For It is a comfort to think that fate still makes ample provision for the suburbs of university towns, and that Concord is but about ten miles from Cambridge. many years the two were "half-shire-towns" of the same county, and Emerson, as Knight of the half-shire, fitly shared the intellectual jurisdiction of his compeer, the President of the College. Indeed, he made his house, like that of Falkland, “a college in purer air"; and so inseparable has been the influence of his life from that of his books, that the whole has supplied for us "a university in less volume." It is the enviable lot of those who were pupils in this benig. nant seminary, that they can never know how much of their instruction came from the text-books and how much from the teacher. Thus the literary work of Emerson eludes the criticism of contemporaries, and awaits a colder audience which shall award its meed. It is now ten years since the "Conduct of Life" was published. Most of the present essays, though printed later, were written earlier than that volume, and some of them were read as lectures a quarter of a century ago. Is it, then, from early association that some of us find in them, or seem to find, a fresher inspiration than in the "Conduct of Life"? We fancy that they show more variety, and a more distinct organic life in each essay, while they are no less finished and scarcely less concentrated. There is a provoking trait about some of his later lectures, and they seem like stray sheets caught up at random; or to have what botanists call premorse roots, that seem as if bitten off arbitrarily at the end, and can stop any. where. But these have each a beginning, a middle, and an end, so that they seem alive and graceful, as well as nutritious and good. Literary ease and flexibility do not always advance with an author's years; as his thoughts deepen they sometimes press harder and harder on the vehicle of expression, and though his sympathies may mellow, his style does not. He is then in danger of becoming like the giant in the Norse Edda, who was choked by his own wisdom and needed a siphon for his relief. Far from our beloved Emerson be such a peril! but meanwhile there is a charm in the easier flow of his earlier essays, even though they be burdened with less weighty thought. We sigh at not finding in this volume that admirable lecture on "The Natural Method of Intellectual Philosophy," which many of us heard with such delight a dozen years ago, and which came nearer to a positive system than anything which Emerson has ever printed. Possibly it forms the basis for his present course on "The Natural History of Intellect," and if so it may well be withheld. There was in it material enough for twenty lectures, without doubt. But there is no such compensation for the loss of the essay on "War," first read as a lecture in 1838, and printed eleven years later in Miss Peabody's "Esthetic Papers. There are other omissions; but if, on the other hand, we looked through Emerson's whole works, we could find nothing to take precedure of the essays here printed on "Books," on "Eloquence," on “Works and Days," and on "Society and Solitude.” They are not surpassed by the "Method of Nature," nor by "Man Thinking." It is not enough to say that such papers as these constitute the high-water mark of American literature; it is not too much to say that they are unequalled in the literature of the age. Name, if you can, the Englishman or the Frenchman who, on themes like these, must not own himself second to Emerson. Bearing these in his hand, the resolute American traveller can fearlessly unfurl the stars and stripes in presence of the Académie itself, were it necessary, and yet not feel himself to be swerving from the traditional modesty of his race. The Heart of the Continent. A Record of Travel across the Plains and in Oregon, with an Examination of the Mormon Principle. By FITZHUGH LUDLOW. With Illustrations. New York: Hurd and Houghton. SINCE Mr. Ludlow made his explorations, some ten years ago, the Heart of the Continent has been visited by such numbers of travellers that it is wellnigh as stale and battered as the heart of a coquette entering upon her fifth or sixth season of flirtations. Only imagine how many romantic adorers have one after another wooed and won that prodigious organ! And shall a man whose passion is ten years old make us listen to his superannuated raptures about buffaloes, and sage-bush, and alkali, and antelopes, and parks, and the giant pines and domes of the Yosemite, and Brigham Young's capacity for self-government, and all the rest? It is rather late for Mr. Ludlow, we must confess, and we think that five hundred and six pages are a good many. Yet Mr. Ludlow is an easy writer, and practised in magazinery so well that he knows how to detect and detain the picturesque and the impressive wherever he finds it, and we readily fancy his book being read through. He is not so fine a hand that there are puzzling subtleties of feeling anywhere in his book; in fact, the savor is somewhat rank at times, and he throws you in whole collops of sentiment whenever he likes. In some ways he reminds you of travellers of an even remoter antiquity than 1861-62, and chiefly in the matter of being himself the hero of most of the adventures narrated, and the deus ex machina generally. He gets people out of terrible difficulties, unmasks hidden Mormons, protects an imprudent Frenchman from the consequences