The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864

By omissions here and there,—in all not amounting to ten pages of printed matter,—these literary remains of Theodore Parker might have been made less offensive to believers in the Christian Revelation, as well as to the not small class of gentlemanly skeptics who go through whatever motions the best society esteems correct. In these days, many worthy people, who are not quite sound upon Noah's ark, or even the destruction of the swine, will wince perceptibly at hearing the Lord's Supper called "a heathenish rite." And it would be unfair to the memories of most noted men to stereotype for ten thousand eyes the rough estimates of familiar letters, or the fragmentary ejaculations of a private journal. But Mr. Parker never scrupled to exhibit before the world all that was worst in him. There are few chapters that will not recall defects publicly shown by the preacher and author. The reader can scarcely miss a corroboration of a shrewd observation of Macaulay, that there is no proposition so monstrously untrue in politics or morals as to be incapable of proof by what shall sound like a logical demonstration from admitted principles. Theodore Parker was a strong and honest man. Yet few strong men have so lain at the mercy of some narrow bit of logic; few honest ones have so warped facts to match opinions. We speak of exceptional instances, not of ordinary habits. He seemed unable to persuade himself that a scheme of faith which was false to him could be true to others of equal intelligence and virtue. He fell too easily into the spasmodic vice of the day, and said striking things rather than true ones. He assumed a basis of faith every whit as dogmatic as special revelation, and sometimes grievously misrepresented the creeds which he assailed. Strangers might go to the Music Hall to breathe the free air of a catholic liberality, and find nothing but the old fierceness of sectarianism broken loose against the sects. Let us make every deduction which a candid criticism is compelled to claim, and Theodore Parker stands a noble representative of Republican America. His place is still among the immortals who are not the creatures of an age, but its regenerators. For it is not the life of a great skeptic, but the work of a great believer, which is brought before us in these volumes. This uncompromising enemy of the creeds was the ally of their highest uses. His soul never lacked that dear and personal object of worship which is offered by the Christian Revelation in its common acceptance. He could have lived in no more jubilant confidence of immortality, had he enjoyed the tactual satisfactions of Thomas himself. No Catholic nun feels more delicious assurance of the protection of the Virgin, no Protestant maiden knows a more blissful consciousness of the Saviour's marital affection towards her particular church, than felt this Theodore Parker in the fatherly and motherly tenderness of the Great Cause of All. Certainly, few doubters have ever doubted to so much purpose as he. Men who are skeptical through the intellect in the Christian creeds seldom live so sturdily the Christian life. Yet we cannot think that the fervent faith with which he wrought came from what was exceptional in his belief; it was rather a good gift of native and special sort. For it is a true insight which leads Tennyson to warn him whose faith does not trust itself to form, that his sister is "quicker unto good" from the hallowed symbol through which she receives a divine truth. Many who flatter themselves that they have outgrown the need of a human embodiment of the Father's love have only induced a plasticity of mind which prevents the life from taking shape in any positive affirmation. "It is a strong help to me," writes a Congregational minister, "to find a man, standing on the extreme verge of liberal theology, holding so firmly, so tenaciously, to the one true religion, love to God and man." But may all men stand there, and cling to it as resolutely as he did?

The ancestors of Theodore Parker seem to have been creditable offshoots from the Puritan stock. They were men and women of thrift and sagacity. Of his mother there are very sweet glimpses. He describes her as "imaginative, delicate-minded, and poetic, yet a very practical woman." She appears to have been thoroughly religious, but without taste for the niceties of dogmatic theology. Piety did not have to be laboriously put into her, before it could generously come out. "I have known few," writes her son, "in whom the religious instincts were so active and profound, and who seemed to me to enjoy so completely the life of God in the soul of man." And again he says, "Religion was the inheritance my mother gave,—gave me in my birth,—gave me in her teachings. Many sons have been better born than I, few have had so good a mother. I mention these things to show you how I came to have the views of religion that I have now. My head is not more natural to my body, has not more grown with it, than my religion out of my soul and with it. With me religion was not carpentry, something built up of dry wood, from without; but it was growth,—growth of a germ in my soul." Thus we see that Parker was not singular in his sources of goodness and nobility: here also have the strong and worthy men of all time received their inspiration. The mother's sphere is never confined to the household, but expands for joy or bitterness through the world at large. A youth of farm-work, snatches of study, and school-teaching, seem to be the appointed curriculum for our trustworthy men. In addition to this, Theodore achieves a slight connection with Harvard,—insufficient for a degree, yet enough for him, if not for the College. Then he teaches a private class in Boston, and presently opens school in Watertown. Here, for the first time, comes a modest success after the world's measurement. He has soon thirty-five, and afterwards fifty-four scholars. And now occurs an incident which is unaccountably degraded to the minion type of a note. It is, however, just what the reader wants to know, and deserves Italics and double-leading, if human actions are ever sufficiently noteworthy for these honors. The Watertown teacher receives a colored girl who has been sent to him, and then consents to dismiss her in deference to the prejudices of Caucasian patrons. Simon Peter denied the Saviour for whom he was afterwards crucified with his head hanging down. One day we shall find this schoolmaster leaving most cherished work, and braving all social obloquies, that he may stand closer than a brother to the despised and ignorant of the outcast race. The colored girl was amply avenged. But the teacher is here, as ever after, a learner, and his leisure is filled with languages, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, German, Spanish, and French. During his subsequent stay at the Cambridge Divinity School, there are added studies in Italian, Portuguese, Icelandic, Chaldaic, Arabic, Persian, and Coptic. Of his proficiency in this Babel of tongues the evidence is not very conclusive. Professor Willard is said to have applied to the young divinity-student for advice in some nice matters of Hebrew and Syriac. Theology there can be no doubt that he thoroughly mastered. After a brief season of itinerancy through Massachusetts pulpits, he is settled at West Roxbury. And here begins that agony of doubt dismal and unprofitable to contemplate, when it is not redeemed by a manly ardor which searches on for attainable grounds of trust. But in this young minister the faith of a little child cannot be superseded by the advents of geology and carnal criticism. Some of the Biblical conceptions of the Deity may be found inadequate, but Nature and the human soul are full of His presence and glow with His inspirations. Within the limits of capacity and obedience, every man and woman may receive direct nourishment from God. At length the South-Boston sermon of 1841 separates the position of Theodore Parker from that of his Unitarian brethren. After this, his life belongs to the public. He is known of men as an assailant of respectable and sacred things, a bitter critic of political and social usages. That these manifestations were but small portions of the total of his life, the public may now discern.

