Graham's Magazine, Vol. XLI, No. 5, November 1852

“‘Most happy – oh! most blessed to die by a blow so sweet from the hand she loved.’

“Her voice died into a broken whisper; a few large tears trembled in her mournful eyes, but they did not fall; the unwonted color faded from her face, and in another moment she was as statue-like as ever, and with the same impenetrable look, which made Lilian feel as if she never should have either the wish or the courage to address her. Her astonishment and utter horror at Aletheia’s strange remark were, however, speedily forgotten in the stronger emotion caused her by an incident which occurred immediately after.”

This specimen of the author’s style will prove a better recommendation than any thing we can say in favor of the book; yet we do recommend it earnestly. It is a work of real genius.

Up-Country Letters. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1 vol. 12mo.

This is a brilliant and thoughtful volume, giving fine views of country life in spring, summer, autumn and winter, with here and there a capital daguerreotype of character and manners.

Anglo-American Literature and Manners. From the French of Philarète Chasles, Professor in the College of France. New York: Charles Scribner. 1 vol. 12mo.

This brilliant and vigorous volume should be read for its happy flashes of original thought, and occasional keenness of observation, rather than for its consistent truth. It swarms with errors, but the errors are so sparklingly expressed that they are valuable as epigrams when worthless as opinions. Every thing is sacrificed to point, and even the truths the volume contains are lit up in such a glare of witty impertinence, that they are truths suggested rather than truths expressed. French dogmatism is pertness, and our lively Frenchman’s pertness almost amounts to genius. But he is still a scholar and a critic, and some of the principles he announces are really deep and valuable; it is in their application that he fails. He lacks all sobriety of mind in observing character, manners and men, being chiefly solicitous to find in them pegs to hang his epigrams on, so that the object seen will not be America, Franklin, Irving or Bryant, but Philarète Chasles. And then he is so perfectly content with himself – he chuckles and chirrups so blithely over his own brilliant little self – he has such a sweet unconsciousness that the limits of his conceptions are not the limits of the human mind – that his quick, sharp, knowing, and gleeful spirit becomes, after the first shocks of opposition are over, quite delightful to the reader’s reason and risibles. He seems continually to say of himself, with little Isaac, in Sheridan’s Duenna – “roguish, perhaps, but keen, devilish keen.” We envy the students of the College of France such a Professor of Belles Lettres, who must hear himself talk as gladly as others hear him, and whose very seriousness seems got up for effect. He has a philosophy regarding the “fitness of things;” but to him this fitness consists in the predetermined ease with which nature and man yield occasions for point and antithesis to such a charming fellow as Philarète Chasles.

In truth, our author is a French Hazlitt. We will give some of his sprightly decisions on our American writers, in illustration of his manner. He is a joking, but a hanging judge, vivacious as a coxcomb but ruthless as a Jeffries. In speaking of Washington Irving, he overlooks Irving’s subtle sentiment, purely native to his character, and calls him a mere graceful imitator of old English literature. All that he writes “is a somewhat timid copy, on silk paper, of Addison, Steele and Swift,” and “it glows with the gentle, agreeable lustre of watered silk.” He praises Cooper, it is true, and praises him intelligently; but then he calls Joel Barlow’s Columbiad “a poem which has both eloquence and vigor.” Afterward, forgetting this praise, he lumps the “Columbiad,” Dwight’s “Conquest of Canaan,” and Colton’s “Tecumseh,” together, as “epics, colossi of cotton and papier maché, forming a mass of about ten thousand verses, which, however, yield the palm in absurdity to the epic called ”Washington,“ printed in Boston, in 1843.” It is needless to say that the first three of these epics few Americans have ever read, and the last, which is made the butt of our author’s satire, no American ever heard of. We have made particular inquiries of “the man who read Cooper’s Monnikens,” – who, we are happy to inform the public, is gradually recovering from the effects of his gigantic feat – and even that remarkable individual had not yet got on the trail of “Washington, an Epic.” It seems, if we may believe Philarète Chasles, that the poet in question had read in one Dr. Channing’s writings that America had no national literature. Struck with this astounding fact, which had never occurred to him before, he naively says, that he resolved at once to present his country with an epic. Our French critic deposes that the present has been made, but as the country, which ought to know, is ignorant of the matter, it will take more than a foreigner’s assertion to make us believe it. The coming man, with his coming epic, should therefore be awaited in breathless wonder; “Expectation sits i’ th’ air;” let all our astronomers of letters be on the watch, with telescopes sweeping the whole field of observation, for this new and “mighty orb of song” which is to “swim into our ken.”