of his distrust of the Saints, cures an Englishman of a painful colic by the application of hot cloths, rescues himself from manifold embarrassments of all kinds, and comes out fresh and bold in a page of comment or description, and is ready with lance in rest for the next affair, it matters very little to him what it is. Such wonderfully good answers and retorts, too, as Mr. Ludlow makes! - not being once obliged, as most of us are, to wait for the occurrence of the happy thought "till next morning in bed." He understands everybody at a glance, and he such an old, shrewd traveller! But we must not praise him for these things alone, for his book has many other merits, more pertinent to the actual business of it. Whilst it is too literary at times, it is yet the most artistically written account of the heart of the continent which we have seen; and the style, where it has not been made too good, is very good indeed, — frank and facile. We always skip scientific knowledge when reading for our own entertainment, and we cannot speak with certainty of the quality of that shown by Mr. Ludlow ; but we respect its appearance, and we feel sure that his sketches of the different wild characters, white and red, whose acquaintance he made in his travels, are very pleasant. That account of the frontier family, Comstock, who, with all their pioneer life and their savage surroundings, were read in Longfellow and Dickens, and who dreamed of the East and of cities as people here dream of the plains and solitude, has some thing very charming in it; and the enthu siasm of the head of the family for Henry Ward Beecher is none the less admirable because he expresses it by saying, that "he would give more to see that man than the biggest buffalo bull that ever ran." Mr. Ludlow is apt in the preservation of the local flavors of speech, and contributes to our knowledge of the manifold Western use of the word outfit the phrase of a hunter: "He came back from among the Indians with the prettiest outfit of small-pox you ever see." Of the Indians he does not tell us much that is new, - perhaps there is nothing new to tell, — and he can do little to relieve the national embarrassment concerning those unpleasant brethren, whom we all feel that it would be hard to clean and cure of their savagery, and whom we yet do not all seem to see it our duty to kill, -though this is the self-devoted creed of the Plains. Perhaps the most interesting - certainly the solidest and most thoughtful - part of the book is the Appendix, which is devoted to the consideration of Mormonism. This Mr. Ludlow believes merely the result of the Judaizing tendency which has always existed in the body of Christianity; and while he deprecates any Congressional meddling with polygamy as unwise, he predicts that as soon as Utah becomes a State with a republican form of government, the church, being divorced from the political power, must perish. As to polygamy, he thinks most Mormons marry more than one wife to enhance their pleasures in the next world rather than in this, that they are not sensualists, but fanatics. He believes they are sincerely religious men in their way. They look forward to Brigham Young's death as a moment of great calamity, if not ruin, to the Church; for none among them is recognized as able to succeed him. If Young dies soon, the Mormon question, according to Mr. Ludlow, solves itself; if not, the admission of Utah as a State solves it. Some of our author's sketches of the leading Mormons as Kimball, Porter Rockwell, and Young-are valuable, as being done by a better hand than most of their portraits; yet we find a disheartening sameness and ineffectualness in all accounts of Mormon life, to which Mr. Ludlow's is no exception. We imagine that the Prophet has had revelations upon the subject of interviewing which have enabled him to cope miraculously with that subtle spirit. The Bazar Book of Decorum. The Care of the Person, Manners, Etiquette, and Ceremonials. New York: Harper and Brothers. UNDER many things that otherwise could hardly be borne, the mind is upheld by the hope that in a better state, even on earth, such troubles will be unknown; and we cling to the belief that in a happier and humaner civilization that odious device of society, the polished gentleman, and that invention of the enemy, the accomplished lady, will not exist, and that naturally there will be no books to teach the imitation of their abominable perfection. Men and women born into rich and fashionable society will always be au fait in its customs; and people whose wish to rise into that kind of society is cruelly granted will not be kept from betraying their unfashionable origin by all the behavior-books that ever were written. In fact, most behavior-books seem to hint at a pathetic self-consciousness in their authors; they read like the painful warnings of experience, and they are commonly of such a vulgar tone, that it seems better not to seek the difficult circles for which they fit their reader. All the wisdom needed for the career of the ordinary republican aspirant can be condensed into three rules, which he may write down on his reversible paper cuff: 1. Keep out of fine society; 2. Be cleanly, simple, and honest; 3. Never be ashamed of a blunder. Everything beyond these is vanity. But we suppose that the ordinary republican aspirant will not put up with this succinctness yet a while; and meantime here is happily "The Bazar