We can recall no published correspondence of the century which combines more excellent and diverse qualities than this with which Mr. Weiss has plentifully filled his pages. Occasions for which the completest of Complete Letter-Writers has failed to provide are met by Mr. Parker with consummate discretion. His letters are to Senators, Shakers, Professors, Doctors, Slaveholders, Abolitionists, morbid girls, and heroic women: they are all equally rich in spontaneity, simplicity, and point. Keen criticisms of noted men, speculations upon society, homely wisdom of the household, estimates of the arts, and consolations of religion, all packed in plain and precise English, seem to have been ever ready for delivery. If Mr. Parker had not chosen the unpopularity of a great man, he could have had the abundant popularity of a clever one. Let us see how he outlines the Seer of Stockholm for an inquiring correspondent:—

"Swedenborg has had the fate to be worshipped as a half-god, on the one side; and on the other, to be despised and laughed at. It seems to me that he was a man of genius, of wide learning, of deep and genuine piety But he had an abnormal, queer sort of mind, dreamy, dozy, clairvoyant, Andrew-Jackson-Davisy; and besides, he loved opium and strong coffee, and wrote under the influence of those drugs. A wise man may get many nice bits out of him, and be the healthier for such eating; but if he swallows Swedenborg whole, as the fashion is with his followers,—why, it lays hard in the stomach, and the man has a nightmare on him all his natural life, and talks about 'the Word,' and 'the Spirit,' 'correspondences,' 'receivers.' Yet the Swedenborgians have a calm and religious beauty in their lives which is much to be admired."

The deeply affectionate nature of Theodore Parker glows warmly through the Correspondence and Journal. His friends were necessities, and were loved with a devotion by no means characteristic of Americans. He could give his life to ideas, but his heart must be given to persons, young and old. Turning from his task of opposition and conflict, he would yearn for the society of little children, whose household loves might dull the noise and violence and passion through which he daily walked. "The great joy of my life," he writes, "cannot be intellectual action, neither practical work. Though I joy in both, it is the affections which open the spring of mortal delight. But the object of my affections, dearest of all, is not at hand. How strange that I should have no children, and only get a little sad sort of happiness, not of the affectional quality! I am only an old maid in life, after all my bettying about in literature and philanthropy." And in a letter to Dr. Francis there comes an exclamation of which the arrangement is very pathetic in its significance,—"I have no child, and the worst reputation of any minister in all America!"

We are in no position to estimate with any exactness either the adaptation of Theodore Parker to our national well-being or his positive aid to the mental and moral progress of New-England society. Violent denunciations in the interest of the various sects and policies that he attacked will for the present be levelled against him. Neither will there be wanting extravagant eulogiums from personal friends, fellow-religionists, and zealous reformers. Only the distant view of a generation yet to be can see him in just relation to the men of this time. In judging the weight and work of a contemporary, we attach an over-importance to the number and social position of his nominal adherents; while, in estimating the utility of an historic leader, we instinctively feel that these things are almost the last to be considered. For the greatest influence for good has come from men who have struggled in feeble minorities,—ever alienating would-be friends by an invincible honesty, or even by an invincible fanaticism. Not to the excellences or extravagances of a handful of persons who precisely agree with his views of Christianity may we look for the influence of Theodore Parker which to-day works among us. We might find it in greater power in Brownson's Catholic Review, in the humane magnetism of orthodox Mr. Beecher, in the Episcopal ministrations of Dr. Tyng. For any intelligent Christian must allow that those claiming to represent the Church of Christ have too often sided with the oppressor, fettered human thought in departments foreign to religion, and inculcated degrading beliefs, which scholars eminent in orthodoxy declare indeducible from any Biblical precept. It is not the incredibleness of a metaphysical belief, but a laxity or cowardice of the practice connected with it, which can point the reformer's gibe and wing his sarcasm. Theodore Parker virtually told the Christian minister that he must reprove profitable and popular sins, or else stand at great disadvantage in the trial between Rationalism and Supernaturalism which is vexing the age. In rich and prosperous communities Christianity has been too prone to degenerate into a mere credence of dogma; it must reassert itself as the type of ethics. It is also good that the clergy, intrusted with the defence of the faith delivered to saints, be compelled to place themselves on a level with the ripest scholarship of the day. For ends such as these the life of this critic and protester has abundantly wrought. If he has pulled down a meeting-house here and there, we are confident that he has been instrumental in building up many more to an effective Christianity.

Peculiar. A Tale of the Great Transition. By Epes Sargent. New York: G.W. Carleton. 12mo.