Our friend Griswold’s collection of American poetry, the invariable target of all that “gentle dullness which ever loves a joke,” is, of course, made the especial mark of our Frenchman’s malicious raillery. “The distinctive sign of all the specimens,” he says, “is commonplace; they are all made with a shoemaker’s punch. Take off your hats, salute these images, they are from the Gradus ad Parnassum. The worn-out forms of Europe make fortunes in the States, as bonnets of past fashions do in the Colonies. The figures are stereotyped; the lake is ever blue, the forest ever trembling, the eagle invariably sublime. The bad Spanish poets did not write more rapidly stantes pede in uno, their wretched rhymes, than the modern American verse-makers, bankers, settlers, merchants, clerks, and tavern-keepers, their epics and their odes. In the way of counterfeiting they are quite at ease. One re-does the Giour, another the Dunciad. Mr. Charles Fenno Hoffman repeats the songs of Thomas Moore; Mr. Sprague models after Pope and Collins. One takes the Byronic stanza, another appropriates the cadence and images of Wordsworth. Mrs. Hemans, Tennyson, Milnes, all find imitators. Once the consecration of the British public given, the American counterfeit soon appears.” Is not this in the very spirit of little Isaac – “roguish, perhaps, but keen, devilish keen!” Still, it is really too bad that a Frenchman should presume to attack our poetry on the ground of imitation and diffuseness. What has been the larger part of French poetry for five centuries? Has it not been cold imitation of classical models or red-republican spasm? The French poets have been five centuries at work, and yet where is French poetry? graceful, vigorous, vital, national poetry? Why, is it not notorious that it was fast dwindling from frigid imitation into hopeless imbecility when it was roused by the convulsive school – which is but feebleness gone stark mad and raving? The French never had any poetry, growing naturally out of the national mind, like the poetry of Greece, or Italy, or Spain, or England. Ah! Philarète Chasles, smirking so conceitedly in your national glass-house, beware how you throw stones! You Frenchmen, who imitate even in your revolutions – you, whose republican heroes are but caricatures “done into” French from Plutarch, and about as much like the original as Ovid “Englished” by a Grub-Street hack of Charles’s day – you talk of imitation!

The best poets of America, according to our pleasant Frenchman, are Bryant, Emerson and Longfellow. “Bryant has created nothing great; his voice is feeble, melodious, somewhat vague; but pure, solemn, and not imitative… By his contemplative gentleness and gravity he reminds one of Klopstock; fantasy and free caprice are found in neither.” Mr. Emerson “is the most original man produced in the United States up to this day;” a true remark, if it be meant to be confined to literature, but perhaps unjust if extended to politics, as in that department our country has produced many marked originalities, ranging all the way from original sin to original virtue. Chasles emphasizes the exquisite beauty of Emerson’s lines to the Humble-Bee – one of the finest poems in the language. Of Longfellow it is said, that he is more varied than either Emerson or Bryant; and “severe intellectual beauty,” “a peculiar sweetness of expression and rhythm,” “great calm approaching to majesty,” “a sensibility stirred in its very deeps, but exhibited in moderated vibration and rhythm,” “a sad, sweet grandeur,” are mentioned as characteristics of this, the first in rank of American poets, and first in virtue of having soared highest “into the middle air of Poesy.” The essential flavor and fragrance of Emerson’s poetic thought, it is hardly to be expected that a foreigner could appreciate, and we are therefore not surprised that after naming Emerson as the most original man in the United States, he should still prefer Longfellow’s poetry.

Our author exercises the utmost severity of his pertness on the female poets whom he selects from our “forests of versifiers;” but we are too gallant to quote his impertinences. There is a good chapter on Audubon, and the introductory paragraph of description is so striking that we cannot refrain from extracting it. “Had you visited the English drawing-rooms in 1832, you would have remarked in the midst of a philosophic crowd, speaking obscurely, and overthrowing without pity the highest questions of metaphysics, a man very different from those about him. The absurd and mean European dress could not disguise that simple and almost wild dignity which is found in the bosom of the solitude which nurses it. While men of letters, a vain and talking race, disputed in the conversational arena, the prize of epigram or the laurels of pedantry, the man of whom I speak remained standing, head erect, with free, proud eye, silent, modest, listening sometimes with disdainful, though not caustic air to the æsthetic tumult, which seemed to astonish him. If he spoke it was at an interval of repose; with one word he discovered an error, and brought back discussion to its principle and its object. A certain naive and wild good sense animated his language, which was just, moderate and energetic. His long, black, waving hair was parted naturally upon his smooth white forehead, upon a front capable of containing and guarding the fires of thought. In his whole dress there was an air of singular neatness; you would have said that the waters of some brook, running through the untrodden forest, and bathing the roots of oaks old as the world, had served him for a mirror… At the sight of that long hair, that bared throat, the independent manner, the manly elegance which characterized him, you would have said, ‘that man has not lived long in old Europe.’”

