Poems. By Frances Sargent Osgood. With Illustrations by Huntington, Darley, Cushman, Osgood, etc. Philadelphia: A. Hart. 1 vol. 8vo.
This beautiful volume, the finest in point of pictorial illustrations of a beautiful series, deserves a much more extended notice than we are capable of giving it at present. Mrs. Osgood occupies, among American poets, a place peculiarly her own, where she is without a peer, and almost without a rival. She is the most lyrical of our poets, her nature being of that fluid character which readily pours itself out in song, and quick and sensitive to impressions almost to a fault. A hint from an object is taken, and instantly her soul surrenders itself to the impression, and sings it as if her whole life was concentrated in the emotion of the moment. Her mind, being thus so readily impassioned, glides easily into various forms of character and peculiarities of situation, which she has never actually experienced. Most of the songs in the volume, though they burn and beat as if the writer’s life-blood was circling through them, are essentially dramatic lyrics—the position of the author being an imaginative not a personal one.
A long article might be written on the purity, delicacy, tenderness and strength of feeling which this book evinces, and the exquisite melody and richness of the verse. The signs of a sweet and passionate poetic nature, seeking the ideal by a fine instinct, and finding in song the appropriate expression of its inward harmony, are over the whole volume; and we trust its bird-like music will win for it a place in American homes by the side of the more meditative works of Bryant and Longfellow.
Greenwood Leaves. A Collection of Stories and Letters. By Grace Greenwood. Second Edition. Boston: Ticknor, Reid & Fields. 1 vol. 12mo.
This volume, eloquent in style and entertaining in matter, beyond almost any similar work which has been issued for years, was published but a month or two ago, and has already reached a second edition. The materials of which it is composed are essays and stories originally contributed to different periodicals, and apparently dashed off, without a thought of their being eventually collected and made into a book. The impression which the whole leaves upon the mind, notwithstanding the separate parts were thus composed, is eminently an individual one, and indicates that the authoress has sufficient force of being and character to write in all varieties of mood without parting with her personality, without assuming to be what she is not. In short, she is a contradiction in fact to the Mahometan doctrine, assented to by many Christians, that women have no souls. The present volume indicates a soul, and a broad and powerful one—a soul to feel and to represent with equal intensity the heroic in conduct and the tender in sentiment; a soul which penetrates every faculty of her mind, whether it be understanding or humor, with a vitality, and flashes out, in some passages, in the very eloquence of disinterestedness and heroism. The defect of her mind, at present, seems to be its tendency to exaggeration—to transfer to objects the emotions they excite in herself, and to make them stand for qualities which they only rouse in enthusiastic natures like her own. The volume is splendid in promise, and with all its merit rather suggests than limits her capacity. A mind so fresh, active, powerful and impassioned as hers, cannot fail to reach the high excellence on which her eye is evidently fixed.
The Annals of the Queens of Spain, By Anita George. New York: Baker & Scribner. 1 vol. 12mo.
This work is introduced with the high endorsement of Prescott, the historian, and is worthy even of his commendation. The authoress is an accomplished Spanish lady, who has long resided in the United States, and who writes English with ease and dignity. The subject is entirely new, and the materials gathered from sources of which the general reader is profoundly ignorant. As a work of industry and research, therefore, it is of considerable importance to the student of history; but the authoress has contrived to make it equally interesting to the common reader, by the variety of novel circumstances she has introduced, and her anecdotes of court life. The present volume contains the Gothic queens, those of Oviedo and Leon, of Arragon and of Castile, comprehending a thousand years, from 415 to 1475. The early period to which the volume is confined, though it makes each biography short, makes each full of surprising matter. In the hundred queens presented to us, there are all varieties of feminine nature exhibited in connection with enough remarkable and romantic events to form the plots of numerous novels and dramas.