come to something; should this succeed, there is small hope for her.

Studies for Stories. By Jean Ingelow. Boston: Roberts Brothers.

These narratives are probably called "Studies for Stories," as the catalogue of the Boston Public Library is called an "Index to a Catalogue": this being a profession of humility, implying that a proper story, like a regular catalogue, should be a much more elaborate affair. Nevertheless, a story, even if christened a study, must be criticized by the laws of stories and no other.

Tried by this standard, we must admit that Miss Ingelow's prose, though possessing many merits, has not quite the charm of her verses. With a good deal of skill in depicting character, and with a style that is not unpleasing, though rather formal and old-fashioned, she has no serious drawback except a very prominent and unpleasant moral tendency, which is, indeed, made so conspicuous that one rather resents it, and feels a slight reaction in favor of vice. One is disposed to apply to so oppressively didactic an author the cautious criticism of Talleyrand on his female friend,—"She is insufferable, but that is her only fault." For this demonstrativeness of ethics renders it necessary for her to paint her typical sinners in colors of total blackness, and one seldom finds, even among mature offenders, such unmitigated scoundrels as she exhibits in their teens. They do not move or talk like human beings, but like lay figures into which certain specified sins have been poured. This is an artistic as well as ethical error. As Porson finely said to Rogers, "In drawing a villain, we should always furnish him with something that may seem to justify him to himself"; and Schiller, in his æsthetic writings, lays down the same rule. Yet this censurable habit does not seem to proceed from anything cynical in the author's own nature, but rather from inexperience, and from a personal directness which moves only in straight lines. It seems as if she were so single-minded in her good intents as to assume all bad people equally single-minded in evil; but they are not.

Thus, in "The Cumberers," the fault to be assailed is selfishness, and, in honest zeal to show it in its most formidable light, she builds up her typical "Cumberer" into such a complicated monster, so stupendous in her self-absorption, as to be infinitely less beneficial to the reader than a merely ordinary inconsistent human being would have been. The most selfish younger sister reading this story would become a Pharisee, and thank God, that, whatever her peccadilloes, she was not so bad as this Amelia. "My Great-Aunt's Picture" does the same for the vice of envy; "Dr. Deane's Governess" for discontent, and so on; only that this last story is so oddly mixed up with English class-distinctions and conventionalisms that one hardly knows when the young lady is supposed to be doing right and when doing wrong. The same puzzle occurs in the closing story, "Emily's Ambition," where the censurable point of the aspiration consists in being dissatisfied with the humbler vocation of school-teaching, and in pining after the loftier career of milliner, which in this community would seem like turning social gradations upside-down.

By far the ablest of the five "studies," at least in its opening, is the school-story of "The Stolen Treasure," which, with a high-flown name, and a most melodramatic and commonplace ending, shows yet great power in the delineation and grouping of characters. The young school-girls are as real as those of Charlotte Bronté; and although the typical maidenly desperado is present,—lying and cheating with such hopeless obviousness that it seems as if they must all have had to look very hard the other way to avoid finding her out,—yet there is certainly much promise and power in the narrative. Let us hope that the modesty of the title of this volume really indicates a lofty purpose in its author, and that she will learn to avoid exaggeration of character as she avoids exaggeration of style.

Collection De Vries. German Series. Vols. I.-X. Boston: De Vries, Ibarra, & Co.

The present high price of imported books, which is stimulating our publishers to rival their English compeers in typographical triumphs, is also creating an important class of German reprints, to which attention should certainly be called. Until lately the chief business in this line has been done by Philadelphia houses, but we now have editions from Boston publishers which surpass all predecessors in accuracy and beauty. Indeed, the average issues of the German press abroad do not equal these in execution; and though the books issued are thus far small, yet the taste shown in the selection gives them a peculiar value.

First comes Hans Andersen's ever-charming "Picture-Book without Pictures,"—tales told by the Moon, as she looks in at the window of a poor student. There is also a separate edition of this little work, issued by the same house, with English notes for students, by Professor Simonson of Trinity College.