There seems to be an element of luck in the production of highly successful plays and novels. To succeed in this department of imaginative writing, it is not enough that the author has literary power and skill. Else why do the failures of every great novelist and playwright almost always outnumber the successes? Even Shakspeare offers no exception to the fact. What a descent from "Hamlet" to "Titus Andronicus," from "Othello" to "Cymbeline"! Miss Bronté writes "Jane Eyre," and fails ever afterwards to come up to her own standard. Bulwer delights us with "The Caxtons," and then sinks to the dulness of "The Strange Story." Dickens gives us "Oliver Twist," and then tries the patience of confiding readers in "Martin Chuzzlewit." We will not undertake to analyze all the reasons for these startling discrepancies; but one obvious reason is infelicity in the choice of a subject. A subject teeming with the right capabilities will often enable an ordinary playwright to produce a drama that will rouse an audience to wild enthusiasm; whereas, if the subject is un-pregnant with dramatic issues, not even genius can invest it with the charm that commands the sympathy and attention of the many. Watch a large, miscellaneous audience, as it listens, rapt, intent, and weeping, to Kotzebue's "Stranger," and see the same audience as it tries to attend to Talfourd's "Ion." Yet here it is the hack writer who succeeds and the true poet who fails. Why? Because the former has hit upon a subject which gives him at once the advantage of nearness to the popular heart, while the latter has selected a theme remote and unsympathetic.

In "Peculiar" Mr. Sargent has had the luck, if we may so call it, of finding the materials for his plot in incidents which carry in themselves so much of dramatic power that a story is evolved from them with the facility and inevitableness of a fate. When the United States forces under General Butler occupied New Orleans, certain developments connected with the workings of "the peculiar institution" were made, which showed a state of social degradation of which we had not supposed even Slavery capable. It appeared that women, so white as to be undistinguishable from the fairest Anglo-Saxons, were held as slaves, lashed as slaves, subjected to all the indignities which irresponsible mastership involves.

"Peculiar" derives its title from one of the characters of the novel, an escaped negro slave, who has received from his sportive master the name of "Peculiar Institution." The great dramatic fact of the story lies in the kidnapping of the infant child of wealthy Northern parents who have been killed in a steamboat-explosion on the Mississippi. The child, a girl, is saved from the water, but saved by two "mean whites," creatures and hangers-on of the Slave Power, who take her to New Orleans, and finally, being in want of money, sell her with other slaves at auction. In a very graphic and truthful scene, the "vendue" is depicted. About this little girl, Clara by name, the intensest interest is thenceforth made to centre. Her every movement is artfully made a matter of moment to the reader.

Antecedent to the introduction of Clara, the true heroine of the novel, we have the story of Estelle, also a white slave. At first this story seems like an episode, but it is soon found to be inextricably interwoven with the plot. The author has shown remarkable dexterity in preserving the unity of the action so impressively, while dealing with such a variety of characters. Like a floating melody or tema in a symphony or an opera, the souvenirs of Estelle are introduced almost with the effect of pathetic music. Indeed, to those accustomed to look at plots as works of art, the constructive skill manifest in this novel will be not the least of its attractive features.

One word as to the characters. These are drawn with a firm, confident pencil, as if they were portraits from life. Occasionally, from very superabundance of material, the author leaves his outline unfilled. But the important characters are all live and actual flesh and blood. In Pompilard, a capitally drawn figure, many New-Yorkers will recognize an original, faithfully limned. In Colonel Delancy Hyde, "Virginia-born," we have a most amusing representative of the lower orders of the "Chivalry." Estelle is a charming creation, and we know of few such touching love-stories as that through which she moves with such naturalness and grace. In the cousins Vance and Kenrick we have strongly marked and delicately discriminated portraits. The negro "Peculiar" is made to attract much of our sympathy and respect. He is not the buffoon that the stage and the novel generally make of the black man. He belongs rather to the class of which Frederick Douglas is a type. It is no more than poetic justice that from "Peculiar" the book should take its name.

We should say more of the plot, did we not purposely abstain from marring the reader's interest by any indiscreet foreshadowing. Everybody seems to be reading or intending to read the book; and its success is already so far assured that no hostile criticism can gainsay or check it. Not the least of the merits of "Peculiar" is the healthy patriotic spirit which runs through it, vivifying and intensifying the whole. The style is remarkably animated, often eloquent, and would of itself impart interest to a story far less rich than this in incident, and less powerful in plot.

The Life of William Hickling Prescott. By George Ticknor. Boston: Ticknor & Fields.

The third edition of Mr. Ticknor's "History of Spanish Literature" was noticed with due commendation in our number for November last. That was a work drawn exclusively from the region of the intellect, and written by the "dry light" of the understanding. The author appeared throughout in a purely judicial capacity. His task was to summon before his literary tribunal the writers of a foreign country, and mostly of past generations, and pronounce sentence upon their claims and merits. Learning, method, sound judgment, and good taste are displayed in it; but the subject afforded no chance for the expression of those personal traits which are shown in daily life, and make up a man's reputation in the community where he dwells.