In taking leave of this volume it may be proper to remark, that it is rather a series of sketches, published originally in a separate form, than a connected view of American institutions and literature. This will account, in some degree, for its lack of proportion and its omissions. As a whole, if a conglomerate can be called a whole, it is a shrewd, mischievous, witty, sparkling, egotistical, flippant, free-and-easy, cut-and-come-again, impertinent, inconsistent, sprightly, Frenchified performance, sipping “the foam of many minds.”

The Clifford Family; or A Tale of the Old Dominion. By One of her Daughters. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1 vol. 12mo.

The authoress of this volume evinces many admirable qualities of mind and heart, and is especially felicitous in depicting the struggle of generous with selfish passions. The scene of the story is laid in Virginia, at the breaking out of the revolutionary war, and the sad havoc which that event made among lovers whose hearts were opposed to their duties, is very truthfully represented. There is, however, a pervading tone of sadness in the book which weakens the impression due to its essential vigor of description and characterization.

Precaution; a Novel, by James Fenimore Cooper. Containing W. C. Bryant’s Oration on the Life, Writings, and Genius of the Author. Stringer & Townsend, New York.

This is a new and revised edition of the first maiden efforts of the greatest novelist America has yet produced, or, it is probable, ever will produce – the first, the most purely American, and thoroughly original of all American writers. What he lacked in grace, finish, ease of style, plot and composition, he amply overbalanced by his force, sometimes rugged but ever truthful, the sterling, earnest soundness of his heart, the sturdy independent manhood with which he upheld what he esteemed truths, because he believed them to be true, whether they were popular or no. Mr. Cooper was for many years an esteemed contributor to our Magazine, for many years a personal and valued friend, and will forever be by us respected and admired. It has not been with Mr. Cooper, as Antony was willing that it should be with Cæsar,

“The evil that men do lives after them,

The good is oft interred with their bones;”

for he never was rightfully appreciated until he was taken away from us. His good has survived him, and much of what was accounted to him for evil during his life, is now admitted to have been good; not least his brave, manly, and successful stand against the tyranny of the press; and the valuable and true lesson which he taught its members, that however much, when an author has stepped out upon the public stage, his public writings, public doings, and published opinions are open to the sternest animadversions of the press, his private life, his domestic affairs, his personal character, and self-entertained opinions are his own, and sacred – that the public has no right to them, and that the press may not go behind the record, without suffering the penalty of meddling and impertinent interference.

To say that Precaution is a great work, or even that it gave any clear indication of its author’s matured powers, were to speak hyperbolically; but it is, at least, highly creditable as a maiden effort: like all Mr. Cooper’s works, it is sensible, sterling, and sincere, and is eminently readable.

Mr. Bryant’s oration is the ideal of what such an oration should be, a model of appreciative criticism – fine style, and just laudation of high qualities, and worthy contribution to the land’s literature. We rejoice to learn that Messrs. Stringer & Townsend propose shortly to bring out a splendid complete edition of his works, finely illustrated by Darley, like Putnam’s edition of Irving, and prophecy equal success to their enterprise.

The Master Builder: or a Life at a Trade. By Day Kellog Lee. Author of “Summerfield, or Life on a Farm.” Redfield, Clinton Hall, New York.

This is a simple, domestic tale, founded on the difficulties, the struggles, and the ultimate success of a poor foundling boy, thrown in his infancy among strangers, and fighting his way, through the great battle-field of life, in spite of all difficulties, by dint of genius, backed by industry, perseverance, energy, honesty, and faith, to happiness, fame, and fortune.

The subject is well conceived, the plot well planned, the characters, in the main, well drawn, though in some sort exaggerated, and the tale, as regards matter, well told.

