Let me, most loving of you all,
Say, not a tear must o’er her fall—
“He giveth His beloved sleep!”
Stars that Have Set in MDCCCXLII.—Among the dead of the year now drawing to a close, America laments her Marsh and Channing, and Europe, Sismondi and some less brilliant luminaries.
The Rev. James Marsh, D.D. was, at the time of his death, the third day of July, Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy in the University of Vermont. He was a calm, chaste scholar, an earnest and profound thinker, and a powerful and eloquent advocate of the highest principles of religion and philosophy, with the perfect simplicity and grandeur of whose life were blended the rarest virtues that adorn humanity. His principal published writings, excepting a few articles in the leading reviews, and some translations from the German, are devoted to those high and spiritual principles of philosophy, of which Coleridge and Kant were the most celebrated European exponents. We are pleased to learn that Professor Torrey, one of the dearest friends of the departed, is now superintending the publication of a complete edition of his works.
The name of William Ellery Channing has been long familiar to the readers of America and Great Britain. He was equally popular in both countries, and in both was regarded as one of the greatest authors of the age. The first edition of his collected writings we believe was published some five or six years since in Glasgow, and the last, in six octavo volumes, in Boston, in the winter of 1840. We presume his later productions, unprinted sermons, etc.—sufficient to fill several additional volumes—will soon be published, with his memoirs. Doctor Channing was for a long period the leading divine of the Unitarian belief, and though an ardent controvertist, was regarded by all men with love and reverence. The purity of his life, his high aims, his candor, and the dignity and beauty of his diction, won for him a reputation that will endure when most of the names now prominent in the world of letters are forgotten. He died in Bennington, in Vermont, on his return way from an excursion among the Green Mountains in search of health, on the second day of October.
John Charles Leonard de Sismondi was one of the most celebrated historical, political and æsthetical writers of the time. He died near Geneva, on the twenty-fifth of June, in his sixty-ninth year. He was the author of New Principles of Political Economy, A History of the Italian Republics, A History of the Literature of Southern Europe, A History of France, Julia Severn, a romance, and several other works, making in the aggregate about one hundred and fifty volumes, in the French editions. As a historian he has rarely been surpassed, and in every department of letters he exercised a powerful influence for nearly half a century.
Mr. James Grahame, author of the excellent History of the United Slates which bears his name; Sir Robert Kerr Porter, the traveler; Theodore E. Hook, the novelist, biographer, and dramatic writer; and Robert Mudie, author of several works on natural history, etc. were better known in this country than any of the other literary characters who have died in Europe during the present year.
New Books.—We received several new works too late to be noticed properly in our present number, of which we have space to mention particularly only Mr. Norman’s “Rambles in Yucatan,” and Mr. Lester’s observations on “The Condition and Fate of England,” both from the press of Messrs. Langley, of New York. The first is an exceedingly interesting work, and the last quite as good as the same author’s “Glory and Shame of England.” We shall endeavor to do them full justice in our Magazine for January.