The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866

The books of M. Laugel and Mr. Goldwin Smith come to us, as we hinted, after infinite stupid and dishonest censure from their countrymen; but the intelligent friendship of such writers is not the less welcome to us because we have ceased to care for the misrepresentations of the French and English tourists.

Hospital Life in the Army of the Potomac. By William Howell Reed. Boston; William V. Spencer.

The advice of friends, so often mistaken, and so productive of mischief in goading reluctant authorship to the publication of unwise, immature, or feeble literature, prevailed upon Mr. Reed to give the world the present book; and we have a real pleasure in saying that for once this affectionate counsel has done the world a favor and a service. We have read the volume through with great interest, and with a lively impression of the author's good sense and modesty. In great part it is a personal narrative; but Mr. Reed, in recounting the story of the unwearied vigilance and tenderness and dauntless courage with which the corps of the Sanitary Commission discharged their high duties, contrives to present his individual acts as representative of those of the whole body, and to withdraw himself from the reader's notice. With the same spirit, in describing scenes of misery and suffering, he has more directly celebrated the patience and heroism of the soldiers who bore the pain than the indefatigable goodness that ministered to them, though he does full justice to this also. The book is a record of every variety of wretchedness; yet one comes from its perusal strengthened and elevated rather than depressed, and with new feelings of honor for the humanity that could do and endure so much. Mr. Reed does not fail to draw from the scenes and experiences of hospital life their religious lesson, and throughout his work are scattered pictures of anguish heroically borne, and of Christian resignation to death, which are all the more touching because the example of courage through simple and perfect faith is enforced without cant or sentimentality.

The history of the great Christian aspect of our war cannot be too minutely written nor too often read. There is some danger, now the occasion of mercy is past, that we may forget how wonderfully complete the organization of the Sanitary Commission was, and how unfailingly it gave to the wounded and disabled of our hosts all the succor that human foresight could afford,—how, beginning with the establishment of depots convenient for the requisitions of the surgeons, it came to send out its own corps of nurses and watchers, until its lines of mercy were stretched everywhere almost in sight of the lines of battle, and its healing began almost at the hour the hurt was given. Mr. Reed devotes a chapter to this history, in which he briefly and clearly describes the practical operation of the system of national charity, accrediting to Mr. Frank B. Fay the organization of the auxiliary corps, and speaking with just praise of its members who perished in the service, or clung to it, till, overtaken by contagion or malaria, they returned home to die. The subject is dealt with very frankly; and Mr. Reed, while striving to keep in view the consoling and self-recompensing character of their work, does not conceal that, though they were rewarded by patience and thankfulness in far the greater number of cases, their charities were sometimes met by disheartening selfishness and ingratitude. But they bore up under all, and gave the world such an illustration of practical Christianity as it had never seen before.

Mr. Reed's little book is so earnestly and unambitiously written, that its graphic power may escape notice. Yet it is full of picturesque touches; and in the line of rapidly succeeding anecdote there is nothing of repetition.

A History of the Gypsies: with Specimens of the Gypsy Language. By Walter Simpson. Edited, with Preface, Introduction, and Notes, and a Disquisition on the Past, Present, and Future of Gypsydom, by James Simpson. New York: M. Doolady.

The history of the Gypsies, according to the editor of the present work, is best presented in a series of desultory anecdotes which relate chiefly to the Egyptian usages of murder, pocket-picking, and horse-stealing, and the behavior of the rogues when they come to be hanged for their crimes. Incidentally, a good deal of interesting character is developed, and both author and editor show a very intimate acquaintance with the life and customs and speech of an inexplicable people. But here the value of their book ends; and we imagine that the earlier Simpson, who contributed the greater part of it in articles to Blackwood's Magazine, scarcely supposed himself to be writing anything more than sketches of the Scotch Gypsies whom he found in the different shires, and of the Continental and English Gypsies of whom he had read. The later Simpson thought it, as we have seen, a history of the Gypsies, and he has furnished it with an Introduction and a Disquisition of amusingly pompous and inconsequent nature. His subject has been too much for him, and his mental vision, disordered by too ardent contemplation of Gypsies, reproduces them wherever he turns his thought. If he values any one of his illusions above the rest,—for they all seem equally pleasant to him,—it is his persuasion that John Bunyan was a Gypsy. "He was a tinker," says our editor. "And who were the tinkers?" "Why, Gypsies, without a doubt," answers the reader, and makes no struggle to escape the conclusion thus skilfully sprung upon him. Will it be credited that the inventor of this theory was denied admittance to the columns of the religious newspapers in this country, on the flimsy pretext that the editors could not afford the space for a disquisition on John Bunyan's Gypsy origin?