Book of Decorum," composed in the most elegant language that could be got in the dictionary, and overflowing with fashionable knowledge. The style is really a marvel of genius and learning, and places the ordinary objects in thought and nature in a light so novel and surprising that you feel the freshest interest in them. Would you ever suppose, for example, that you had such a thing as this on your face? "The nose, as is well known,” — observe the kind intimacy with which this great author stoops to the common mind, “is the organ of smell; for this purpose it is endowed now he rises again" with a pair of nerves, called the olfactory, whose abounding filaments pierce the many holes and cover the multiple surfaces of the light and porous structure termed the spongy bone, which lies And at the root of each nostril." We call this a fine diction, and a beautiful use of a familiar object for the illustration of literary power; but what do you say to a warning against trying to darken the eyes by dropping ink into them, when couched in terms like these? "Not only does a decorous taste emphatically condemn these practices, which give unmistakable evidences of the painted Jezebel, but prudence forbids them." Yet this is not more magnificent than our author's definition of laughter. "Laughter," he says, without looking on the book, and as it were with one hand tied behind him, -- "laughter, which is the ordinary physical manifestation of the sentiment of mirth, is peculiarly favora ble to health. Its action, starting with the lungs, diaphragm, and contiguous muscles, is conveyed to the whole body, 'shaking the sides,' and producing that general jellylike vibration, of which we are so agreeably conscious when under its influence." concerning the saddest thing in the world he is as nobly ready and voluble as concerning the gayest: "The human body even in the unconsciousness of death continues to be the object of a punctilious observance of ceremony. The mourning relatives are usually spared many of the painful details of funereal civility by the convenient officious. ness of the undertaker, upon whom devolve the chief arrangements of the burial and its attendant formalities." This fitly introduces the subject of funerals, and is so pertinent and just that (if our author will allow us humbly to form ourselves upon his delightful manners) we are sensible of our inability to withhold from it the meed of a grateful encomium. We must likewise praise him when he calls the female effort to make a small waist, "reducing the centre of the body to an almost impalpable tenuity," as he does in preparing us for a fact that makes us know him at once for a person of the highest breeding: "As we stood admiring that most perfect conception of female grace, the Venus of Milo in the Louvre, we took from the fair woman hanging upon our arm her pocket-handkerchief, and made a comparative measurement of the ancient and modern beauties,❞— and did not get his ears boxed, the lucky dog! Of course, a man who can write like this does not embarrass himself much with the prescription of forms and particular rules for behavior. He would guard his reader against the habit of passing his pocket-comb through his hair at table, but we believe he nowhere especially tells him not to pick his teeth with his fork. The author is not only a very learned man, as you may judge from his language, but a person of general polite reading, and he chooses to treat mostly of the loftier aspects of his theme, as when, instead of telling us some such thing as that a gentleman always uses his handkerchief in blowing his nose, he touches upon a topic like the control of the emotions and mellifluously polysyllables forth: "A well-bred person is ordinarily disinclined to make a public demonstration of his most affectionate feelings and tenderest sentiments." He is also replete - of course he would say replete — with appropriate anecdotes of the fashionable and literary world, and he commonly ends his delicious discourses with one of these, teaching, for instance, that you must not be bashful, though Hawthorne, "with a head like that of Jove, and a natural majesty that might have become the throne of Olympus, would shrink, blush, hang his head, and hesitate in speech before a stranger like an awkward school-boy." He is familiar with Tennyson, as we know by his quoting him in this wise : "Gorgonizing him all over with a stony British stare." We find our author in every way admirable in fact, lofty in thought, proper in sentiment, of a very subtle and characteristic humor, and a severe morality. He is a companion for the toilet and the centre-table, for the study and, the drawing-room, in whom we think the reader will find an unfailing pleasure (and profit, of course); and we have quite made up our mind when, in sitting for our mental photograph, we come to that bewildering question, "What book, not the Bible, would you part with last?" to say, "The Bazar Book of Decorum." Haydn and Other Poems. By the Author of "Life Below." New York: Hurd and Houghton. WITH "other poems one need hardly ever concern one's self, and we shall not particularize any of these here. But "Haydn" is a performance which we should treat respectfully, if it had no other merit than the earnest spirit in which it is written. The author has just ideas of the poet's office, and if not quite a poet yet, — he is evidently a young man, and our business is not prophecy, he