have breathed for a moment over his soul, freighted with
the odor of amaranths and asphodels. For he wrote two strange letters:
one to her who mourns him faithful in death; one to his parents. There
is nothing braver or more pathetic. With the prophetic instinct of love,
he assumed the office of consoler for the stroke that impended.

In the dewy light of the early dawn he occupied the first rebel town.
With his own hand he tore down the first rebel flag. He added to the
glories of that morning the seal of his blood.

The poor wretch who stumbled upon an immortality of infamy by murdering
him died at the same instant. The two stand in the light of that
event--clearly revealed--types of the two systems in conflict to-day:
the one, brave, refined, courtly, generous, tender, and true; the other,
not lacking in brute courage, reckless, besotted, ignorant, and cruel.

Let the two systems, Freedom and Slavery, stand thus typified forever,
in the red light of that dawn, as on a Mount of Transfiguration. I
believe that may solve the dark mystery why Ellsworth died.

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

_Chambers's Encyclopaedia: A Dictionary of Universal Knowledge for
the People; on the Basis of the Latest Edition of the German
Conversations-Lexicon_. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co. Vols. I. and
II.

An Encyclopaedia is both a luxury and a necessity. Few readers now
collect a library, however scant, without including one of some sort.
Many of them, even in the absence of all other books, of themselves
constitute a complete library. The Britannica, Edinburgh, Metropolitana,
English, Penny, London, Oxford, and that of Kees, are most elaborate
works, extending respectively to about a score of heavy volumes,
averaging eight or nine hundred pages each. Such publications must
necessarily be expensive. They are, moreover, to be regarded rather as a
collection of exhaustive treatises,--great prominence being given to
the physical and mathematical sciences, and to general history. For
instance, in the Britannica, the publication of the eighth edition
of which is just completed, the length of some of the articles is as
follows: Astronomy, 155 quarto pages; Chemistry, 88; Electricity, 104;
Hydrodynamics, 119; Optics, 176; Mammalia, 120; Ichthyology, 151;
Entomology, 265; Britain, 300; England, 136; France, 284. Each one of
these papers is equal to a large octavo volume; some of them would
occupy several volumes; and the entir