It would be pleasant to end here; but we should do justice neither to the author nor to ourselves, did we not speak the truth, right out. And the truth is – that all these excellences, and the book itself, are almost in toto ruined by the detestable affectation, false sentiment, and sickening transcendentalism of the manner.

Young ladies of an æsthetic turn of mind, members of a sentimental clique in some small western town, may think such passages as the following sweetly pretty: “She lived opulently in a lofty book;” – monstrous poor lodgings for opulence, it seems to us – “she was industrious; and yet she lived all she could in the woods, and loved to lie down in the hay-fields, or under the oaks on the hill pasture overlooking the village, and warble responses to the birds, and let them sing her at last to sleep. She loved to feed the fishes in meadow-brooks. She built nests for robins and sparrows every spring.” But the author may rely on it, that men of judgment and sense, and women of matured taste, will, according to their natures, laugh at or lament such perversity.

For the writer can write better, but chooses to write worse. Some of his descriptions of scenery are simple, terse, and beautiful – some of his glimpses at character true, shrewd, and striking – though his style is, at times, provincial, inelegant, and ungrammatical; as when he writes that some person “like to have done so and so” – meaning that he “was on the point of doing so;” or that a boy’s nostrils “palpitated the spirit of a man,” which is neither grammar nor sense, much less English.

The author is, as we judge, a young man and a young writer; and therefore it is that we have written so freely, for we are convinced that, if he will lay aside his besetting affectations, eschew pseudo sentimentalism, and write naturally about nature, he may yet take high place as a describer of the domestic and rural life of America.

Personal Memoirs and Recollections of Editorial Life. By Joseph T. Buckingham. Boston: Ticknor, Reed & Fields. 2 vols. 16mo.

The present volumes are the production of one of the veterans of the American press, connected for more than fifty years with many enterprises in the periodical department of literature, such as the Polyanthos, the New England Magazine, and the Boston Courier. He has known intimately most of the authors, artists, actors, poets, eminent merchants, politicians and statesmen, of his section of the country, and his work overflows with reminiscences of their personal and public character. Starting as a practical printer, he worked steadily up to editorial life and political position; and now enjoys a wide reputation in New England, not only for fearlessness and for ability, but for independence, incorruptible honor, unswerving honesty, and uncompromising consistency – qualities which have stood a little in the way of his interest in those emergencies when judicious apostacy is the road to wealth and consideration. To no one better than to him can be justly applied the words of Sidney Smith, in relation to Sir James Scarlett: “He has never sold the warm feelings and honorable motives of youth and manhood for an annual sum of money and an office. He has never touched the political Aceldama, nor signed the devil’s bond for cursing to-morrow what he has blessed to-day.”

The introductory portion of these volumes, describing the condition of the author’s parents at the close of the revolutionary war, conveys a vivid idea of the injustice done to those soldiers and officers of the war, who had invested their whole means in the discredited continental currency. The tale of poverty which Mr. Buckingham tells, is one of the most pathetic we ever read. The description of the struggles of his mother, left after his father’s death with a large family, to support herself and her children, is more powerful than any thing of the kind we remember in romance. The trusting piety, which mingled with all her miseries and lightened their load, is touchingly delineated. Indeed, the first fifty pages of the book are worthy to be placed in the front rank of biographical literature.

Mr. Buckingham’s style of composition is vigorous, condensed, and pure; and, more than all, bears the mark of his sturdy character and determined will. We trust his work will have a wide circulation.

Sicily: a Pilgrimage. By Henry T. Tuckerman. New York: George P. Putnam. 1 vol. 16mo.

The subject of Mr. Tuckerman’s volume is novel, as Sicily is rarely visited by the tourist, rich as it is in picturesque and beautiful scenery. The author has happily described, in the course of an interesting story, the many natural beauties of the island, and the manners and customs of the inhabitants. The book is written in Mr. Tuckerman’s rich, tasteful, and condensed style, an artist’s hand being visible in every sentence. It deserves to rank as a classic among books of travels. It tells in a short space what some other tourists would have expanded into a couple of volumes – and it tells it well and thoroughly. The author’s reflections on the character of the people are marked by justice and charity, sounding “as bad as truth,” yet explaining the causes of what he is compelled to condemn. The volume belongs to Putnam’s Semi-Monthly Library, and is the sixteenth number of that cheap and admirable miscellany.

Anna Hammer; a Tale of Contemporary German Life. Translated from the German of Temme, by Alfred H. Guernsey. New York: Harper & Brothers.