But the Life of Prescott is a book of another mood, and drawn from other fountains than those of the understanding. It glows with human sympathies, and is warm with human feeling. It is the record of a long and faithful friendship, which began in youth and continued unbroken to the last. It is the elder of the two that discharges this last office of affection to his younger brother. Mr. Ticknor could not write the life of Mr. Prescott without showing how worthy he himself was of having so true, so loving, and so faithful a friend. But he has done this unconsciously and unintentionally. For it is one of the charms of this delightful book—one of the most attractive of the attractive class of literary biography to which it belongs that we have ever read—that the biographer never intrudes himself between his subject and the reader. The story of Mr. Prescott's life is told simply and naturally, and as far as possible in Mr. Prescott's own words, drawn from his diaries and letters. Whatever Mr. Ticknor has occasion to say is said with good taste and good feeling, and he has shown a fine judgment in making his portraiture of his friend so life-like and so true in detail, and yet in never overstepping the line of that inner circle into which the public has no right to enter. We have in these pages a record of Mr. Prescott's life from his cradle to his grave, sufficiently minute to show what manner of man he was, and what influences went to make up his mind and character; and it is a record of more than common value, as well as interest.

For the last twenty years of his life Mr. Prescott was one of the most eminent and widely known of the residents of Boston. He was universally beloved, esteemed, and admired. He was one of the first persons whom a stranger coming among us wished to see. His person and countenance were familiar to many who had no further acquaintance with him; and as he walked about our streets, many a glance of interest was turned upon him of which he himself was unconscious. The general knowledge that his literary honors had been won under no common difficulties, owing to his defective sight, invested his name and presence with a peculiar feeling of admiration and regard. The public at large, including those persons who had but a slight acquaintance with him, saw in him a man very attractive in personal appearance, and of manners singularly frank and engaging. There was the same charm in his conversation, his aspect, the expression of his countenance, that was felt in his writings. Everything that he did seemed to have been done easily, spontaneously, and without effort. There were no marks of toil and endurance, of temptations resisted and seductions overcome. His graceful and limpid style seemed to flow along with the natural movement of a running stream, and to those who saw his winning smile and listened to his gay and animated talk he appeared like one who had basked in sunshine all his days and never known the iron discipline of life.

But this was not true; at least, it was not the whole truth. Besides this external, superficial aspect, there was an inner life which was known only to the few who knew him intimately, and which his biography has now revealed to the world. This memoir sets the author of "Ferdinand and Isabella" before the public, as Mr. Ticknor says in his preface, "as a man whose life for more than forty years was one of almost constant struggle,—of an almost constant sacrifice of impulse to duty, of the present to the future." Take Mr. Prescott as he was at the age of twenty-five, and see what the chances are, as the world goes, of his becoming a laborious and successful man of letters. He was handsome in person, attractive in manners, possessed of a competent property, very happy in his domestic relations, with one eye destroyed and the other impaired by a cruel accident; what was more probable, more natural, than that he should become a mere man of wit and pleasure about town, and never write anything beyond a newspaper-article or a review? And we should remember that defective sight was not the only disability under which he labored. His health was never robust, and he was a frequent sufferer from rheumatism and dyspepsia,—the former a winter visitor, and the latter a summer. And not only this, but there was yet another lion in his path. His temperament was naturally indolent. He was fond of social gayety, of light reading, of domestic chat. He had that love of lounging which Sydney Smith said no Scotchman but Sir James Mackintosh ever had. But there was a stoical element in him, lying beneath this easy and pleasure-loving temperament, and subduing and controlling it. He had a vigilant conscience and a very strong will. He had early come to the conclusion that not only no honor and no usefulness, but no happiness, could be secured without a regular and daily recurring occupation. He made up his mind, after due reflection and consideration, to make literature his profession; and not only that, but he further made up his mind to toil in this, his chosen and voluntary vocation, with the patient and uninterrupted industry of a professional man whose daily bread depends upon his daily labor.

And the biography before us reveals that inner life of struggle and conquest which, while Mr. Prescott was living, was known only to his most intimate friends. We see here how resolutely and steadily he contended, not only against defective sight and indifferent health, but also against the love of ease and the seductions of indolence. We see with what strenuous effort his literary honors were won, as well as with what gentleness they were worn. And thus the work has a distinct moral value, and is full of encouragement to those who, under similar or inferior disabilities, have determined to make the choice of Hercules, and prefer a life of labor to a life of pleasure. And this moral lesson is conveyed in a most winning and engaging way. The interest of the narrative is kept up to the end with the freshness of a well-constructed work of fiction. It is an interest not derived from stirring adventures, for Mr. Prescott's life was very uneventful, but from its happy portraiture of those delightful qualities of mind and character of which his life was a revelation. Though it tells of constant struggle and not a little suffering, the tone of the book is genial, sunny, and cheerful, as was the temperament of the historian himself. For it is a remarkable fact that Mr. Prescott's bodily infirmities never had any effect in making his mind or his character morbid. His spiritual nature was eminently healthy. His leading intellectual trait was sound good sense and the power of seeing men and things as they were. He had no whims, no paradoxes, no prejudices. His histories reflect the aggregate judgment of mankind upon the personages he describes and the events he narrates, without extravagance or overstatement in any direction. And it was the same with his character, as shown in daily life; it was frank, generous, cordial, and manly. No man was less querulous, less irritable, less exacting than he. His social nature was warm; discriminating, but not fastidious. He liked men for the good there was in them, and his taste in friendship was wide and catholic. He was rich in friends, and this book proves how just a title to such wealth he could show. We shall be surprised, if this biography does not attain a popularity as wide and as enduring as that enjoyed by any of Mr. Prescott's historical works. It is largely made up of extracts from his letters and private journals, which are full of the playful humor, the ready sympathy, the sunny temper, the kindly judgment of men and things, which made the historian so dear to his friends and so popular among his acquaintances.

We cannot dismiss this book without saying a word or two in praise of its externals. Handsome books are, happily, no longer so rare a product of the American press as to require heralding when they do appear, but this is so beautiful a specimen of the art of book-manufacturing that it deserves special commendation. The type, paper, press-work, and illustrations are all admirable, and the whole is a result not easily to be surpassed in any part of the world.

