racter may
impregnate the spiritless and help to sustain the brave. Consider,
moreover, what an element may be thus generated by the combined hopes
and prayers of a whole loyal people! This is the atmosphere which is to
sustain the President and his advisers in their work: this, although we
may not know it, and although they may be unaware, is the vital breath
they need to give them wisdom and power equal to the great crisis; while
even the soldiers, in the far-off fields of conflict, shall feel the
agitations of this subtile fluid, this life-supporting oxygen, buoying
up their hopes, and wafting their banners on to victory.

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

_Dissertations and Discussions: Political, Philosophical, and
Historical._ By JOHN STUART MILL. In Three Volumes. 12mo.
Boston: W. V. Spencer.

At a time of deep national emotion, like the present, it is impossible
that we Americans should not feel some bias of personal affection in
reading the works of those great living Englishmen who have been true to
us in the darkest hour. Were it only for his faithful friendship to
freedom and to us, Mr. Mill has a right to claim an attentive audience
for every word he has ever written; and this collection of his
miscellaneous writings, covering a period of thirty years, has a special
interest as showing the successive steps by which he has risen to this
high attitude of nobleness.

But apart from these special ties, Mr. Mill claims attention as the most
advanced of English minds, and the ablest, all things considered, of
contemporary English writers. His detached works have long since found a
very large American audience,--larger, perhaps, than even their
home-circle of readers; and the sort of biographical interest which
attaches to a collection of shorter essays--giving, as it does, a
glimpse at the training of the writer--will more than compensate for the
want of continuity in these volumes, and for the merely local interest
which belongs to many of the subjects treated. Church-rates and the
English currency have not to us even the interest of heraldry, for that
at least can offer pictures of mermaids, and great ingenuity in Latin
puns; but, on the other hand, every discussion of the British
university-system has a positive value, in the exceedingly crude and
undeveloped condition of American collegiate methods. There is the same
disparity of interest in the different critical essays. Bentham has