This is an American translation of a German novel, written by Temme, “a man who bore a prominent part in the attempt made in 1848 to construct a German state from the scattered fragments of the great German people,” and meeting the usual fate of German patriots, was arrested. During his imprisonment he began the present novel, the object being not so much to construct an artistical novel, as to give striking representations of the servility, corruption, and tyranny which result from the present constitution of German government. The author has certainly succeeded in his object, and conveys a great deal of important information in the course of his story. The translation, which is well executed, forms No. 173 of Harper’s “Library of Select Novels.”

The Personal Adventures of “Our Own Correspondent” in Italy. By Michael Burke Honan. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1 vol. 12mo.

The author of this dashing and exhilarating volume was the correspondent of the London Times during the troubles in Italy, and gives here his personal adventures in the camp of Charles Albert. It is a glorious volume, written by a man whose animal spirits are carried to the height of genius, and full of disclosures which will startle the reader. It is deliciously impudent and reckless, showing, in the author’s own phrase, “how an active Campaigner can find good quarters when other men lie in the fields; good dinners while many are half-starved; and good wine, though the king’s staff be reduced to half-rations.”

Daniel Webster and his Contemporaries. By Charles W. March. New York: Charles Scribner. 1 vol. 12mo.

This is the fourth edition of a work originally published under the title of “Reminiscences of Congress.” It is mostly devoted to Mr. Webster, and gives an animated account of his life, with long descriptions of the great debates in which he has been engaged. Benton, John Quincy Adams, Grundy, Livingston, and many other statesmen, are also more or less powerfully and truthfully sketched. Mr. March’s style is unequal, but has many brilliant and vigorous, and some splendid passages. The book is calculated to be extensively popular.

Marco Paul’s Adventures in the Pursuit of Knowledge. By Jacob Abbot. New York: Harper & Brothers. 4 vols. 18mo.

These little volumes are in Abbot’s most attractive style, giving an account of the journeys of a boy in Maine, New York and Vermont, in search of knowledge. The volume on the Erie Canal and that on the Forests in Maine, are especially interesting. Each volume is well printed and illustrated.

Lydia; a Woman’s Book. By Mrs. Newton Crossland. Boston: Ticknor, Reed & Fields. 1 vol. 16mo.

This is a well-written and elegantly printed novel, designed to exhibit the fatal injury done to a woman’s nature when her affections are lavished on an object unworthy of her love. The description of Lydia’s resistance to all the facts which would demonstrate to another the wickedness of Charlton, and her continued love for him to the very point where she discovers him playing the part of a poisoner, is exceedingly well done, and evinces a more than ordinary familiarity with the weakening effect of affection on character, where affection is not accompanied by sense and principle. The different parts of the story are not very artistically combined, and the characters are not very powerfully conceived, but the volume will still well reward perusal for the excellence of its sentiments and design, and its exposure of the rascality and meanness of that class of fine and “fast” young men who are commonly most successful in winning the love of beautiful, accomplished and virtuous young women.

The Life of Franklin Pierce. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. Boston: Ticknor, Reed & Fields. 1 vol. 16mo.

General Pierce was Hawthorne’s companion at college, and the present biography is in some respects a labor of love, though it has not the usual felicity of such labor in having in it the best qualities of the author’s genius. It is well written, in the ordinary meaning of the word, but it has hardly a single peculiarity of thought or style to remind one of the author of “The Scarlet Letter,” and “The Blithedale Romance.”

The School for Fathers. An Old English Story. By T. Gwynne. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1 vol. 12mo.

The object of this novel is to present a vivid representation of English town and country life as it existed a century ago. It is generally well-written, but the story indicates an unpracticed hand in romance, and the transition from Addisonian description to Ainsworthian horrors, is abrupt and unnatural. The scene where the choleric lover blows out the brains of the beautiful lady, as she is going to church to be married to his rival, is a little too exciting even for our hardened critical nerves.

Arctic Journal; or Eighteen Months in the Polar Regions. By Lieut. S. Osborn. New York: Geo. P. Putnam. 1 vol. 12mo.

This is the work of a thorough English sailor, bluff, honest, with a quick eye for what he sees, and a racy dogmatism in recording his own impressions. The descriptions are almost daguerreotypes of objects, and throughout the whole volume a delightful spirit of hope and health breathes. It is invigorating as well as interesting.