Mr. Chapin is a Boston clergyman, of strong and cultivated intellect, and eloquent both as a writer and speaker. The present little volume is full of deep feeling and fine reflection, and will go right to the hearts of those for whom it was especially written. As a literary production it well sustains the author’s reputation. The style is nervous and animated, the topics are well chosen and well treated, and a tone of earnestness gives meaning and character to every page. A great deal is compressed in a small compass.
The Months. By William H. C. Hosmer. Boston: Wm. D. Ticknor & Co. 1 vol. 12mo.
We have read this unpretending little volume with great pleasure. Its gifted author unites to a fervid and sparkling imagination a profound and enthusiastic love of Nature, and a rare and poetical appreciation of its beauties. It is a daring task to undertake the description of the seasons after Thomson; but Mr. Hosmer has succeeded in presenting the distinctive features of our ever changing and ever beautiful American scenery, with a grace and truthfulness that will challenge the admiration of every reader of taste. “Each of the within,” say the neat and modest preface, “is marked by its own distinctive features, clothed in its appropriate garb, and hallowed by the recollection of the events which have occurred during its stay. The year which came with the one closes with the other. There is, in this constant, never-ending change, something congenial to the nature of man, which is stamped on every thing around him. Were our skies to be ever of an azure blue, clear and unclouded, we should soon become wearied with the sameness of their aspect.
“Who would be doomed to gaze upon
A sky without a cloud or sun?”
We select, as a seasonable and gratifying specimen of the author’s manner, the following, from his description of October:
The partridge, closely ambushed, hears
The crackling leaf—poor, timid thing!
And to a thicker covert steers