"Tis wonderful how many consaits mankind have consarnin' happiness and misery, hereafter!? exclaimed the hunter, borne away by the power of his own thoughts. Some believe in burnin's and flames, and some think punishment is to eat with the wolves and dogs. Then, ag'in, some fancy heaven to be only the carryin' out of their own 'arthly longin's; while others fancy it all gold and shinin' lights! Well, I've an idee of my own, in that matter, which is just this, Sarpent. Whenever I've done wrong, I've ginirally found 't was owin' to some blindness of the mind, which hid the right from view, and when sight has returned, then has come sorrow and repentance. Now, I consait that, after death, when the body is laid aside, or, if used at all, is purified and without its longin's, the spirit sees all things in their ra'al light, and never becomes blind to truth and justice. Such bein' the case, all that has been done in life is beheld as plainly as the sun is seen at noon; the good brings joy, while the evil brings sorrow. There's nothin' onreasonable in that, but it's agreeable to every man's exper'ence.'

"I thought the pale-faces believed all men were wicked; who then could ever find the white man's

heaven?'

"That's ingen'ous, but it falls short of the missionary teachin's. You'll be christianized one day, I make no doubt, and then 't will all come plain enough. You must know, Sarpent, that there's been a great deed of salvation done, that, by God's help, enables all men to find a pardon for their wickednesses, and that is the essence of the white man's religion. I can't stop to talk this matter over with you any longer, for Hetty's in the canoe, and the furlough takes me away; but the time will come I hope, when you 'll feel these things; for, after all, they must be felt, rather than reasoned about. Ah 's! me; well, Delaware, there's my hand; you know it's that of a fri'nd, and will shake it as such, though it never has done you one-half the good its owner wishes it had.'"

We have purposely refrained from allusion to the main incidents of 'The Deerslayer,' by which it is constituted a romance proper, or to the minuter machinery by which its dramatic scenes and plot are evolved. These we commend our readers to seek in the work itself; asking them only to judge how far, if the passages we have quoted be from the 'dull' and 'tedious' portions, they may be likely to find entertainment in those parts which were invincible against the ready censure of lynx-eyed and hostile critics.

CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. From the last London Edition. In one volume. pp. 190. Boston: WILLIAM D. TICKNOR.

BRIEF reference has heretofore been had in the KNICKERBOCKER to this remarkable and exciting work, which had its origin some twenty years ago in the pages of the London Magazine.' It purports to be an extract from the life of a scholar.' The authorship of these 'Confessions has been frequently attributed, and so far as we know without denial, to DE QUINCY, and their authenticity is believed to be unquestionable. Indeed, no reader can rise from a perusal of the book, with any doubt in his mind on this subject. We have only refreshed our memory of records which it would be impossible, having once read, ever entirely to forget; but as many of our readers may not have encountered them, we shall venture upon one or two extracts. The first is from the pleasures of opium,' which a friend informs us, who was once for a few hours under the influence of the drug, can scarcely be depicted, so ravishing are the sensations, and so exquisite the joys which belong to the incipiency of the habit:

"Arrived at my lodgings, it may be supposed that I lost not a moment in taking the quantity prescribed. I was necessarily ignorant of the whole art and mystery of opium-taking; and, what I took, I took under every disadvantage. But I took it; and in an hour, oh! Heavens! what a revulsion! what an upheaving, from its lowest depths, of the inner spirit! what an apocalypse of the world within me! That my pains had vanished, was now a trifle in my eyes: this negative effect was swallowed up in the immensity of those positive effects which had opened before me-in the abyss of divine enjoyment thus suddenly revealed. Here was a panacea-a paguazov vɛntɛvdɛg for all human woes; here was the secret of happiness, about which philosophers had disputed for so many ages, at once discovered; happiness might now be bought for a penny, and carried in the waistcoat pocket; portable ecstacies might be had corked up in a pint bottle; and peace of mind could be sent down in gallons by the mail-coach."... "The town of L-represented the earth, with its sorrows and its graves left behind, yet not out of sight, nor wholly forgotten. The ocean, in everlasting but gentle agitation, and brooded over by dove-like calm, might not unfitly typify the mind and the mood which then swayed it. For it seemed to me as if then first I stood at a distance and aloof from the uproar

of life; as if the tumult, the fever, and the strife, were suspended; a respite granted from the secret burdens of the heart; a sabbath of repose; a resting from human labors. Here were the hopes which blossom in the paths of life, reconciled with the peace which is in the grave; motions of the intellect as unwearied as the heavens, yet for all anxieties a halcyon calm; a tranquillity that seemed no product of inertia, but as if resulting from mighty and equal antagonisms; infinite activities, infinite repose."