My Farm of Edgewood. A Country Book. By the Author of "Reveries of a Bachelor." New York: Charles Scribner. 12mo.

When "Ik Marvel" ten years ago turned farmer, a good proportion of the reading public supposed that his experiment would combine the defects of gentleman- and poet-farming, and that he would escape the bankruptcy of Shenstone only by possessing the purse of Astor. That a man of refined sentiments, elegant tastes, wide cultivation, and humane and tender genius, given, moreover, to indulgences in "Reveries" and the "Dream-Life," should succeed in the real business of agriculture, seemed a monstrous supposition to those cockney idealists who consider the cultivation of the mind incompatible with the cultivation of the ground, who cannot bring, by any theory of the association of ideas, practical talent into neighborly good-will with lofty aspirations, and who necessarily connect the government of brutes with an imbruted intelligence. The book we have under review is a blunt contradiction to objectors of the literary class. That it is practical, the coarsest farmer must admit; that its practicality is not purchased by any mean and unwise concessions to "popular prejudice," the most sensitive littérateur will concede; and that the whole representation constitutes a most charming book, all readers will be eager to pronounce. Indeed, the critic of the volume is somewhat puzzled to harmonize the fine rhythm of the periods, and the superb propriety of the tone, with the subject-matter. The bleakest and most ghastly aspects of Nature,—the most prosaic facts of the farmer's life,—Irish servants and compost-heaps,—cows which try to consume their own milk,—beehives which send forth swarms to sting the children of the house, and give no honey,—soils which refuse to bear the products which intelligence has anticipated,—all are transformed into "something rich and strange" by the poet's alchemy, without any sacrifice of truth, or the insertion of details which a farmer would disavow as inaccurate or sentimental. The "Ik" is a full counterpoise to the "Marvel," even to the most literal reader of the volume, though it is certain that no book has ever before appeared in our country in which the farmer-life of New England has assumed so poetic a form. The "chiel" among the agriculturists "taking notes" will be more likely to seduce than to warn; and if the record of his eventual triumphs be received as gospel truth, we must expect a vast emigration of the men of mind from the cities to the country. Who would not cheerfully encounter all the vexations attending a settlement in "My Farm in Edgewood" for the compensations so bountifully provided for the privations?

To the literary reader the doubt will arise, whether the writer of this work might not have more profitably employed his time, during the last ten years, in creating thoughts than in "improving" land,—in diffusing information than in selling milk. As a poetic, scientific, and practical farmer, he has doubtless silenced all cynic doubts of his capacity to make four or six per cent. on the capital he invested in land; but it is plain, that, without capital, he might have made three or four times as much by the genial exercise of his literary power. The talent exercised on his farm we must, therefore, consider from a financial point of view to have been more or less wasted. As a "gentleman-farmer," he might easily have repaired from his study all the losses which his trained subordinates of the garden and the field incurred from the lack of his constant superintendence. Everything which a man of mind could want in a country-residence might have been obtained without his personal oversight of every minute detail, and the net result of the gains of the year would have been greater, if, instead of riding daily into New Haven to sell his milk, he had stayed quietly in his study to write for the magazines. This calculation we have made from a rigid scrutiny of the figures in which the author sums up, year after year, his gains.

We have been provoked into this comparison by the evident glee with which Ik Marvel parades the results of his agricultural labors. So earnest is he to show that a man of genius can make money by farming, that he is inclined to overlook the distinction between the work of an ordinary and that of an extraordinary mind. Waiving this consideration, we have nothing to object to his ten years' seclusion from literature. That seclusion has brought him into contact with the rough realities of a farmer's life, has enabled him personally to inspect every process of agriculture, and furnish his mind with an entirely new class of facts. The result is a book whose merit can hardly be overpraised. It should be in every farmer's library, as a volume full of practical advice to aid his daily work, and full of ennobling suggestions to lift his calling into a kind of epic dignity. As a book for the generality of readers, it far exceeds any previous work of the author in force, naturalness, and beauty, in vividness of description and richness of style, and in that indefinable element of genius which envelops the most prosaic details in an atmosphere of refinement and grace.

Methods of Study in Natural History. By L. Agassiz. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 12mo.

A work from the scientific storehouse of Professor Agassiz needs only to have attention called to its existence to command universal welcome. The readers of the "Atlantic" are already in some measure familiar with its contents, being a reprint of a series of papers published in this journal; but they will be read again with double satisfaction in this continuous form. The avowed purpose is "to give some general hints to young students as to the methods by which scientific truth has been reached."

There are many lovers of Nature, and many students of Nature; but there are very few whom we may term philosophers of Nature. In other words, there are those who are charmed with the external world, its landscapes, its beauteous forms and tints, and all its various adaptations to fascinate the senses,—and those who delight in deciphering and describing all the details of individual objects, and their wonderful fitness to the role they have severally or unitedly to play; and there is the man who, endowed with all this, seeks to go still farther, and from myriads of observations to deduce great general truths. He is the philosopher.

