volume of Hudson River Georgics, which he calls Letters from up the River, a few months ago, we recommended him to eschew all but humorous subjects in his future books, for humor is so unmistakably his forte that we had a doubt of his exploiting himself to so good advantage in any other direction. But he has shown his good sense by following his own instincts rather than our advice, and his next volume is romantic and pathetic. Crystalline; or, the Heiress of Fall Down Castle, by F. W. SHELTON, author of the Rector of St. Bardolph's, is the title of his last volume just published by Scribner. Crystalline is a pure romance and purely written; the chief incident of the story is a borrowed one, from the legend of the Gazza Ladra, known also as the Maid and Magpie; and there being no novelty in the denouement, the interest of the narrative is weakened by the absence of a surprise. But Shakespeare borrowed his plots, and so have many story tellers and dramatists since his time. Mr. Shelton says that it was not wholly from the legend of La Gazza Ladra that he drew his inspiration, but his romance was suggested from actual observation of the pranks of a mischievous bird. But, if the incident is old, Mr. Shelton's manner of using it is certainly new, and so is the whole machinery of his ro mance. -A History of the Old Hundredth Psalm Tune, by the Rev. W. H. HAVERGAL, with a Prefatory Note by Bishop WAINWRIGHT, recently published by Mason & Brothers, of this city, is a very remarkable monograph. The history of this universal tune, its origin, and all the various changes it has undergone, form altogether an exceedingly curious and entertaining essay. -We have been making a collection, or rather accumulating a large pile of American novels, with the intention of making them the text of a review of our progress in this most prolific department of literature. But the collection, though large, has not yet exhibited the salient and characteristic points we have been most anxiously anticipating. Our great American novelist has not yet cast his shadow before him; he is still to come, and we are not very sure that he is coming. It is very remarkable, and rather mortifying, to see the succession of novelists in England, in France, in Germany, and even in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, while we have so little to boast of ourselves. Thackeray, Dickens and Bulwer Lytton are all three contemporary authors, with scores of lesser lights surrounding them, of the same order, while we cannot name even one popular novelist. This dearth of story-telling talent. in a country which numbers more novel readers than any other in the world, is a defiance of the politico-economic aphorism that demand creates a supply. The supply comes, to be sure, but not in a legitimate manner; the stories are furnished to the readers, but only as merchandise used to be furnished to Algerine shopkeepers, not by the producers, but the cruisers. It is not the demand of American readers which caused Dickens, and Thackeray, and Bulwer, and Dumas, and Balzac, to write their novels and romances. We might have demanded until doomsday before we should have got a supply of Dombey and Newcome, but for the demand of those who were willing to pay for their literary luxuries. In the meanwhile we have no lack of stories, such as they are, and Uncle Tom, to appease our longings until we can do better. From C. SHEPHARD & Co. we have Uncle Sam's Farm Fence, by W. A. MILNE, an author who is new to us, and a title that does not promise much. We expect a prose satire, and open it and find it a story of "that dreadful evil-Intemperance." Jewett & Co., of Boston, send us another tale on the same subject, called Durham Village, by CORA LINN. We would like to see the statistics of converted inebriates from reading temperance stories. If there be any reformatory power in moral stories they ought to be very numerous. The Life and Adventures of a Country Merchant, by J. B. JONES, from Lippincott, Grambo & Co., of Philadelphia, is a very promising title, and the book itself is much better than the greater part of its class. There is a good deal of real Western humor, and some distinctly drawn, though rather coarse characters in the Country Merchant. The local descriptions are racy and characteristic. But this is not strictly a novel; the sketches are held together by a fine thread of story, yet they run into the burlesque and grotesque. The Country Merchant is a much better novel of American manners, though, than the once much vaunted stories of the mythical Sealsfield. Tempest and Sunshine; or, Life in Kentucky, by MRS. MARY J. HOLMES, from Appleton & Co., is an attempt at a novel of Southwestern life, as the title promises. It is entitled to a more extended notice than we can now afford to bestow upon it, and we defer it for another occasion. We are happy to see an announcement by Ticknor, Reed & Fields, of Boston, of the charming story of Wensley, with which the readers of our Monthly are already familiar. It contained some of the most delicious