Spaniards and their Country. By Richard Ford. Part 2. New York: Wiley & Putnam.
The second portion of this work is as amusing as the first. It does not give us a high opinion of the author, if we except the gratitude we naturally feel to a person who sacrifices his personal dignity for the pleasure of his reader. The book is flippant, light-hearted, and often shallow, with the egotism and arrogance of the Englishman, modified by the graceful impudence of the Parisian; but it is singularly acute in the detection of the qualities which immediately underlie the superficies of national character, and singularly brilliant in style and description. Without any very sparkling passages, its tone of pleasantry is uniformly sustained, and draws the reader on to the conclusion by the fascination of its volatile spirit. The subject is comparatively new, and rich in materials of interest. These advantages the author has skillfully improved, and made a book worth a hundred “Tours in Spain,” written by gentlemen with a philosophical tone of mind. There is a spirit of enjoyment in the book which is communicated to the mind of the reader. As the author, good-naturedly, takes the world as it is, the reader is content to take him as he is; and thus his coxcombry excites no anger, and his pleasantry is left to operate undisturbed.
Hyperion. By H. W. Longfellow. Fourth Edition. Boston: Wm. D. Ticknor & Co. 1 vol. 12mo.
This is an elegant and tasteful edition of an exquisite book. It has been deservedly the most successful of the author’s prose compositions. Indeed, as a proof of the fertility of Longfellow’s imagination, the delicacy and sweetness of his sentiment, and his general poetic view of nature and life, we should appeal to this romance as readily as to his poems. It is full of delicious imagery, beautiful description, and striking thoughts, and the style is richly sensuous and musical. The strain of sentiment running through the book, however, is not strong and bracing enough for our climate. Its general tone is too much that of a sad sweetness, though passages are replete with a firmer and sterner feeling. It reminds one more of Fletcher than Milton; of the “Faithful Shepherdess” than of “Comus.” The leading characteristic of Longfellow’s mind is that peculiar blending of sensation with imagination, commonly called sensuousness—a characteristic of all poetic genius, but which is apt to bewitch the soul with a sense of the beauty of things, to the forgetfulness of their other qualities and relations, and by this forgetfulness to lead the mind away from the contemplation of the highest intellectual and moral beauty. “Hyperion,” however, ranks among the first books of its kind in English letters, and might be appropriately entitled, “Prose, by a Poet.”
Chefs-d’Œuvre Dramatiques de la Langue Française. Par A. G. Collot. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1 vol. 12mo.
This is an excellent French Reader, worth a thousand of the common collections going under the name. It contains whole dramas by Corneille, Racine, Voltaire, Molière, Piron, Scribe, and Berquin, carefully edited, with explanations to facilitate the progress of the student. Such a work has long been wanted. It enables the student to study the French language as used by some of the master-spirits among Frenchmen. As a collection of five dramas, also, it will be interesting to many who understand the language, but are unable to purchase the whole works of the authors from whom the plays are selected.