When Agassiz arrived in this country, there were many good observers of Nature here, and many who had accumulated a large store of facts. Each one had been working in his own way, almost alone, scarcely knowing the ultimate aims of scientific research, much less knowing how to arrive at them. To him, more than to any other person, zoölogists in this country are indebted for showing them how to work, and for presenting to them a plan to be worked out, with processes and means by which this is to be done. And now he designs to diffuse these high aims and methods throughout the community. As he says, "The time has come when scientific truth must cease to be the property of the few, when it must be woven into the common life of the world." Of all men, he is the one to gain the ear and understanding of the public on such matters, and to command the recognition of his conclusions. His faculty of simplifying great principles, and of clothing them in such language and with such illustrations as to render them intelligible and attractive to the uninstructed, is one of Professor Agassiz's most rare characteristics. In these chapters he has unfolded some of the methods by which high scientific results have been and may be attained, and has well illustrated them. In a short sketch of the progress of Natural History, he has noticed the methods which were successively pursued in its study, and the long time which elapsed before anything like true science was developed; he has pointed out the necessity and nature of classification, the important terms employed, as classes, orders, families, genera, and species, and their signification, and dwells upon the great idea that all the denominations represented by these terms exist definitely in Nature, and can be legitimate and permanent only as they conform to the plan laid down by Nature herself. Much of the work is devoted to the enforcement of this doctrine. He shows us, more especially by the class of Radiates, how objects at first view widely different all conform to the same definite plan, and how some which during a part of their history would not be suspected of having any alliance with each other, yet, by alternate generations, come to be identical. He shows, by the ovarian egg, the great simplicity and apparent identity of the beginnings of all animal life, and the successive steps by which the diversified forms of animals are developed, and insists upon the necessity of following the history of an animal through all its phases before its true place in the grand plan can be determined. He discusses the permanence of species, and the limits of their variation, which he illustrates more especially by the growth of corals, and most emphatically expresses his dissent from the startling development-doctrines of Darwin. But it would be fruitless to attempt an abstract of the numerous truths he has alluded to, and the methods by which such truths are to be sought. It is to these truths, in contradistinction to the mere study and description of species, and the building up of systems on external characters alone, that he hopes to direct attention. Those comprehensive truths are few. Agassiz tells us, that, after a whole life devoted to the study of Nature, a simple sentence may express all he himself has done: "I have shown that there is a correspondence between the succession of fishes in geological times and the different stages of their growth in the egg,—this is all." Though this is by no means the limit of his claim so modestly expressed, yet that was a grand generalization, and, like the great doctrine of gravitation, and the demonstration by Cuvier of the existence of races of animals and plants on the globe anterior to those now existing, it proves to be of almost indefinite application, and, like those doctrines, has revolutionized science.

The peculiar scientific views here presented this is no place to criticize. But we may say that to every student of liberal culture this work is essential. Every teacher's table and every school-library should be furnished with it.

Hannah Thurston: A Story of American Life. By Bayard Taylor. New York: G.P. Putnam.

Mr. Bayard Taylor evidently does not subscribe to the theory which "Friends in Council" attributes to a large class: "that men cannot excel in more things than one; and that, if they can, they had better be quiet about it." Having already achieved a reputation as a traveller, a poet, and a secretary to a foreign legation, he now enters the lists with the novelists, who must look well to their laurels, if they would not have them snatched from their brows by this new-comer.

The book is called "A Story of American Life." It is American life, just as the statue of the Venus de' Medici or the Apollo Belvedere is the representation of the human figure. No Athenian belle, no Delphic athlete, stood for those beautiful shapes; but the nose was modelled from one copy, the limbs from another, the brow from a third, and the result is a joy forever. So the American life portrayed in this story is a conglomeration, and partially a caricature, of the various isms which have disturbed the strata of our social life. That early American village should present within its outmost circle the collection of peculiarities gathered here would be little less than marvellous. That they are found in so many American villages as to justify their being attributed to American villages in general is preposterous. Certainly, this picture does not daguerreotype New England, however it may be in New York,—and though New England is small and provincial and New York is large and cosmopolitan, still we respectfully submit that any characteristic which may belong to New York and does not belong to New England is local and not national; and though a writer, for his own convenience and the better to convey his moral, may, if he choose, group all the wickednesses and weaknesses of the land in one secluded spot, he ought not to convey to strangers so wrong an idea of our rural social life as to make that spot the exponent of all.—So much for the title.

We now open the book, and are immediately in the midst of scenes which have an indescribable familiarity. We have a confused sense of having met these people before. Certainly they have a strong family-likeness to denizens of modern novels. The sewing-circles and small-talk savor of the cheap wit of Widow Bedott. Jutnapore must have descended in a right line from Borrioboola-Gha. The traditional spinsters with their "withered bosoms" march in four abreast. The hereditary clergymen, hungry, sectarian, sanctimonious, rabid, form into line with the precision acquired by long drill. The hero and heroine stand up as good as married in the first chapter. The features of the hero are instantly recognizable. There is the small stir, the rising of the curtain, and some one steps upon the stage, "tall and sunburnt, with a moustache,"—'tis he! Alonzo!—"with easy self-possession and a genial air,"—the very man,—"habitual manners slightly touched with reserve, but no man could unbend more easily,"—who but he, our old acquaintance?—"a rich baritone voice," "strung with true masculine fibre," striking in among the sharps and flats and bringing them all into harmony,—that is the invariable way. "Generally, the least intellectual persons sing with the truest and most touching expression, because voice and intellect are rarely combined, [the reason seems to us rather a restatement of the fact,] but Maxwell Woodbury's fine organ had not been given to him at the expense of his brain." Certainly not. He never would have been our hero, if it had. When you add, that "his manners were thoroughly refined, and his property large enough and not too large for leisure," why, one might almost send a sheriff to arrest him, trusting to this description to make sure of his identity. The heroine is of course the "pale, quiet, earnest-looking girl," who, in the midst of snoods, frocks, jackets, pocket-handkerchiefs, and other commonplace handicraft, is embroidering with green silk upon warm brown cloth the thready stems and frail diminishing fronds of a group of fern-leaves,—who alone among assured matrons and faded spinsters is visited by "a flitting blush, delicate and transient as the shadow of a rose tossed upon marble,"—and who matches the "glorious lay" of the hero, that "thrilled and shook her with its despairing solemnity," with an Alpine song, that, pure and sweet, sets the hero once more face to face with the Rosenlaui glacier and the jagged pyramid of the Wetterhorn.