The pleasures of opium-eating are painted less elaborately than the 'pains' of the practice, which are dashed in with a rich brush. Take for example the following:

"The first notice I had of any important change going on in this part of my physical economy, was from the reawaking of a state of eye generally incident to childhood, or exalted states of irritability. I know not whether my reader is aware that many children, perhaps most, have a power of painting, as it were, upon the darkness, all sorts of phantoms; in some that power is simply a mechanic affection of the eye; others have a voluntary, or semi-voluntary power to dismiss or to summon them; or, as a child once said to me when I questioned him on this matter, I can tell them to go, and they go; but sometimes they come when I don't tell them to come.' Whereupon I told him that he had almost as unlimited a command over apparitions, as a Roman centurion over his soldiers. In the middle of 1817, I think it was, that this faculty became positively distressing to me: at night, when I lay awake in bed, vast processions passed along in mournful pomp; friezes of never-ending stories, that to my feelings were as sad and solemn as if they were stories drawn from times before Edipus or Priam, before Tyre, before Memphis. And, at the same time, a corresponding change took place in my dreams; a theatre seemed suddenly opened and lighted up within my brain, which presented nightly spectacles of more than earthly splendor." "The changes in my dreams were accompanied by deep-seated anxiety and gloomy melancholy, such as are wholly incommunicable by words. I seemed every night to descend, not metaphorically, but literally to descend, into chasms and sunless abysses, depths below depths, from which it seemed hopeless that I could ever reascend. Nor did I, by waking, feel that I had reascended." "The sense of space, and in the end, the sense of time, were both powerfully affected. Buildings, landscapes, etc., were exhibited in proportions so vast as the bodily eye is not fitted to receive. Space swelled, and was amplified to an extent of unutterable infinity. This, however, did not disturb me so much as the vast expansion of time: I sometimes seemed to have lived for seventy or one hundred years in one night."

After remarking that Southern Asia in general, the cradle of the human race, was the seat of awful images and associations, and the dreams of oriental imagery and mythology those of unimaginable horror, the opium-eater says:

"Under the connecting feeling of tropical heat and vertical sun-lights, I brought together all creatures, birds, beasts, reptiles, all trees and plants, usages and appearances, that are found in all tropical regions, and assembled them together in China or Indostan. From kindred feelings, I soon brought Egypt and all her gods under the same law. I was stared at, hooted at, grinned at, chattered at, by monkeys, by paroquets, by cockatoos. I ran into pagodas, and was fixed, for centuries, at the summit, or in secret rooms; I was the idol; I was the priest; I was worshipped; I was sacrificed. I fled from the wrath of Brama through all the forests of Asia: Vishnu hated me: Seeva laid wait for me. I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris: I had done a deed, they said, which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at. I was buried, for a thousand years, in stone coffins, with mummies and sphynxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles; and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud. Sooner or later, came a reflux of feeling that swallowed up the astonishment, and left me, not so much in terror, as in hatred and abomination of what I saw. Over every form, and threat, and punishment, and dim sightless incarceration, brooded a sense of eternity and infinity that drove me into an oppression as of madness. Into these dreams only, it was, with one or two slight exceptions, that any circumstances of physical horror entered. All before had been moral and spiritual terrors. But here the main agents were ugly birds, or snakes, or crocodiles; especially the last. The cursed crocodile became to me the object of more horror than almost all the rest. I was compelled to live with him; and (as was always the case almost in my dreams) for centuries. I escaped sometimes, and found myself in Chinese houses with cane tables, etc. All the feet of the tables, sofas, etc., soon became instinct with life: the abominable head of the crocodile, and his leering eyes, looked out at me, multiplied into a thousand repetitions: and I stood loathing and fascinated. And so often did this hideous reptile haunt my dreams, that many times the very same dream was broken up in the very same way; I heard gentle voices speaking to me, (I hear every thing when I am sleeping,) and instantly I awoke: it was broad noon; and my children were standing, hand in hand, at my bed-side; come to show me their colored shoes, or new frocks, or to let me see them dressed for going out. I protest that so awful was the transition from the damned crocodile, and the other unutterable monsters and abortions of my dreams, to the sight of innocent human natures and of infancy, that, in the mighty and sudden revulsion of mind, I wept, and could not forbear it, as I kissed their faces."