and truthful pictures of the better kind of New England life that we have seen in print, and we are quite sure that even those who read it in our columns will be glad to renew their acquaintance with the incomparable parson, and his no less incomparable dusky valet. -Serial stories are exotics that have never taken root or flourished among us; notwithstanding that all the great popular writers of England find it to their interest to publish their productions in parts, doling out small doses of plot and character through twenty mouths until the reading public becomes thoroughly imbued with the spirit of the author and familiarized with all his characters. It was by this ingenious method of diffusing himself that Dickens achieved his first great success in Pickwick, and all the popular novelists had the sagacity to see the advantages of the system, and follow the example set them. In no other manner could the reading world have become so thoroughly conversant with the characters of Thackeray and Dickens. But this palpably advantageous method of keeping before the public, has never been tried with success by any of our authors, except by availing themselves of the aid of a Magazine. None of them have yet had sufficient strength to stand on their own pins and go ahead at the same time. A new attempt has just been made in Boston by Paul Creyton, with the advantage of a popular publisher. We have read two numbers of Martin Merivale, his Mark, published fortnightly by Messrs. Phillips, Sampson & Co. The commencement of the story is very promising, but we do not discern any original traits in the treatment or in the style. The characters are the commonplaces of fiction, and the illustrations are not by any means encouraging specimens of art. REPRINTS. Few modern writers upon scientific subjects have made a wider circle of friends than HUGH MILLER. whose "Footprints of Creation" is a favorite book. In his "Scenes and Legends of Scotland," he scarcely sustained his reputation, and yet had that been his first book, it would have produced a decided impression. As a third attempt, we have now "My Schools and my Schoolmasters, or the Story of my Education," which, as giving personal details, will likely achieve a popularity superior to either of the former. Miller, it appears from this, is emphatically a man of the people.-and of a low sort of people. His grandfather was a buccaneer, his father a common sailor, and the rest of his kith and kin related to those reiving Highlanders, who figure in romances as heroes, but in reality are the terrors of a neighborhood. Yet, in spite of these disadvantages, he early acquired a taste for reading, and became master of Gulliver's Travels, the Arabian Nights, Captain Cook's Voyages, and the New Testament. Being sent to school in one of the remote districts of Scotland, he showed the blood from which he was descended, by taking the teacher in hand, and giving him a flogging. It was thus made obvious, that he was not the best subject in the world for school discipline, and he was consequently put to trade to a stone-mason. Instead of laboring, however, with diligence, as other lads would have done, he availed himself of the opportunities of the quarry to study mineralogy and geology. A slight taste for drink, at the same time, interrupted his devotion both to labor and study. But this taste did not last long. His strong nature struggled against it, his better feelings got the mastery, and he began to advance at a rapid rate, in the acquisition of knowledge. The results of his self-education, the world knows in those admirable volumes we have already mentioned. Republished by Gould & Lincoln, Boston. -Redfield has reprinted WARRINGTON W. SMYTH'S "Year with the Turk," one of the most interesting sketches of travel in the dominion of the Sultan, which the war has called forth. It attempts to relieve the character of the Turks from the odium which has been heaped upon it by previous writers, by describing faithfully the author's experience during a protracted journey through both European and Asiatic Turkey. He states, that the Turks are a commercial people; that they are exceedingly kind-hearted; that they are gradually improving, and that the sympathy of France and England is merited, in every respect. This may all be so; but Mr. Smyth prefixes a colored map to his book, showing the distribution of populations over the Ottoman Empire, which is one of the most striking evidences of the impossibility that the Turk should maintain his foothold in Europe, that can be imagined. It represents the whole vast region, from the Sea of Marmora on the north, and the Adriatic on the west, as in the possession already of the Sclaves. Servians, and Bulgarians, among whom the Turks hold here and there a few scarcely visible spots. They are emphatically rari nantes in gurgite vasto, and how they can expect to hold possession of such an immense territory, in which they are scattered only as specks, is astonishing. Apart from all questions of justice, it seems to us inevitable that they