Next comes "Prinzessin Ilse," a graceful little story by Von Ploennies, almost as charming as "Undine,"—with its scene laid in the Hartz Forest, by the legend-haunted Ilsenstein. Then follows a similar wreath of fancies, called "Was sich der Wald erzählt," by Gustav zu Putlitz, in which fir-trees and foxgloves tell their tales, and there are sermons in stones and all the rest of it. Why is it that no language but the German can possibly construct a Mährchen, so that Englishmen and Americans grow dull, and Frenchmen insufferable, whenever they attempt that delicious mingling of the ideal and the real?

Then we have two of the most popular novelettes of Paul Heyse, "Die Einsamen" and "Anfang und Ende,"—two first-class æsthetic essays by Hermann Grimm, on the Venus of Milo and on Raphael and Michel Angelo,—and two comedies by Gustav zu Putlitz. There is also Von Eichendorff's best novel, which in Berlin went through four editions in a year, "Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts," or "Memoirs of a Good-for-Nothing,"—and, finally, Tieck's well-known story of "The Elves," and his "Tragedy of Little Red Riding-Hood."

Among these various attractions every reader of German books will certainly find something to enjoy; and these editions should be extensively used by teachers, as the separate volumes can be easily obtained by mail, and the average cost of each is but about half a dollar. We hope yet to see editions equally good of the complete works of the standard German authors, printed in this country and for American readers. Under present circumstances, they can be more cheaply produced than imported.

Reynard the Fox. A Burlesque Poem, from the Low-German Original of the Fifteenth Century. Boston: De Vries, Ibarra, & Co.

The mocking legends of the Wolf and the Fox were wielded without mercy by many mediæval satirists, against the human animals of those species, then prevailing in courts and cloisters. But the jokes took their most permanent form in the fable of "Reyneke de Vos," first published in the year 1498. Written in Low-German by Nicholas Bauman, under the pseudonym of Hinrek van Alkmer, the satire did a similar work to that done by Rabelais, and Boccaccio, and Piers Plowman. It has since been translated into many languages, and as Goethe at last thought it worth putting into German hexameters, one may still find it worth reading in English Hudibrastic rhymes. The present attractive edition is a reprint of the paraphrase of Von Soltau, published at Hamburg in 1826,—though, for some reason, this fact is not stated in the present issue. New or old, the version is executed with much spirit, and is, to say the least, easier reading than Goethe's hexameters.

The Cradle of Rebellions: A History of the Secret Societies of France. By Lucien de la Hodde. New York: John Bradburn.

The translator of this sharp and pungent sketch of the later French revolutionists is understood to be General John W. Phelps of Vermont,—a man whose personal services, despite some eccentric traits, will give him an honorable place in the history of these times. It is possible that readers may not agree with him in his estimate of the dangers to be incurred by American institutions from secret societies. They are a thing essentially alien to our temperament. The Southern plotters of treason were certainly open enough; it was we who were blind. The "Know-Nothing" movement was a sort of political carnival, half jest, half earnest, and good for that trip only. If anything could have created secret societies, it would have been the Fugitive-Slave-Law excitement: that, indeed, produced them by dozens, but they almost always died still-born, and whatever was really done in the revolutionary line was effected by very informal coöperation.

Indeed, even the French nation is, by its temperament, less inclined to deep plotting than any nation of Southern Europe, and as De la Hodde himself admits, "not one of our revolutions during the last sixty years has been the work of conspirators." "There is but one maker of revolutions in France, and that is Paris,—idle, sophistical, disappointed, restless, evil-minded Paris. We all know her." "Of one thing we may rest assured: the greater part of our revolutions signify nothing." And this has been notoriously true since the days of the Fronde.

Yet the moral of the book is not without value, and its historic interest is considerable, taken in connection with the other memoirs of the same epoch. The style is rather piquant, and the translation good, though a little stiff. The writer is an Orleanist, and thinks the Revolution of 1848 a mere whim of the populace, favored by a "vertigo" on the part of Louis Philippe. It was "an incomprehensible contingency,—sovereign power giving way to a revolt, without the test of a combat."

