Mary Howitt, who has already endeared herself to the hearts of all children by her many fascinating and interesting publications for the young, is about to undertake the editorship of a new juvenile magazine the first number of which was expected to appear in June.
The lectures of Niebuhr on Ancient History, translated from the German, with additions and corrections, by Dr. L. Schmitz, once a pupil of the historian, will shortly be published. The work consists of three volumes, comprising the history of all the nations of antiquity, with the exception of that of Rome. In his account of the Asiatic Empires and of Egypt, Niebuhr is reported to have foretold, more than twenty years ago, the splendid discoveries which have been made in our days by Mr. Layard and by others. By far the greater portion of the work is devoted to the history of the Greeks and Macedonians.
A translation has appeared, by Leonora and Joanna Horner, of Hans Christian Oersted's Soul of Nature. Professor Oersted died last year at the age of seventy-four, a few months after a jubilee was held in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of his eminent services at the University of Copenhagen. In 1836 he attended the British Association at Southampton, at the closing general meeting of which Sir John Herschel pronounced a high eulogy of the Danish philosopher, and described the new fields of research which he had opened up, including that important discovery which has led to the invention of the electric telegraph. A brief memoir of Oersted's life and labors is prefixed to the volume. Few men have so combined the patience and labor of experimental research with the genius and boldness of philosophical speculation. The writings of Oersted are eminently suggestive as well as instructive; and with the researches on electricity, magnetism, and other branches of natural science, there are interspersed many wonderful discourses on the relation of the material and the spiritual, of the body and "the soul in nature."
Of English literary gossip we have two or three stray fragments worth setting down. The one is, that Tennyson is busy with a new poem, of a totally different order from any he has yet published, unless the fragment of the Morte d'Arthur be counted; another is, that the gay and brilliant author of The Bachelor of the Albany has nearly completed a new novel of a philosophical and satirical turn. Thackeray, whose historical novel was to have been published last Christmas, has not finished much more than half of his work.
Johannes Ronge, resident in England, announces as in preparation, a new work, to be published by subscription, on The Reformation of the Nineteenth Century, or the Religion of Humanity—a subject, tasking the highest powers.