enjoy the very woods and fields in Hosea Biglow's quaintly and subtly faithful feeling for them. They are justly subordinate to him, however, and we are not suffered to forget Mr. Lowell's creed, that human nature is the nature best worth celebrating. The landscape is but the setting for Jaalam, -shrewd, honest, moral, angular, — Hosea Biglow municipalized. The place should be on the maps, for it has as absolute existence as any in New England, and its people by slight but unerring touches are made as real. For ourselves, we intend to spend part of our next vacation at Jaalam, and shall visit the grave of the Reverend Homer Wilbur, for whose character we have conceived the highest regard, and whose death we regret not less keenly than Hosea Biglow's resolution to write no more. It would have been a pleasure which we shall now never enjoy- to enter the study of the good minister, and tell him how thoroughly we had learned to know him through his letters introducing Mr. Biglow's effusions, and how we had thus even come to take an interest in Jaalam's shadowy antiquities. We should have esteemed it a privilege to have his views of the political situation; and if we had turned to talk of literature, we should have been glad to hear an admirer of the classic Pope give his notion of the classic Swinburne.

Somewhere in the South, Birdofredum Sawin must be lingering, the most hightoned and low-principled of the reconstructed. In his character Mr. Lowell has presented us with so faultless an image of what Pure Cussedness works in the shrewd and humorous Yankee nature, that we hope not even the public favor shall prevent his appearance as an original Union man. The completion of the ballad of "The Courtin'" is a benefaction very stimulating to desire for whatever the author has not absolutely refused to give us.

As for the Introduction to this series of the Biglow Papers, the wonder is how anything so curiously learned and instructive could be made so delicious. Most of us will never appreciate fully the cost of what is so lightly and gracefully offered of the fruit of philological research; but few readers will fail to estimate aright the spirit which pervades the whole prologue. Mr. Lowell pauses just before the point where those not sharing the original enthusiasm might be fatigued with the study of words and phrases, and yet possesses

his reader of more portable, trustworthy knowledge of Americanisms than is elsewhere to be found. The instances of national and local humor given are perfect; and Mr. Lowell's reserve in attempting to define American humor which must remain, like all humor, an affair of perception rather than expression- might teach something to our Transatlantic friends, who suppose it to be merely a quality of exaggeration. We enjoy, quite as well as even the discreet learning of this Introduction, such glimpses as the author chooses to give us of his purpose in writing the Biglow. Papers, and in adopting the Yankee dialect for his expression, as well as of his methods of studying this dialect. Some slight defence he makes of points assailed in his work; but for the most part it is effortless, familiar talk with his readers, always significant, but persistent in nothing, and in tone as full and rich as the best talk of Montaigne or Cervantes.

To those bound by kindred and personal friendship to the heroic young men whose histories are recounted in these volumes, the work has of course a value which others cannot duly estimate; but every one must perceive that it has merits very rare in necrologic literature. The memorials are written with constant good taste, and there is little of the detraction of over-praise in them, though they have that warmth and fulness of appreciation which might be expected from writers selected for their intimate relations with the dead. Where no friend or kinsman could be found to contribute a biography, the task was performed by the editor, with the sympathy which united him to the subject of his sketchwhoever he might be -as a soldier and scholar. Indeed, Mr. Higginson has performed all his work in the preparation of these memorials with excellent effect. We have here, not only the narratives of certain Harvard graduates who died in the service of their country during the late war, but a tribute to the highest and best feeling which has eyer animated men to war.

There is sufficient interest of event and adventure in the biographies to attract the general reader, but their worthiest claim is in their representative character. None of these brilliant and generous young men

gave more than the simplest and obscurest soldier whom a patriot impulse drew from the shop or the furrow; but their lives are more vocal, and they more eloquently present the image of a martyrdom that crowned the silent tens of thousands. The book only repeats, with whatever of variation in the story, a sole theme, — ungrudging sacrifice to the common good of lives which letters and affection and the world claimed with those appeals and promises so hard for the gifted, the young, and the happy to resist. And except that the sublimity of the nation's passion and triumph seems to enter and fill these as no lives of egotism can be filled, it would not be possible to regard without inconsolable regret the sum of so much loss. What should comfort us for the fact that a man rich in youth and culture, and instinct with high feelings and purposes, fell before the rifle of some Arkansas savage, or Georgian peasant, or Carolinian vassal, but that the cause of mankind had crowned and accepted the sacrifice, and that his death had helped to disenthrall his murderer? Not to heap the measure of the leading traitors' crimes did such another scholar quit his books and languish in hospitals: he died for God's poor everywhere forever; and from the agony of yet another who hungered and thirsted to death in prison, a whole race was clothed with freedom.

