d be resolved again into
elemental milk and water, or shall one of them lodge in a dusty library,
here and there, and, having ceased to be literature, lead the idle life
of a curiosity? We imagine another as finding a moment's pause upon the
centre-table of a country parlor. Perhaps a third, hastily bought at a
railway station as the train started, and abandoned by the purchaser,
may at this hour have entered upon a series of railway journeys in
company with the brakeman's lamps and oil-bottles, with a fair prospect
of surviving many generations of short-lived railway travellers. We
figure to ourselves the heart-breaking desolation of a village-tavern,
where, on the bureau under the mirror, to which the public comb and
brush are chained, a fourth might linger for a while.

But in all the world shall anybody read one of these books? We fancy not
even a critic; for the race so vigilantly malign in other days has lost
its bitterness, or has been broken of its courage by the myriad numbers
of the versifiers once so exultingly destroyed. Indeed, that cruel
slaughter was but a combat with Nature,--

"So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life";

and from the exanimate dust of one crushed poetaster she bade a thousand
rhymesters rise. Yet one cannot help thinking with a shudder of the
hideous spectacle of "Eros" in the jaws of Blackwood or the mortal
Quarterly, thirty years ago; or of how ruthlessly our own Raven would
have plucked the poor trembling life from the "Patriotic Poems," or "The
Contest," or the "Poems."

The world grows wiser and better-natured every day, and the tender
statistician has long since stayed the hand of the critic. "Why strike,"
says the gentle sage, "when figures will do your work so much more
effectually, and leave you the repose of a compassionate soul? Do you
not know that but one book in a thousand survives the year of its
publication?" etc., etc., etc. "And then as to the infinite reproduction
of the species," adds Science, "_is_ Nature,

"'So careful of the single type?' But no,
From scarped cliff and quarried stone
She cries, 'A thousand types are gone.'"

Patience! the glyptodon and the dodo have been dead for ages. Perhaps in
a million years the poetaster also shall pass.

_Thirty Years of Army Life on the Border._ By COLONEL R. B. MARCY, U. S.
A. With Numerous Illustrations. New York: Harper and Brothers.

There is not much variety in fr