The comparison of the Gypsy language in this book with a dialect of the Hindostanee is interesting and useful, and the accounts of Gypsy habits and usages are novel and curious; and otherwise the work is a mass of rather entertaining rubbish.

Eros. A Series of connected Poems. By Lorenzo Somerville, London: Trübner & Co.

Patriotic Poems. By Francis de Haes Janvier. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co.

The Contest: a Poem. By G. P. Carr. Chicago: P. L. Hanscom.

Poems. By Annie E. Clark. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co.

All these little books are very prettily printed and very pleasingly bound. Each has its little index and its little dedication, and each its hundred pages of rhymes, and so each flutters forth into the world.

"Dove vai, povera foglia frale?"

To oblivion, by the briefest route, we think; and we find a pensive satisfaction in speculating upon the incidents of the journey. Shall any one challenge the wanderers in their flight, and seek to stay them? Shall they all reach an utter forgetfulness, and be resolved again into elemental milk and water, or shall one of them lodge in a dusty library, here and there, and, having ceased to be literature, lead the idle life of a curiosity? We imagine another as finding a moment's pause upon the centre-table of a country parlor. Perhaps a third, hastily bought at a railway station as the train started, and abandoned by the purchaser, may at this hour have entered upon a series of railway journeys in company with the brakeman's lamps and oil-bottles, with a fair prospect of surviving many generations of short-lived railway travellers. We figure to ourselves the heart-breaking desolation of a village-tavern, where, on the bureau under the mirror, to which the public comb and brush are chained, a fourth might linger for a while.

But in all the world shall anybody read one of these books? We fancy not even a critic; for the race so vigilantly malign in other days has lost its bitterness, or has been broken of its courage by the myriad numbers of the versifiers once so exultingly destroyed. Indeed, that cruel slaughter was but a combat with Nature,—

"So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life";

and from the exanimate dust of one crushed poetaster she bade a thousand rhymesters rise. Yet one cannot help thinking with a shudder of the hideous spectacle of "Eros" in the jaws of Blackwood or the mortal Quarterly, thirty years ago; or of how ruthlessly our own Raven would have plucked the poor trembling life from the "Patriotic Poems," or "The Contest," or the "Poems."

The world grows wiser and better-natured every day, and the tender statistician has long since stayed the hand of the critic. "Why strike," says the gentle sage, "when figures will do your work so much more effectually, and leave you the repose of a compassionate soul? Do you not know that but one book in a thousand survives the year of its publication?" etc., etc., etc. "And then as to the infinite reproduction of the species," adds Science, "is Nature,

"'So careful of the single type?' But no,
From scarped cliff and quarried stone
She cries, 'A thousand types are gone.'"

Patience! the glyptodon and the dodo have been dead for ages. Perhaps in a million years the poetaster also shall pass.

Thirty Years of Army Life on the Border. By Colonel R. B. Marcy, U. S. A. With Numerous Illustrations. New York: Harper and Brothers.

There is not much variety in frontier life, it must be confessed, though there is abundant adventure. A family likeness runs through nearly all histories of bear-fights, and one Indian-fight might readily be mistaken for another. So also bear-fighters and Indian-fighters are akin in character, and the pioneers who appear in literature leave a sense of sameness upon the reader's mind. Nevertheless, one continues to read of them with considerable patience, and likes the stories because he liked their ancestral legends when a boy.

Colonel Marcy's book offers something more than the usual attractions of the class to which it belongs; for it contains the history of his own famous passage of the Rocky Mountains in mid-winter, and notices of many frontiersmen of original and striking character (like the immortal Captain Scott), as well as much shrewd observation of Indian nature and other wild-beast nature. All topics are treated with perfect common-sense; if our soldierly author sometimes philosophizes rather narrowly, he never sentimentalizes, though he is not without poetry; and he is thoroughly imbued with the importance of his theme. One, therefore, suffers a great deal from him, in the way of unnecessary detail, without a murmur, and now and then willingly accepts an old story from him, charmed by the simplicity and good faith with which he attempts to pass it off as new.

