Mr. Street's Poem is a polished and graceful description of the romantic scenery of the Mohawk Valley, interspersed with several striking Indian legends, comparing the tranquil happiness of the present day, with the carnage and misery of the old warfare. Mr. Street gives a pleasing picture in the following animated verses:
View the lovely valley now!
Villages strew, like jewels on a chain,
All its bright length. Whole miles of level grain,
With leagues of meadow-land and pasture-field,
Cover its surface; gray roads wind about,
O'er which the farmer's wagon clattering rolls,
And the red mail-coach. Bridges cross the streams,
Roofed, with great spider-webs of beams within.
Homesteads to homesteads flash their window-gleams,
Like friends they talk by language of the eye;
Upon its iron strips the engine shoots,
(That half-tamed savage with its boiling heart
And flaming veins, its warwhoop and its plume.
That seems to fly in sullen rage along—
Rage at its captors—and that only waits
Its time to dash its victims to quick death).
Swift as the swallow skims, that engine fleets
Through all the streaming landscape of green field
And lovely village. On their pillared lines,
Distances flash to distances their thoughts,
And all is one abode of all the joy
And happiness that civilization yields.
Harper and Brothers have republished from the English edition Lord Holland's Foreign Reminiscences, edited by his son, Henry Edward, Lord Holland—a book which has excited great attention from the English press, and will be read with interest by the lovers of political anecdote in this country. It is filled with rapid, gossiping notices of the principal European celebrities of the past generation, and devotes a large space to personal recollections of the Emperor Napoleon. Lord Holland writes in an easy conversational style, and his agreeable memoirs bear internal marks of authenticity.
Jane Bouverie, by Catherine Sinclair, is a popular English novel (republished by Harper and Brothers), intended to sketch a portrait of true feminine loveliness, without an insipid formality and without any romantic impossibilities of perfection. The denouement has the rare peculiarity of not ending in marriage, the heroine remaining in the class of single ladies, designated by the author as par excellence "The Sisters of England."
London Labor and the London Poor, by Henry Mayhew (republished by Harper and Brothers), is the title of a work of the deepest interest and importance to all who wish to obtain a comprehensive view of the present condition of industry and its rewards in the metropolis of Great Britain. It consists of the series of papers formerly contributed by the author to the Morning Chronicle, entirely rewritten and enlarged by the addition of a great variety of facts and descriptions. The author has devoted his attention for some time past to the state of the working classes. He has collected an immense number of facts, illustrative of the subject, which are now brought to light for the first time. His evident sympathies with the poor do not blind his judgment. His statements are made after careful investigation, and show no disposition to indulge in theoretic inferences. As a vivid picture of London life, in the obscure by-ways, concerning which little is generally known, his work possesses an uncommon value. It is to be issued in successive parts, illustrated with characteristic engravings, the first of which only has yet appeared in the present edition.
Harper and Brothers have published a new English novel by the author of Mary Barton, entitled The Moorland Cottage, a pleasing domestic story of exquisite beauty.