has poetry in him, and he gets flavors and colors of it into his verse. It is poetry of a grave and thoughtful sort, and the expression is simple and dignified, with fewer lapses into dulness and flatness than we expect in a new author. We do not mean to say that, on the whole, he has made the story of Haydn's love for the young girl, who becomes a nun that her sister may marry the composer, very interesting; but he has thought it thoroughly, he has conceived several characters; he has told the tale unaffectedly, with self-control and with self-respect; and he says things which if they do not greatly startle or surprise, certainly arrest notice. For example, the sisters have been talking together of Haydn, and the one whom he loves says of the one whom he had been intended to marry : "It was strange With what abhorrence shrank my soul from her At times while gazing on grim helmets there, "I would not dare to mould another thus. We find in the poem such thoughtful passages as this: "Our characters Expand through lifetime as the trees expand. Each passing season that encircles them Leaves from its clasp a ring; the ring remains. So our past deeds remain about ourselves." And this: "Do you know, You women, always will match thoughts to things? You love when comes a look that smiles on you. We men are more creative. We love love, And here is a pretty and tender fancy, in the regret of the young girl who is not helpful in her lover's illness: "Sometimes I leaned above his couch, and grieved We have called this pretty and tender, but generally we feel concerning our author that he is wanting in fineness, or subtlety, or whatever is a better name for access to the reader's sympathy, and that what poetry he has comes from his head rather than his heart; and it is said not to be well to begin SO. With excellent theories of artistic execution, moreover, he has some faults of versification, and occasionally he sins against taste, as in this case where he mixes the familiar and the poetic-conventional in his diction: "Your room was dreadfully Disordered, dear. Our sire just came from it. He was so cross." But it is right to say that this is not a characteristic sin. Life of John Gibson, Sculptor. Edited by LADY EASTLAKE. London: Longmans, Green, & Co. THE life of John Gibson furnishes a striking instance of a born artist, whose early passion for sculpture, and lifelong enthusiasm and industry in his profession, if they did not raise him to the first rank of original creators, show at least how much can be done, where an absorbing devotion to art is steadily met and encouraged by wealth and aristocracy. It is true, in his boyhood and youth he had to struggle with poverty and other thwarting circumstances; but once fairly started on his career, all seems to have gone smoothly with him; and from an early age to his last day, when he held in his paralyzed hand the telegram from the Queen inquiring about his health, he enjoyed the brightest sunshine of British fame and patronage. Gibson was born in Wales in 1790, and was the son of a Welsh market-gardener. When about seven years old he began to draw from nature and from memory on his father's casting-slate. When about nine, his father determined to emigrate to America; but arriving in Liverpool, his mother, who was a woman of strong will, concluded, when she saw the great ships in the docks, never to set her foot upon one of them. So the family settled in Liverpool, and “Jack” was sent to school there, but continued to draw, sometimes in school-hours, once getting severely punished therefor. At the age of fourteen he was bound apprentice to the trade of cabinet-maker; but after remaining a year became disgusted, and persuaded his master to change his indenture and bind him to wood-carving or ornamenting furniture. Here he served another year, till he fell in with a flower-carver in marble, which greatly excited him. This man introduced him to the Messrs. Francis, who had marble works on Brownlow Hill. Mr. Gibson says: "They employed a Prussian workman to model and execute small figures, — his name was Lüge, afterwards he became the head workman to Sir Francis Chantrey. No words can give an idea of the impression made on me by the models and works I saw there. In my leisure hours during the second year of my apprenticeship I modelled in clay, copying what casts I could procure. I soon began to feel the greatest contempt for my line of wood-carving, and I became very melancholy. One day I ventured to ask leave of Mr. Francis to copy in clay a small head of Bacchus by Mr. Lüge, which enchanted me with its beauty. When finished I brought my copy with the original to show Mr. Francis. He confessed that the copy was so exact that he could hardly distinguish one from the other. But at the same time he gave me to understand that, having paid a large price to the Prussian for all the models in his place, he could not allow them to be copied, and that he should lend me no more. Such an unexpected reverse of fortune fell upon my ardent soul like the chill of death. I left him in unutterable depression of spirits." The young artist tried to induce Mr. Francis to purchase his indenture from the cabinet-makers, so that he might serve the remainder of his seven years in the practice of sculpture. But they refused to part with him on any terms, saying he was the most industrious lad they ever had. Gibson, however, persevered in his determination to |