The book was first published under the Republic, to which the author professes due loyalty. He suggests, however, that, as no one is required by duty to fall in love with a very ugly woman who may have been imposed on him in marriage, so he is not yet very much smitten with the Republic. But he is ready to respect the dame, if she proves to deserve it, as a legitimate connection.

Cape Cod. By Henry D. Thoreau. Boston: Ticknor and Fields.

Cape Cod is photographed at last, for Thoreau has been there. Day by day, with his stout pedestrian shoes, he plodded along that level beach,—the eternal ocean on one side, and human existence reduced to its simplest elements on the other,—and he pitilessly weighing each. His mental processes never impress one with opulence and luxuriance, but rather with a certain sublime tenacity, which extracts nutriment from the most barren soil. He is therefore admirably matched against Cape Cod; and though his books on softer aspects of Nature may have a mellower charm, there is none in which the very absence of mellowness can so well pass for an added merit.

No doubt there are passages which err upon the side of bareness. Cape Cod itself certainly errs that way, and so often does our author; and when they are combined, the result of desiccation is sometimes astounding. But so much the truer the picture. If Vedder's "Lair of the Sea-Serpent" had the rank verdure of the "Heart of the Andes," the kraken would still be as unimpressive on canvas as in the newspapers. No one ever dared to exhibit Cape Cod "long, and lank, and brown" enough before, and hence the value of the book. For those who insist on chlorophylle, is there not "Azarian"? If the dear public will tolerate neither the presence of color in a picture, nor its absence, it is hard to suit.

Yet it is worth remembering, that Thoreau's one perfect poem,—and one of the most perfect in American literature,—"My life is like a stroll upon the beach," must have been suggested by Cape Cod or some kindred locality. And it is not the savage grandeur of the sea alone, but its delicate loveliness and its ever-budding life, which will be found recorded forever in some of these wondrous pages, intermixed with the statistics of fish-flakes and the annals of old men's diseases.

But in his stern realism, the author employs what he himself calls "Panurgic" plainness of speech, and deals with the horrors of the sea-shore as composedly as with its pearls. His descriptions of the memorials of shipwrecks, for instance, would be simply repulsive, but that his very dryness has a sort of disinfectant quality, like the air of California, where things the most loathsome may lie around us without making the air impure.

He shows his wonted formidable accuracy all through these pages, and the critic feels a sense of bewildered exultation in detecting him even in a slip of the pen,—as when in the note on page 228 he gives to the town of Rockport, on Cape Ann, the erroneous name of Rockland. After this discovery, one may dare to wonder at his finding a novelty in the "Upland Plover," and naming it among the birds not heard in the interior of the State, when he might be supposed to have observed it, in summer, near Mount Wachusett, where its wail adds so much, by day or night, to the wildness of the scenery. Yet by the triviality of these our criticisms one may measure the astonishing excellence of his books.

This wondrous eye and hand have passed away, and left no equal and no second. Everything which Thoreau wrote has this peculiar value, that no other observing powers were like his; no one else so laboriously verified and exhausted the facts; and no other mind rose from them, at will, into so subtile an air of meditation,—meditation too daring to be called devout, by church or world, yet too pure and lofty to merit any lower name. Lycidas has died once more, and has not left his peer.

Cape Cod does not change in its traits, but only in its boundaries, and this book will stand for it, a century hence, as it now does. It is the Cape Odyssey. Near the end, moreover, there is a remarkable chapter on previous explorers, which shows, by its patient thoroughness, and by the fearless way in which the author establishes facts which had eluded Hildreth and Bancroft, that, had he chosen history for his vocation, he could have extracted its marrow as faithfully as that of his more customary themes. Yet the grand ocean-pictures which this book contains remind us that it was the domain of external Nature which was his peculiar province; and this sublime monotone of the surges seems his fitting dirge, now that—to use the fine symbol of one who was his comrade on this very excursion—his bark has "sunk to another sea."