The style of the book is clear and direct, except in those parts where light and humorous narration is required. There it is bad, and seems to have been formed upon the style of the sporting newspapers and the local reporters, with now and then a hint from the witty passages of the circus, as in this colloquy:—

"'Mought you be the boss hossifer of that thar army?'

"'I am the commanding officer of that detachment, sir.'

"'Wall, Mr. Hossifer, be them sure 'nuff sogers, or is they only make-believe chaps, like I see down to Orleans?'

"'They have passed through the Mexican war, and I trust have proved themselves not only worthy of the appellation of real, genuine soldiers, but of veterans, sir.'"

And so forth. We like Colonel Mercy when he talks of himself better than when he talks for himself. In the latter case he is often what we see him above, and in the former he is always modest, discreet, and entertaining.

Memoirs of a Good-for-Nothing. From the German of Joseph von Eichendorff, by Charles Godfrey Leland. With Vignettes by E. B. Bensell. New York: Leypoldt and Holt.

When, as Heine says, Napoleon, who was Classic like Cæsar and Alexander, fell to the ground, and Herren August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, who were Romantic like Puss in Boots, arose as victors, Baron von Eichendorff was one of those who shared the triumph. He wrote plays and poems and novels to the tunes set by the masters of his school, but for himself practically he was a wise man,—held comfortable offices all his life long, and, in spite of vast literary yearning, sentiment, and misanthropy, was a Philister of the Philisters. The tale which Mr. Leland translates so gracefully is an extravaganza, in marked contrast to all the other romances of Eichendorff, in so far as it is purposely farcical, and they are serious; but we imagine it does not differ from them greatly in its leading qualities of fanciful incoherency and unbridled feebleness. An idle boy, who is driven from home by his father, the miller, and is found with his violin on the road to nowhere by two great ladies and carried to their castle near Vienna,—who falls in love with one of these lovely countesses, and runs away for love of her to Italy, and, after passing through many confused adventures there, with no relation to anything that went before or comes after, returns to the castle, and finds that his lovely countess is not a countess, but a poor orphan adopted by the great folk,—and so happily marries her,—this is the Good-for-Nothing and his story. A young student of the German language, struggling through the dusty paths of the dictionary to a comprehension of the tale, would perhaps think it a wonderful romance, when once he had achieved its meaning; but being translated into our pitiless English, its poverty of wit and feeling and imagination is apparent; and one is soon weary of its mere fantasticality.

notes

1

Bohn's edition of Humboldt's Personal Narrative, p. 134. Humboldt alludes to these formations repeatedly; it is true that he refers them to the ancient conglomerates of the Devonian age, but his description agrees so perfectly with what I have observed along the banks of the Amazons, that there can be no doubt he speaks of the same thing. He wrote at a time when many of the results of modern geology were unknown, and his explanation of the phenomena was then perfectly natural. The passage from which the few lines in the text are taken shows that these deposits extend even to the Llanos.

2

I am aware that Bates mentions having heard, that at Obydos calcareous layers, thickly studded with marine shells, had been found interstratified with the clay, but he did not himself examine the strata. The Obydos shells are not marine, but are fresh-water Unios, greatly resembling Aviculas, Solens, and Arcas. Such would-be marine fossils have been brought to me from the shore opposite to Obydos, near Santarem, and I have readily recognised them for what they truly are, fresh-water shells of the family of Naiades. I have myself collected specimens of these shells in the clay beds along the banks of the Solimoens, near Teffe, and might have mistaken them for fossils of that formation had I not known how Naiades burrow in the mud. Their resemblance to the marine genera mentioned above is very remarkable, and the mistake as to their true zoological character is as natural as that by which earlier ichthyologists, and even travellers of very recent date, have confounded some fresh-water fishes from the Upper Amazons of the genus Pterophyllum (Heckel) with the marine genus Platax.

3

As I have stated in the beginning, I am satisfied that the unstratified clay deposit of Rio and its vicinity is genuine glacial drift, resulting from the grinding of the loose materials interposed between the glacier and the solid rock in place, and retaining to this day the position in which it was left by the ice. Like all such accumulations, it is totally free from stratification. If this be so, it is evident, on comparing the two formations, that the ochraceous sandy clay of the Valley of the Amazons has been deposited under different circumstances; that, while it owes its resemblance to the Rio drift to the fact that its materials were originally ground by glaciers in the upper part of the valley, these materials have subsequently been spread throughout the whole basin and actually deposited under the agency of water.

4

F. W. H. M., you know I mean you.