Other passages in connexion with these we had pencilled for insertion; but the printer, more mindful of our available space, brings us up with a round turn,' forcibly reminding us how much larger is our desire than our ability to entertain our readers longer with the experiences of an opium-eater.

THE HISTORY OF CONNECTICUT, FROM ITS FIRST SETTLEMENT TO THE PRESENT TIME. BY THEodore Dwight, Jr. New-York: HARPERS' Family Library.

MR. DWIGHT has given us an entertaining volume, which perhaps we may take another occasion to review in detail. We refer to it at present only to defend our worthy and world-renowned progenitor against the serious charge of falsifying history, implied in the records of our author. Either Mr. DWIGHT OF DIEDRICH KNICKERBOCKER is mistaken. To doubt which of the two is wrong, would be sacrilege. The modern historian has followed the example of his predecessor, BENJAMIN TRUMBULL, and evidently considers the Dutch to have been mere intruders' in the land of steady habits. The leading Dutchmen at Manhadoes, says Mr. DWIGHT, came to America for trade, and not for religious purposes; and he dwells upon the notice given by KIEFT, that the people of Hartford were no longer to be permitted to trade with the Dutch at Fort Good-Hope, and upon the protest against the settlement of New-Haven, as evincing little sympathy with the colonists. NOW KNICKERBOCKER's veracious history contains not only proofs that the Dutch had clear title and possession in the fair valleys of the Connecticut, and that they were wrongfully dispossessed thereof, but likewise that they have been scandalously maltreated ever since by the misrepresentations of the crafty historians of New England. Even in the reign of VAN TWILLER, the pacific cabinet of that renowned monarch bore the impertinences of the losel Yankees with a magnanimity that redounded to their immortal credit; becoming by passive endurance inured to the increasing mass of wrongs; like that mighty man of old, who by dint of carrying about a calf from the time it was born, continued to carry it without difficulty when it had grown to be an ox.' And in the matter of Fort Goed Hoop, did not the Weathersfield squatters extend their onion-plantations under the very noses of the garrison, insomuch that the honest Dutchmen could not look toward that quarter without tears in their eyes? Talk of sympathy!' What sympathy had they with the redoubtable VAN CURLET? They paid no attention to his protests, and even less to the two proclamations of his new sovereign, WILHELMUS KIEFT, although the second missive of that sturdy executive was of heavy metal, written in thundering long sentences, not one of which was under five syllables. 'It forbade and prohibited all commerce and connexion between any and every of the Yankee intruders, and the fortified post of Fort Goed Hoop; and ordered, commanded, and advised all his trusty, loyal, and well-beloved subjects to furnish them with no supplies of gin, gingerbread, or sour-crout; to buy none of their pacing horses, measly pork, apple-brandy, Yankee rum, cider-water, apple-sweatmeats, Weathersfield onions, tin ware or wooden bowls.' What was the consequence? The first that was heard of the result of this proclamation was the sudden arrival of the gallant Van Curlet, who came staggering into New-Amsterdam at the head of his crew of tatterdemalions, bringing the tidings of his own defeat, and the capture of the redoubtable post of Fort Goëd Hoop by the ferocious enemy, which happened in this wise: 'It appears that the crafty Yankees, having heard of the regular habits of the garrison, watched a favorable opportunity, and silently introduced themselves into the fort, about the middle of a sultry day; when its vigilant defenders, having gorged themselves with a hearty dinner, and smoked out their pipes, were one and all snoring most obstreperously at their posts, little dreaming of so disastrous an occurrence. The enemy most inhumanly seized Jacobus Van Curlet and his sturdy myrmidons by the nape of the neck, gallanted them to the gate of the fort, and dismissed them severally with a kick on the crupper,

as Charles the Twelfth dismissed the heavy-bottomed Russians, after the battle of Narva, only taking care to give two kicks to Van Curlet, as a signal mark of distinction. A strong garrison was immediately established in the fort, consisting of twenty long-sided, hard-fisted Yankees, with Weathersfield onions stuck in their hats by way of cockades and feathers; long rusty fowling-pieces for muskets; hasty-pudding, dumb-fish, pork and molasses for stores; and a huge pumpkin was hoisted on the end of a pole as a standard, liberty-caps not having as yet come into fashion.' It will behoove modern historians of Connecticut to consult authentic records, before they sit down to write away the reputation of the Dutch fathers of our city. Having put our readers upon their guard, we take leave of Mr. DWIGHT'S volume for the present.

