country than our own would have been
instantly recognized as a deed of the highest heroism. And if we are not
careful to do justly, all the new ropes wherewith we have bound this
accursed Samson of Slavery will be broken like a thread, and our last
state be worse than our first.

We know no work of fiction so full as this of beauty and wisdom, so free
from folly, so resplendent with intellectual life, with moral purity,
and Christian holiness, so apt to teach, so graceful in the teaching. We
follow it with admiration and sympathy, from its gay beginning, through
all the pain, the passion, and the peace, to the heartache of its
closing pages,--that close, supremely sad, yet strangely beautiful. "She
sang to him, and he slept; she spoke, and he did not awaken." It is the
record of heavy struggle, of defeat that was triumph, and triumph that
was Heaven.

We offer no congratulations to the new author; nor do we deprecate for
him any harsh censure;--not only because praise and censure seem alike
rugged and halting by the sweet strains we seek to celebrate, but
because he who in his "saintly solitude" can create a world so fair is
independent of these light afflictions. For him there is always
sympathy, great companionship, and godlike work. From this Earth can
nothing take away; than this she has nothing more to give.

_History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in
Europe._ By W. E. H. LECKY, M. A. Two Vols. New York: D. Appleton & Co.

Mr. Lecky has given us a book replete with interesting matter; and yet,
owing to some lack of intellectual mastery in him over his materials, it
leaves a singularly vague and dispiriting impression on the mind in
reading it. The author has a plethora of knowledge in regard to the
surface changes in history, but no insight whatever apparently into the
meaning of history itself, into the philosophic causes which these
changes attest and obey. He is a man of uncommon bulk, but deficient
muscle. His mental furniture enfeebles his intellectual faculty. His
body obstructs his soul. _Sumptus fructum superat._ His book costs the
author more than it comes to. He is so absorbed in the contemplation of
the accidents of history as to forget that history itself is but a
narrow river, conducting to the broad, illimitable ocean of human
brotherhood or equality,--and that to stand upon the bank, therefore,
and watch its successive waves, instead of manfully leaping in and
committing