The author of this volume is one of the most profoundly meditative writers living. We are not aware that his productions have had an extended circulation out of New England, where they are very popular, and if they have not, we hardly know of a better service we could do our readers than to advise them to seek his companionship. Martyria and the present work are two books which no one can read without being benefitted—without having a deeper sense of the "dread soul within him," and without feeling a warmer love of his race. "Euthanasy" is one of those volumes which win their way into the heart with a soft unconscious persuasiveness, and abide there when they have once found an entrance. The author's spirit is rich, sweet, thoughtful, tender—seeking the beautiful and the good by a spontaneous instinct, and discerning them often, with the subtilty of purity in things which seem valueless to the common eye—and while it soars into the highest regions of spiritual contemplation, can still survey practical life with a wisdom and sagacity which almost seem incompatible with its loftiness. The truth is that the author possesses one of the rarest things ever seen in this world—a truly spiritual mind, in which there is established no divorce between the practical and the spiritual, the common and the ideal. Spirituality with him is a life—no hearsay or imagination, but an experience. He consequently spiritualizes the human and humanizes the spiritual.
The work, in addition to its own stores of original thought, has many a golden sentence and rhyme from the meditative poets of Germany and England, which lend it increased richness and beauty.
Ellen Middleton; a Tale. By Lady Georgiana Fullerton, Author of Grantly Manor. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1 vol. 12mo.
Grantly Manor is a novel of high and peculiar excellence, and has had a great run. Its readers threw themselves upon the present work as soon as it was published, their expectations whetted by the memory of the last. The result has been comparative disappointment. The truth is Ellen Middleton preceded Grantly Manor, and is altogether a less pleasing production. Considered, however, as the first work of the author, it is rich in promise and by no means insignificant in performance. The characters are strongly drawn and well discriminated, and the passions with which it deals are of that potent kind which test a novelist's strength and daring. The difficulty with the book is not its lack of power, but its lack of homely interest. The characters and incidents are too much made up in the author's mind—enclosed, as it were, in a peculiar domain, and colored by one peculiar experience of life—to give that satisfaction which results from a delineation of actual life, or from vivid and beautiful ideal creations. There is too much agony, and anguish, and hyperbolical emotion, and splitting of the heart, and such like rioting in spiritual misery and ruin. The elegance, eloquence and sweetness of the author's style, and the high moral and religious character of her mind, appear, however, in Ellen Middleton as in Grantly Manor, and with the advantage of as good a story would produce as agreeable an impression.
History of Mary, Queen of Scotts. By Jacob Abbott. With Engravings. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1 vol. 16mo.
This is one of a series of popular histories which Mr. Abbott is preparing for his countrymen. The tone and object will considerably differ from the common historical works in circulation. Mr. Abbott considers that the situation and principles of American readers require views of historical events different from those they would obtain from foreigners. The present work is devoted to one of the most romantic and thrilling stories in historical literature—the Life of Mary, Queen of Scotts. It is elegantly and truthfully written, and the mechanical execution of the volume is exceedingly beautiful.
Macaulay's History of England.
The Harpers have received from the author, in sheets, the first and second volumes of "The History of England, from the Accession of James II., by T. B. Macaulay." For these they pay one hundred guineas a volume. The work itself will doubtless create as great a stir as any book published within the last twenty years. Every body is curious especially to discover the style which Macaulay has adopted—that of his Essays being too brisk, brilliant and epigrammatic for an historian. It will probably be something like that of the Preface to the "Lays of Ancient Rome," or that of his latest article on Lord Chatham.