must yield their claims, and retire into Asia, where they are at home. -The Church before the Flood," by the Rev. JOHN CUMMING, D. D., has been reprinted by Jewett & Co., of Boston. It consists of an able series of dissertations, on topics suggested by the Bible history of the period before Noah,-such as the Creation, the state of Adam, the Curse, Abel, the first Martyr, the Primitive Wickedness, the Flood, &c. &c. Dr. Cummings writes with unusual vigor, and being of the sect of Christians known as evangelical, has no compromises with Romanism, High-Churchism, or Infidelity. -Messrs. Gould and Lincoln, of Boston, have issued, with an introduction by Dr. HITCHCOCK, an interesting speculation on the "Plurality of Worlds." The position assumed by the writer, is that the common opinion as to the planets and fixed stars being inhabited, is a mistake, resting his argument on the fact, that the material conditions of those bodies are not adapted to the existence of organized life. All the planets beyond Mars, he says, excluding the asteroids, are in a liquid state, though not from heat. Their distance from the sun, besides, is so great, that the light and heat there could not sustain organic beings, such as exist upon this globe. On the other hand, of the inferior planets, Mercury is so near the sun, that human beings, like ourselves, would scorch in it; while Mars and Venus are the only planets apparently capable of comfortable residence. As to the "fixed stars," which are supposed to be suns, their periods of revolution in their orbits are so enormous, that it is altogether out of the question for any sane man to think of living in them; some taking fifty, and others a hundred years, to turn round, which nobody but a Methuselah could stand. Meanwhile, in respect to the satellites assigned to those stars by conjecture, let their existence first be proved, before we undertake to lend them inhabitants. Thus, the author goes on depopulating the universe, and making this little earth of ours, which some have affected to despise, the most considerable theatre of the creative operations Dr. Hitchcock only partly adopts the conclusions of his author; he sympathizes with the main purpose of "painless extinction," as it regards our sister planets, but yet retains some bowels of commiseration for the fixed stars. He thinks it rather incredible, that amid the countless bodies of the universe, only a single globe, and that a little one, should be fit to be the home of rational and immortal creatures. Moreover, he wisely suggests, that the organism of beings in other spheres, may be adapted to their external condition, and that if they live in a world of gas or water, they may have gaseous or ethereal bodies, and that those bodies may be better instruments of intellectual use than our heavier clods. Does not Revelation, too, speak of angels, "who kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation," probably referring_to some of the stars. At the same time, Dr. Hitchcock strongly recommends the book to men of science and clergymen. Our own opinion is, that as we mortals have a great deal to do on this earth, and a very short time to do it in, it is becoming that we should leave the stars to settle their own business, at least until they shall have given us some more authentic intelligence than we now have as to what they are at. ENGLISH.-If a volume of poems by John Shakespeare were discovered by some sagacious Collier and it were announced that John was a brother of the famous William, there would be an interest felt in the work quite apart from the value of the verse. Can two prophets come from Nazareth? Let Mr. Frederick Tennyson answer. He has just published in London a volume of poems called Days and Hours: and however much a reader may wish to avoid remembering Alfred, it is impossible for him not to see that Frederic has not forgotten his great brother. The new singer is the oldest brother of the Laureate. There is nothing that can be called direct imitation in his volume, but such lines as the following are strictly in the modern style of which Keats was the first, and Alfred Tennyson the best, illustration: "Through the gaunt woods the winds are shrilling cold, Down from the rifted rack the sunbeam pours, Over the cold grey slopes, and stony moors; The glimmering watercourse, the eastern wold, And over it the whirling sail o' the mill, The lonely hamlet with its mossy spire, The piled city smoking like a pyre, Fetched out of shadow, gleam with light as chill." This is not a distinct, although a care ful picture. It has not the irresistible melody, which, in poetry, seems to give the color and meaning to the words. Our meaning will be illustrated by comparing with this landscape of Frederick's, that one of Alfred's in In Memoriam, beginning "Calm is the moon without a sound." In this poem the dull, sad, autumnal landscape stretching slowly away with "lessening towers" to the sea, is as perfect as poetry can make it. And it is so perfect because the sentiment of the spectator is so intimately blended