With what consciousness of perfection life passes from the man who dies for others, none of the heroic and good can turn back upon their ended careers to assure us. We who spend ourselves in the futile effort to fill existence with selfish schemes of toil or pleasure, and close each empty day with a sense of disappointment and hopelessness, can only guess the satisfaction of self-devotion from that keener sentiment of our own fatuity and unworthiness with which we read an heroic history. As nothing we do in the circle of our low-creeping, narrow wills establishes us in our own esteem, we must believe that those equal to a great vocation and a great ordeal do at last have the delight of conscious merit and success. Never labor of pen or brush or chisel but brought its author more secret anguish of failure than joy of triumph; the sublimest song is harsh with jarring discords to the singer, because of that extreme beauty which would not be uttered. But without doubt the hero feels the grandeur of his work, and knows its completeness. There is no touch lacking in his picture; spheral music is not sweeter nor perfecter than his

poem. The years of Titian or of Homer could only have deferred his triumph and reward.

The Picture of St. John. By BAYARD TAYLOR. Boston: Ticknor and Fields.

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THIS poem has the prime virtue of narrative fiction, -coherence and easy movement. The poet has endowed his work with that charm which makes the reader lenient to its errors, and which is so often wanting in blameless works, probably because they have no need to appeal to clemency, it is very interesting, and it classes itself with the far briefer poems which can be read at a sitting; for it is hard to rise and leave it unfinished. It must please even in an age shy of long poems, for it has the fascination of a novel; and if the reader at the end finds himself merely pleased, and does not feel so profoundly instructed as the Application would have him believe, that is no doubt his own fault. For this reader, however, we confess we have some sympathy, and we are willing to join him in forgetting everything but the beautiful and pathetic tale. To tell the truth, we cared rather to learn how, in the course of certain adventures, the picture of St. John happened to be painted, than how, by certain psychological experiences, the artist fitted himself to paint it; and if that work of art had never been produced at all, we should still have been charmed by the story of the lovers and their flight from Florence; of that wild, lonely life in Bavaria; of the poor lady's death; of the mournful return of the bereaved father with his son to Italy; of the boy's cruel fate at the hand of his grandsire, and of the pitiless desolation of the two men that clung to one another above his clay, two fathers fatally avenged, each upon the other, for the loss of his only child. All this is told, not merely with au art that holds the reader's interest, but with a sensibility that imparts itself to his feeling, with strength and beauty of diction, and with an ever-varying harmony of smoothest rhyme. Mr. Taylor's invention of an irregularly rhymed stanza of eight lines so far answers its purpose as to be (but for his Introduction) a matter of uncon. sciousness with his reader, and is no doubt, therefore, successful. But even in the reg. ular ottava rima we should scarcely have found his poem monotonous.

Throughout the tale there is a true and

fine feeling for Italy; and the poet is so happy in his expression of that beautiful life which belongs to the fragrant land of summer, that one is loath to let the scene take him beyond Alps, and longs for his return to Tuscany. Sometimes, indeed, in the warmth of his fancy, he seems to forget the subtle difference between a sensuous and a sensual picture, as well as the fact that sentiment is better than either sensuousness or sensuality, -as in his opulence of diction he forgets that lavish coloring is not rich or vivid coloring. Yet the character and the passion of Clelia are most delicately and tenderly painted. She is a true woman and true Italian; and from the glow of the love-making at Florence to the home-sick, uncomplaining days in a strange land, and into the shadow of death, the imagination is led with a strong and real pathos which leaves little to be desired. Some of the finest lines of the poem occur in the description of the events here hinted, though there are passages of great nobility in the opening stanzas of the first book; while in the third — recounting the incidents of the artist's return to Italy and life by Lago di Garda, and the catastrophe of the boy's death- there is a certain sorrowful and fantastic grace and lightness of touch which will remind the reader very gratefully of the best of Mr. Taylor's minor poems.

Manomin: a Rhythmical Romance of Minnesota, the Great Rebellion, and the Minnesota Massacres. By MYRON Coloney. St. Louis Published by the Author.

IT is scarcely a good sign, we fear, in a new author, if his purpose and himself interest you more than his work. There is no literary excellence but in effect: being and willing are merely elemental; they enlist sympathy and expectation, not praise.

Looking over Mr. Coloney's book we feel how dangerously near he comes to experience of this misfortune. One is moved by the fact that the commercial editor of a daily newspaper in St. Louis has, in spite of every external discouragement, attempted to make a poem representative of modern American life and feeling; and one recognizes the courage and wisdom involved in the attempt. The purpose is not that of a commonplace man; for such a one, instead of telling us, with the trustful simplicity and courage of an old ballad

maker, about the fortunes of a family that moved from Syracuse, New York State, to Minnesota, would far rather have preferred to acquaint us with his sufferings from the coldness of Mary Jane. Mr. Coloney conceived that, if it was his office to sing at all, he must sing of things he had actually known and felt; and he has done so, sometimes with a clear and powerful note, and sometimes in a strain cracked and false enough. With a visible wish on his part to portray every person faithfully, there is often a visible failure to do so; and while we own to the poet that we actually look upon Minnesota woods and settlements in his book, we have also to confess that we find them peopled to a melancholy extent out of the melodrama and the second-rate romance. He deals more successfully with sentiment and manner than with character. His persons become unreal in action; when they speak or are spoken for, we perceive at once their verity; they are men and women who have read the "Tribune" and "Independent," and who, in very great number, believe in spiritual manifestations.

