He was a native of Massachusetts. His original name was Small, and he was born in Salem, in the year of grace 1790; at sixteen apprenticed to J. T. Buckingham, of Boston; at twenty-one had his name changed to H. S. Ellenwood; in 1820 emigrated to North Carolina; and on the 2d of April, 1843, he died, in Wilmington, in that state, having just established there the Daily Advertiser. We suspect that, in literature at least, all charges of "injustice to the South," are as ill founded as this.
The American Gift Books for the present season surpass any hitherto published, both as regards literature and art. The Home Book of the Picturesque, published by Mr. Putnam, is the finest combination of all needful qualities for such a work, that has ever appeared in the English language. The late Fenimore Cooper (of whose admirable article we publish a large portion in preceding pages), Miss Susan Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, W. C. Bryant, N. P. Willis, Alfred B. Street, Bayard Taylor, and Dr. Bethune, are among the contributors, and Durand, Huntington, Cole, Cropsey, &c., furnish pictures, from the most striking, beautiful, and least-known scenery in America. The publishers of the world do not this year furnish a volume more admirable. The Book of Home Beauty, containing exquisitely engraved portraits of some of the most distinguished women in American society, by Charles Martin, with letter-press by Mrs. Kirkland, is another fine quarto; and The Memorial, an octavo, written by Nathanael Hawthorne, N. P. Willis, G. P. R. James, R. B. Kimball, Dr. Mayo, W. G. Simms, Mrs. Hewitt, Mrs. Oakes Smith, and others, is very much above any "Keepsake" or "Souvenir" ever before printed in England or in America.
We have new volumes of Poems, by Messrs. Longfellow, Bayard Taylor, and R. H. Stoddard, from the press of Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, of which appropriate notices are deferred until the next month.
Messrs. Appleton have a series of works, equally remarkable for typographical and pictorial magnificence and literary interest. Christmas with the Poets is admitted to be, on the whole, the most admirably executed production of the printing press; The Women of Early Christianity, written by eminent authors, and edited by the Rev. Mr. Spencer, presents attractively the domestic romance of religious history, with seventeen very excellent engravings, making an imperial octavo, in the style of that remarkably popular series, the Women of the Bible, the Women of the Old and New Testament, and Our Saviour with Prophets and Apostles, all of which are now published in styles to suit the cabinet of art, the drawing-room table, or the library. Another very interesting and richly illustrated work from this house is The Land of Bondage, by Dr. Wainwright, corresponding with the same author's splendid volume, The Pathways and Abiding Places of Our Lord. The Appletons also publish for the coming holidays Mrs. Jameson's most successful work, the Beauties of the Court of Charles the Second, with twenty-one finely engraved portraits, and The Queens of England, by Agnes Strickland, with eighteen portraits—a work of which the fame is as extensive as a love of art or an admiration of woman; and Lyrics of the Heart, a very finely illustrated collection of the poems of Alaric A. Watts. The other illustrated works from this house are enumerated in the advertising pages at the end of this magazine, to which we ask attention.
[The Fine Arts.]
A series of four compositions representing the Seasons, by Calame, a Swiss artist, is highly praised in the Grenzboten, as something altogether original and superior to the technical traditions of the schools. They were painted for a Russian gentleman, and were exhibited for a short time in Berlin. Spring is an Italian or Grecian landscape of the antique world, and the time is morning; Summer is a German scene and the time noon; Autumn is from the lake country of Switzerland and the time late afternoon; Winter is a late evening scene with moonlight.