WILSON'S AMERICAN ORNITHOLOGY: WITH NOTES BY JARDINE. To which is added a Synopsis of American Birds, including those described by BONAPARTE, AUDUBON, NUTALL, and RICHARDSON. By T. M. BREWER. In one volume. pp. 744. Boston: OTIS, BROADERS AND COMPANY.

We are indebted for the delightful 'spirit of life' which pervades the ornithological descriptions of WILSON, to the ardent love he bore his favorite study. We have stood by his grave, near the old Swedes' Church at Philadelphia, and have heard there the fulfilment of his last wish, that he might be buried where the birds could come and sing above his ashes their anthems of praise to the great CREATOR; and we never peruse his pages without a thorough conviction that this last prayer was dictated by no love of eccentricity, nor by affectation, but by a ruling passion so strong that even death had not the power to lessen it. But it is too late in the day to speak of WILSON. His work has attained and maintained an unequalled popularity; and constitutes, with the additions included in the handsome and comprehensive volume under notice, by far the cheapest and best publication of its kind extant. The volume is illustrated with fine copper-plate engravings of the birds described, embellished with an exquisite vignette title-page, than which we scarcely remember any thing more soft and beautiful, and printed upon a clear neat type and fine white paper. It is in short just such an edition as has long been wanted; and while it supplies a present desideratum, will secure for it a future patronage commensurate with its merits and the liberal outlays of the publishers.

MISCELLANIES OF LITERATURE. By the Author of Curiosities of Literature.'
A new edition, revised and corrected. In three volumes.
York: G. AND H. G. LANGLEY.

Pp. 1170.

New

THESE are rare and entertaining volumes, and as such we commend them warmly to the acceptance of our readers, without having either space or leisure to assign the reason of the faith which is in us that they will surely confirm our judgment on a perusal of the work. The mass of facts, the numerous anecdotes, and the authentic gossip, in the collecting of which the author is so remarkable, render it one of those take-downable series from one's library shelf, which are certain to reward even a desultory and hurried examination. The first volume is devoted to literary miscellanies, the 'calamities of authors;' the second to the literary character and character of James the First; and the third to the quarrels of authors; a more various and prolific theme than the reader may imagine. The volumes are well and carefully printed.

EDITOR'S TABLE.

'OLD PUT. DISCHARGED' is the title of a very long communication which we have received from an eastern correspondent, a relative of the renowned General PUTNAM, in reply to the article entitled Old Put. at the Bar,' in our issue for August. In a note to the Editor, the writer says: Many of Gen. PUTNAM'S descendants are among the most honored and respected of our land; and a score of them would start up instantly, if the attack in the KNICKERBOCKER should meet their eyes. Perhaps you have already received replies. If you have any better than the enclosed, please insert them without regard to mine.' We have not as yet received any reply to the article complained of; but as a friend and defender of Gen. PUTNAM has desired us to keep our pages open for the publication hereafter of a few sufficient yet brief rebutting facts, which he is about collecting and rendering press-worthy, we shall substitute them for the communication before us, which is very long, written with great feeling, and contains much that is foreign to the subject in question, with misplaced and it seems to us injudicious reflections upon the writer of the paper whose statements it aims to refute. We may state here, that it was with unwilling willingness we gave a faint consent' to the publication of the original article. It was the first reflection we had ever heard of or ever seen upon the character and services of Gen. PUTNAM; and nothing but the most positive assurance that every material statement which it contained was or could be established by the most irrefragible testimony, induced us at length to yield its reluctant admission into our pages. Our correspondent now informs us that the story is an old one of Gen. DEARPORN's, re-vamped for the occasion; and we learn from him that this officer, whom we have always supposed to have taken Little York and Fort George, and to have been a rather successful general, was of no great consequence in any man's opinion save his own. But it is not with Gen. DEARBORN that we have to do. We wish to confine the reply to the FACTS of the case. Our correspondent says that the wolf-story is true; that a man, when the Pomfret cave is full of dry leaves, can be drawn out with safety, as he himself has tested; that Gen. PUTNAM's horse, being 'well-trained and sagacious, did slide down the rocky steep of Horse-Neck on his haunches;' and what is of more importance, that Gen. PUTNAM was an active belligerent in the battle of Bunker-Hill, and was in fact the hero of the action. But he takes no notice of Gen. HEATH'S statement that the gallant PRESCOTT was the commanding officer; nor of the evidence of the three clergymen and the judge of probate, who affirm that PRESCOTT never ceased to condemn Gen. PUTNAM for having kept his men back when their presence in the action might have changed the fate of the day. We wish only to