Of poetry there is really a good deal in Mr. Coloney's volume. The love-scenes are for the most part naturally and winningly done, and we owe our author a debt of gratitude for several fine pictures of pioneer and sylvan life. Yet we think that as a whole the work is wisely named romance rather than poem, though we are not ready to say that it had been better written in prose. Indeed, we are glad to see verse make so bold with the matter-of-fact phases of life; for, unless it does try to assimilate and naturalize itself to actual conditions in America, it must become as obsolete as sculpture or the drama.

The Life and Letters of James Gates Percival. By JULIUS H. WARD. Boston: Ticknor and Fields.

We have found few books so depressing as this. The spectacle of any sort of helplessness is melancholy; but a life-long helplessness of the kind which does not admit of relief from benevolence and friendship, is intolerable to dwell upon. It paralyzes even pity; the gods are against it.

Percival's seems to have been a life spoiled by excessive indulgence in unripe opportunities. His impatience destroyed in every way his chances of prosperity and greatness. He was born richly gifted, but

nothing came to maturity in him. The critic must see that his poetry, however deeply imbued with genius, is wanting in the finest quality, and lacking, not only in the ultimate, but the antepenultimate touches of art. It was often published prematurely for itself and for its author, who would have forced his fame, and even his era. Perhaps no man of æsthetic purposes in all the world does the work he wants to; and almost certainly no such man in America does. The painter paints portraits and landscapes, the sculptor makes busts, the architect builds French-roofed countryhouses, and marble-fronted, brick-backed palaces for retailing merchandise, the poet writes prose for the magazines and newspapers, and we suspect that several mute, inglorious Miltons are now contributing to the metropolitan press, of which the style is unquestionably inarticulate and obscure. Yet more than thirty years ago Percival sought to live by literature proper in a small town in a country still quite provincial. His execution of this plan was as remarkable as its conception. His sensitiveness was, if we may so speak, aggressive to such a degree that it wounded as often as it received hurt. He suspected all who had business transactions with him, and tried to break nearly every contract favorable to himself, while he clung with fatal fidelity to his bad bargains. The efforts of friends to help him were of scarcely better effect than his own; indeed, his pride, his obstinacy and fickleness, must have made it very hard to befriend him, and very thankless. Something of his early insanity, doubtless, always lurked in him, perverting a sweet and grateful nature. He shunned society, and thought himself neglected; he ran away from the presence of women, and expected the astonished fair he fell in love with to marry him without a hint of courtship preceding his offer. From his own purposes and his own conduct, nothing could flow but disappointment, mortification, and failure. He must live as he did live, in poverty and solitude; and, dying, he must leave, as he has left, his fame to

perish with his contemporaries; for what young man reads Percival? Beds of roses, once so much in use in this world, seem to have gone out with the Sybarites; but there are still honest husk-mattresses, and if we lie upon burrs and thistles, we fear that it is either from our choice or our aberration.

In things that did not concern himself immediately, Percival was wise enough; and there is great value in some of his fierce, pungent criticisms of writers apparently great in his day, but known in this to have been stuffed out with straw. He was, indeed, a man of singular honesty in all things, and a natural hater of shams. If he had had humor, he could have been more useful to himself and to literature; for a due perception of the absurd would have saved him from many errors and would probably have led connected criticism of others. no humor, and his attempts at fun were very melancholy: he never made any joke above the Wordsworthian standard. His life was as pure and blameless as a child's; and if our sympathy cannot follow all his eccentricities, our respect is due to his selfdevotion and high aspirations.

of his own, him to some But he had

The character of the man is suffered to appear in perfect relief by Mr. Ward, to whom we owe one of the most interesting of American biographies. The story tells itself in great part in Percival's own letters and correspondence, and is further developed in the reminiscences of his acquaintance. These Mr. Ward has presented in the language of the writers, and the effect is that of great freshness and variety. Wherever the biographer takes up the narrative himself, he handles it with spirit and good sense, and as discreetly as his merely editorial work. There is nowhere an effort to force Percival upon either compassion or admiration. The facts of his life are simply, fully, and impartially rehearsed, and we behold him as we believe he was, -a man of whom the world took some advantages, but whom it also intended good that he could not receive.