Miss Bremer has passed the winter and spring in the south and west, where she has been received with much hospitality, and detained with the affection she seems every where to inspire. Within a few weeks she has visited Florida, with a family of her friends from Charleston, and she has given very careful attention, under the most favorable circumstances, to the institutions of the southern states. She is now on her way through Tennessee and Virginia to New-York, and will soon return to Sweden, by way of London.
H. Balliere has just published Vestiges of Civilization, or the Ætiology of History, Religious, Æsthetical, Political and Philosophical. It appears to be written with much ability, but we are by no means inclined to believe in the truth of the author's views. He applies to civilization the processes which the author of the Vestiges of Creation applied to Natural History; and without attaining to the fame of that work, the Vestiges of Civilization will probably share its condemnation.
All our readers who were accustomed to read the journals twenty years ago, will remember Shocco Jones, the immortal defender of the fame of North Carolina. We had thought the mortal part of him was sent to the bourne he was so fond of describing in fine rhetoric when he wrote duel-challenges until a few days ago, when a friend advised us that he had lately listened to him saying mass in a Roman Catholic chapel in Mississippi. Who would have thought it?
Mr. Charles Scribner, (successor of Baker & Scribner,) has in press a large number of interesting new works, among which are Incidents in the Life of a Pastor, by the Rev. Dr. Wisner of Ithica; The Captains of the Old World, by Henry William Herbert; Naval Life: the Midshipman, by Lieutenant Lynch, Commander of the late Dead Sea Expedition; The Fall of Poland, by L. C. Saxton; The Evening Book, by Mrs. Kirkland; Rural Homes, by G. Wheeler; The Epoch of Creation, in which the scripture doctrine is contrasted with the geological theory, by Eleazer Lord; &c.
We perceive by the religious journals that Mr. John Neal, who for twenty or thirty years has been the chief literary gladiator of the country, has recently given his attention to religion, and is now laboring with characteristic activity for its advancement in the city and vicinity of Portland. Of course this is very pleasing intelligence, but we cannot help a regret that the conversion of the author of "Randolph" had not taken place before he printed his reviewal of the Life of Poe.