To this there is no special objection. Every man has a right to heap virtues and graces upon his hero, and to heighten their effect by as much uncouthness and insincerity as he chooses to attribute to the subordinates; but so far as he professes to represent life, he should keep within the bounds of natural laws. If he chooses to introduce time-honored personages, we shall not quarrel with him, although we certainly think it desirable that some fresh piquancy in their characters shall be the vindication of their reappearance. We may regret that a subtle, but palpable ridicule is cast upon foreign missions,—a cause which, whether successful or unsuccessful in its immediate objects, will forever stand recorded as one of the most unselfish, the most sublime, and the most Christ-like movements that have ever been originated by man. The hero does, indeed, patronize them to the extent of saying that he has "seen something of your missions in India, and believes that they are capable of accomplishing much good,"—adding, however, lest his words excite hopes too sanguine, "Still, you must not expect immediate returns. It is only the lowest caste that is now reached, and the Christianizing of India must come, eventually, from the highest,"—words which we shall be very ready to take as opinion, but very slow to receive as oracle, since, from the time when the Founder of Christianity was upon the earth, and the common people heard him gladly, while the higher classes thrust him out of their synagogues, till the present day, the history of Christianity has been the history of an influence rising from the lower layers of society into the upper, rather than filtering down from the upper into the lower.

Since, also, however vulgarly the Grindles may put it, it is true that drunkenness is the agony of wives, the dread of mothers,—that it does destroy hopes, desolate hearths, break hearts,—that within the last two years it has added to its terrible deeds wide disasters to our arms, long sorrow to our country, and fruitless death in a thousand households,—we think it would have been well, if the discredit cast upon temperance measures, and the discomfiture visited upon its advocates, had been accompanied by a less covert recognition of the evil and by a more obvious sympathy with its victims. Since the methods taken to insure self-control are insufficient, would it not have been possible to indicate better? Since Woodbury does not think abstinence to be the cure of intemperance, could he not justify his practice by a higher principle than self-indulgence, lay it on a deeper foundation than dilettanteism?

We regret, also, that in a book by Bayard Taylor there should have been found room for such a paragraph as this:—

"The churches in the village undertook their periodical 'revivals,' which absorbed the interest of the community while they lasted. It was not the usual season in Ptolemy for such agitations of the religious atmosphere,—but the Methodist clergyman, a very zealous and impassioned speaker, having initiated the movement with great success, the other sects became alarmed lest he should sweep all the repentant sinners of the place into his own fold. As soon as they could obtain help from Tiberius, the Baptists followed, and the Rev. Lemuel Styles was constrained to do likewise. For a few days the latter regained the ground he had lost, and seemed about to distance his competitors. Luckily for him,… the material for conversion, drawn upon from so many different quarters, was soon exhausted; but the rival churches stoutly held out, until convinced that neither had any further advantage to gain over the other."

No one who has given to the religious phenomena of the day the smallest degree of intellectual and sympathetic attention can fail to pronounce this a gross and ill-bred caricature. Ridicule is the legitimate weapon of Truth; but ridicule that strikes rudely and indiscriminately, wounding without benefiting, is not found in the hands of Christian courtesy. We regret these blemishes, and such as these, the more because we are persuaded that the effects produced were not intended by the author. We believe, not only from his previous reputation, but from the spirit of the book, which warms, deepens, and clarifies itself as it goes on, that he aimed only at results pure, healthful, and desirable. It is by no design of his, that young feet, already wavering downward, will not be strengthened to pause, to turn, to steady themselves, but will rather be lured on by his words. It is no purpose of his to make the crusts of Materialism harden still more hopelessly above the stifled soul. He designs to ridicule only that which is ridiculous. There are evidences of a purpose to relieve the darkness of his coloring in each instance by lines of light, but it is not made palpable enough for running readers. He has seen the weakness that generally develops itself in, and the hypocrisy that almost invariably clings to the skirts of a great popular movement, and it is these alone which he aims to bring down. In this he is right. He errs in that his vision is neither clear nor broad. He does not always wisely discriminate as to the nature or extent of the disease, or the effect of the remedy which he applies. The cause of the difficulty has baffled his researches. The people upon whom his strictures fall, and to whom strictures belong, will be inflamed, but they will not be enlightened; and they who do see the real nature of the movement, its bane as well as its blessing, and who are constantly laboring to separate the chaff from the wheat, will not be helped, but hindered, by his well-meant efforts.

