falls into, and the execution is more finished than his volumes always
are: there are very few prosaic lines, and few instances of that
excess of naturalness which degenerates into the mawkish. The nature
of the plan--which, after all, is substantially though not in form a
set of sonnets on a single theme--is favorable to those pictures of
common landscape and of daily life, redeemed from triviality by genial
feeling and a perception of the lurking beautiful, which are the
author's distinguishing characteristic. The scheme, too, enables him
appropriately to indulge in theological and metaphysical reflections;
where he is not quite so excellent. Many of the pieces taken singly
are happy examples of Tennyson, though not perhaps the very happiest.
As a whole, there is inevitably something of sameness in the work, and
the subject is unequal to its long expansion; yet its nature is such,
there is so much of looseness in the plan, that it might have been
doubled or trebled without incongruity. It is one of those books
which depend upon individual will and feeling, rather than upon a
broad subject founded in nature and tractable by the largest laws of
art. Hence, though not irrespective of laws, such works depend upon
instinctive felicity--felicity in the choice of topics and the mode
of execution, felicity both in doing and in leaving undone: this high
and perfect excellence, perhaps, _In Memoriam_ has not reached, though
omission and revision might lead very close to it."

[Footnote 1: _In Memoriam. By Alfred Tennyson._ 1 vol. 12mo. Boston:
Ticknor, Reed & Fields. 1850.]

* * * * *

ETHERIZATION.--A writer in the _Medical Times_ says, "The day,
perhaps, may not be far off, when we shall be able to suspend the
sensibility of the nervous chords, without acting on the center of the
nervous system, just as we are enabled to suspend circulation in an
artery without acting on the heart."

* * * * *

LEIGH HUNT.

One of the most delightful books of the season will be _The
Autobiography of LEIGH HUNT_, which is being reprinted by Harper &
Brothers, and will very soon be given to the American public in
an edition of suitable elegance. The last great race of poets and
literary men, observes a writer in the London _Standard_, is now
rapidly vanishing from the scene: of the splendid constellation, in
the midst of which Campbell, Scott, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley,