r. CURTIS, have been republished in London by
Bentley, and the book is as much approved by English as by American
critics. The _Daily News_ says:
"The author is evidently a man of great talent."
Leigh Hunt, in his _Journal_, that--
"It is brilliant book, full of thought and feeling."
The _Athenaeum_, that--
"The author of _Nile Notes_, we may now add, is richly
poetical, humorous, eloquent, and glowing as the sun, whose
southern radiance seems to burn upon his page. An affluence of
fancy which never fails, a choice of language which chastens
splendor of expression by the use of simple idioms, a love for
the forms of art whether old or new, and a passionate enjoyment
of external nature such as belongs to the more poetic order of
minds--are the chief characteristics of this writer."
The _Literary Gazette_--
"The genial and kindly spirit of this book, the humor and
vivacity of personal descriptions, redeemed by an exquisite
choice of expression from the least taint of the common or the
coarse; the occasional melody and music of the diction,
cadenced, as it were, by the very grace and tenderness of the
thought it clothes, or the images of beauty it evokes; the
broad, easy touches, revealing as at a glance the majestic and
tranquil features of the Eastern landscape, and the ultimate
feeling of all its accessories of form and hue; the varied
resources of learning, tradition, poetry, romance, with which
it is not encumbered but enriched, as a banquet table with
festal crowns and sparkling wines--all these, and many other
characteristics, to which our space forbids us to do justice,
render these 'Nile Notes' quite distinct from all former books
of Eastern travel, and worthy 'to occupy the intellect of the
thoughtful and the imagination of the lively.' Never did a
wanderer resign his whole being with more entire devotion to
the silence and the mystery that brood, like the shadow of the
ages, over that dead, dumb land. A veritable lotus-eater is our
American Howadji!'"
And a dozen other London journals might be quoted to the same effect.
But critics disagree, as well as doctors, and the Boston _Puritan
Recorder_ comes down on the Howadji in the following exemplary manner:
"This is a much-vaunted book, by a young American, but one in
which we take no pl
|