But, as we intimated, the book, like fame, increases in going. Under all the wit and humor, which are often very charming, under all the satire, which is none the less enjoyable because occasionally half-hidden, under the somewhat multifarious machinery, which the peculiar structure of the book renders necessary, there rises slowly into view and presently into prominence the outline of a purpose as noble as it is rare. In the teeth of popular prejudice, Bayard Taylor has had the courage to take for his heroine a woman "strong-minded," austere in her faith, past her first youth, given to public speaking, and imbued, we might almost say to stubbornness, with ultra ideas of "woman's rights." True, he has given her to us in the most modified form possible to such a character, utterly pure, unselfish, true, refined, without ambition, impelled by the highest motives, and guided by the highest principles. But the conjunction of these two classes of qualities in one person is the real Malakoff. That accomplished and the work is done. In this conception lies the true originality of the book. In this attempt lies the true consciousness of power. He who can make his hero say,—"It was my profound appreciation of those very elements in your character which led you to take up these claims of woman and make them your own, that opened the way for you to my heart: I reverence the qualities, without accepting all the conclusions born of them,"—has a deeper insight than most of his fellows. He shows that he looks at things, and not at the traditions of things. He is not led away by the cry of the mob, and the gleam of gold so pure and solid almost changes into indignation our regret that he has ever suffered himself to be deceived by the glare of tawdry tinsel.

Yet even here he has not struck all truth. It is the most improbable thing in the world that any woman should have built up such a wall around herself as is represented here. It is morally impossible that such a woman as Hannah Thurston should have done it. It is simply unnatural. It might, perhaps, happen, just as a woman might happen to have been born with five fingers on each hand. But it is not with freaks of Nature, it is with Nature, that we have to deal. Girls may please themselves with fine-sounding phrases about equal powers and equal rights in marriage, but they generally vanish with the first approach of a living affection. No idea of independence or equality ever, we dare affirm, came between a great nature and its great love. No woman of exalted aims and large capacities, it may be safely said, will ever be held back from love, or even from marriage, by any scruples as to her relative standing. The stumbling-block in the way of such a woman as Hannah Thurston would not be a dread of the "submission of love," but rather of a submission without love, a submission of mere contiguity to somewhat hard, false, coarse, unjust, naming itself with a name to which it had no title. If she trusted her lover thoroughly, she would intrust all risks to love. She would know with her head and feel with her heart, that, with the chivalry, the intensity, the reverence, the elevation of such a sentiment as she imagined, there could be neither bondage nor freedom, neither mine nor thine, but a oneness that would bring all relations into harmony with itself. The very essence of love is humility, and at the same time its glory is that it abolishes all laws, all rights, all powers, and is to itself alone law, right, and power. By the completeness of self-abnegation may the footsteps of love be traced. This partially the author recognizes, choosing it for the conclusion of the whole matter, but erring in that he makes it come with resistance and reluctance, the conquest of love, instead of spontaneously and unconsciously, its necessary concomitant.

In the hero of the story and his relations to the heroine, with occasional questionable traits, we find often a generosity, delicacy, and devotion which give promise of good. A man who can conceive a character so much above the common level, where the common level has always been low, cannot fail by continued observation and candid thinking to rise still higher. Frequently already, seeming hardly to be conscious of it, he impinges upon a far-reaching, deep-lying, but generally unrecognized truth. When men shall have come to study the nature of woman, instead of haranguing about her duties, a great point will have been gained.

The blemishes which we have pointed out, and others which we have not pointed out, are only blemishes, and chiefly upon the surface. They mar, but they do not vitiate.

The limits of a magazine will not admit that adequate analysis and criticism which the ability of the book, both in point of subject and treatment, deserves. We have only space to say, that, making every allowance for every fault, it has the merit of being a pioneer, and an able pioneer, in a tract which has been hitherto, so far as we know, unbroken wilderness. Its author has not solved the problem,—he does not even understand all its conditions; but he is travelling in the direction of the true solution: and he offers us the rare, we had almost said the solitary, spectacle of a man and an opponent bringing to the discussion of the "Woman's-Rights question" an appreciable degree of sense, justice, and moral dignity.

RECENT AMERICAN PUBLICATIONS

RECEIVED BY THE EDITORS OF THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY

Manual of Instructions for Military Surgeons, on the Examination of Recruits and Discharge of Soldiers. With an Appendix, containing the Official Regulations of the Provost-Marshal-General's Bureau, and those for the Formation of the Invalid Corps, etc. Prepared at the Request of the U.S. Sanitary Commission. By John Ordronaux, M.D., Professor of Medical Jurisprudence in Columbia College, New York. New York. D. Van Nostrand. 12mo. pp. 238. $1.50.

Systems of Military Bridges in Use by the United States Army, those adopted by the. Great European Powers, and such as are employed in British India. With Directions for the Preservation, Destruction, and Reestablishment of Bridges. By Brigadier-General George W. Cullum, Lieutenant-Colonel Corps of Engineers U.S. Army, Chief of Staff of the General-in-Chief of the Armies of the United States. New York. D. Van Nostrand. 8vo. pp. vi., 236. $3.50

General Order No. 100, Adjutant-General's Office. Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field. Prepared by Francis Lieber, LL.D., and revised by a Board of Officers. New York. D. Van Nostrand. 16mo. paper, pp. 36. 25 cts.

A Treatise on Hygiene, with Special Reference to the Military Service. By William A. Hammond, M.D., Surgeon-General U.S. Army, Fellow of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, Member of the Philadelphia Pathological Society, of the Academy of Natural Sciences, of the American Philosophical Society, Honorary Corresponding Member of the British Medical Association, etc., etc. Philadelphia. J.B. Lippincott & Co. 8vo. pp. xvi., 604. $5.00.

A Supplement to Ure's Dictionary of Arts, Manufactures, and Mines, containing a Clear Exposition of their Principles and Practice. From the Last Edition. Edited by Robert Hunt, F.R.S., F.S.S., Keeper of Mining Records, etc., assisted by Numerous Contributors Eminent in Science and Familiar with Manufactures. Illustrated with Seven Hundred Engravings on Wood. New York. D. Appleton & Co. 8vo. pp. 1095. $7.00.