NOTICES OF THE PRESS.

Since the publication of the first number of Mr. LELAND'S version of "HEINE'S Pictures of Travel," the publisher has frequently realized from personal assurances and letters from eminent literary authorities, both in America and Europe, that such an undertaking was not only acceptable to the reading public, but that it has been executed with remarkable fidelity and spirit. He avails himself of this opportunity to return his sincerest thanks to those who have so kindly approved the work, including, of course, those members of the press who have favored it with examination and criticism.

The first translation of a classic work into another language is almost always an unenviable task, particularly when the work in question is of so very difficult a nature as the Reisebilder, and in which, as in our new lands" of the West, a very great proportion of the labor which they demand falls upon him who first breaks ground. In face of these facts, the publisher is both gratified and grateful that the numerous notices, which the work has received from the press, have been, almost without exception, of the most favorable nature, and that those journals, which had most frequently manifested a thorough familiarity with HEINE, have been the ones which have most decidedly praised the merits of Mr. LELAND'S translation.

The following selections will satisfy the reader, that the publisher's lebt of gratitude to the press is not without foundation :

The London Leader of September 1st, 1855, contains a long and brilliant review of Mr. Leland's translation of the Pictures of Travel, From which I extract the following:

Nature one day resolved to make a witty German. But as this preme paradox was not to be achieved all at once, it happened that the ardour of a great purpose, she mistook Hebrew blood for Geran, and while she was busy adding the wit, allowed the best moral nalities of the German to slip out of her hands. So, instead of the vitty Teuton she intended, she would have produced merely a Volirian Jew, speaking the German language, if she had not, perceiving er mistake before it was too late, superadded, as some compensaon for the want of morale, a passionate heart, blending its emotions ith the most delicate and imaginative sensibility to the beaules of earth and sky, and a supreme lyrical genius which could reave the wit, and the passion, and the imagination into songs light ad lovely as the rainbows on the spray of the summer torrent. "Thus it came to pass that we have that wonderful human com

pound, Heinrich Heine, a writer who is master of a German prose as light and subtle, and needle-pointed as Voltaire's French, and of a poetic style as crystalline, as graceful, and as musical as that of Geothe's best lyrics; but a writer who is destitute of the distinct moral conviction which often inspired Voltaire, and still more utterly destitute of the profound wisdom and the depth of love and reverence which roll like a deep river under the sparkling, dimpling surface of Goethe's song. Indeed, we know nothing more likely to inpress a reader with the grander elements of Goethe's mind than a comparison of his lyrics with Heine's, for the very reason that Heine quite equals Goethe in all the charms of mere song; and has one quality mingling itself with his lyrical power which Goethe had notnamely, wit; or rather to express it more specifically, French esprit. For, alien as this quality might seem to passionate love-songs and thrilling legendary pictures, such as form the majority of Heine's poems, it is, nevertheless, almost every where present, giving your rising tears the accompaniment of a laugh, and before you have lost the cold shudder at his spectral visions, appealing irresistibly to your sense of fun. We cannot agree with his very clever American translator, that Humor is Heine's grand characteristic. He certainly has humor-perhaps even enough to set up an inferior genius as a humorist-but we think it will be found that his greatest effects in prose, and most of the contrasts that startle us in his poetry arise from a Mephistophelean wit, a verneinender Geist, rather than from humor which affirms all that is genuinely human, instead of denying it, and is in fact, an exuberant sympathy acting in company with a sense of the ludicrous, while wit is the critical intellect acting in company with that same sense. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that there are many passages of Sterne-like humor in Heine, and herein he is least akin to the French, and most nearly allied to the broader, deeper German nature, which atones for the want of esprit by something which esprit will never supersede-loving earnestness."

"But it is time to turn from such rambling remarks to the object that suggested them-namely, the translation of Heine's Reisebilde by a very gifted American. Of Heine, more even than of the majority of poets, we must say he is untranslatably felicitous. Hence when we praise Mr. Leland's translation-and we do so very sincerely --we must not be understood to mean that it will give the English reader a true conception of Heine's genius. Mr. Leland has that grand requisite of a translator, rigorous faithfulness; he has also poetical sensibility, command of language, and an evidently acute perception of wit; in short he spoils Heine's poems perhaps as little as it is possible to spoil them in a translation. This may not seem to be high praise, but we firmly believe that it is the very highest praise that can ever be given to a translation of Heine's poems, and we recommend the reader who is hopeless of knowing these poems in the original to make his acquaintance with them through Mr. Leland's version."