in the description with the thing seen. This raises it from being a mere description, which would correspond to an imitation of a natural scene in painting, and leaves it a work of art. Mr. Frederick Tennyson's poetry is impalpable and impersonal. He indulges in prosonification to a degree quite beyond general sympathy, but the warm human feelings do not play along his pages. He is a cultivated, pleasant singer-an agreeable versifier. But the want of some reality, something more substantial than graceful revery is felt on every page. The difference between a poet and a man of poetic feeling, ready talent, and fine cultivation, who writes verses, could nowhere be better illustrated than by the Days and Hours of Frederick Tennyson, and the In Memoriam, or the earlier volumes of his immortal brother. We quote a poem from this volume, and a favorable specimen for our readers: IV. The glassy ripplets first began to throng And then the flash and thundering rebound, Of powers cast back in conflict, and the moan Of the long-banded waters overthrown. -The amiable wife of Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton has printed another novel, called "Behind the Scenes," which, of course, is meant to let us into some more of the secrets of her husband's character and conduct. There is not much story in it, but a good deal of malice, which in the estimation of many, will compensate for the want of interest in other respects. The hero Mr. Ponsonby Ferrars, is the great novelist; his friend the Right Hon. Issachar Benaraby, can be no one else but Disraeli,-Lord Redby is the anagram of Lord Derby, and Mr. Carlo Dials is our old acquaintance Charles Dickens. They are described with all of Lady Bulwer's peculiar penetration and malignity, which sometimes, however, rather overshoots the mark, from excessive vehemence. Here, for instance, is a portrait of her liege-lord: "In the adamantine chain of Mr. Ponsonby Ferrars' selfishness, to the links of which, the complex miseries of OTHERS are ever appending, you develope the apparently contradictory, but perfectly compatible, vices of intense meanness and parsimony, with extreme ostentation and extravagance, which are the usual concomitants of the self-worshipping sensualist, and which is a true type of what our present social, or rather anti-social system, with its intellectual fiorettori, can, and but too often does, produce, namely, a solid block of vice, gnarled with villany, but veneered with virtue! (?) and highly varnished with HYPOCRISY, which in these days of pretension and of SHAM, is a far more marketable and popular commodity than the rococo genuine article of unvarnished excellence." She intimates in another place that the distinguished writer is indebted for his translations of Schiller to a certain Fraulein Göthekant, a German governess, ugly as sin, as all governesses are in the eyes of suspicious wives,-because he cannot himself utter "a single guttural of that most bronchitial language,"-meaning German. Here also is a fling at Disraeli : "Mr. Issachar Benaraby was a gentleman of Mosaic extraction, quite as clever in many things as Mr. Ponsonby Ferrars, and much cleverer in others: such as oratory, cool, off-hand impudence, and invincible good-temper; and, being equally unshackled by any shadow of principle, he got on briskly, with a sort of trade wind in society; while bis more saturnine friend had often to tack and labor at the pumps to weather the storm his own execrable temper and overbearing spirit had raised. Mr. Benaraby's polit ical opinions (at least for the time being) were conservative; but his principles (?) were decidedly freetrade, as they were open to, and available for, any and every market where they could fetch their price. He began his career by a diametrically opposite road to his friend; for, whereas Mr. Ponsonby Ferrars winced under and could not brook the slightest merriment at his own expense, but tried to awe every one into an overwhelming deference for his august person, Mr. Benaraby more wisely preferred the 'short cut to popularity,' and rather sought to be laughed at than otherwise, being of Cardinal de Retz's opinion, that 'Qui fait rire l'esprit, est Maitre du Cœur.' And, besides, he was well aware that if he devoted his exterior to the laughing hyænas of society, and allowed them their mirth at all his ruffles and his ringlets, and the other tomfooleries of his costume, it only made his wit and wisdom, by the force of contrast, tell with double effect, like the withering political sarcasms of the Neapolitan Policcinello,' which come trebly barbed from so unexpected and grotesque Of Dickens, we have this account, with which we close our selections of scandal: "Opposite to him sat, as if not quite at his ease on so fine a chair, and in so aristocratic a room, a Mr. Carlo Dials, another star of the literary hemisphere, who, having graduated about the streets, his pavé pictures were unsurpassed; he had obtained the sobriquet of the Aldgate Aristophanes-the pothouse Plutarch would have been more appropriate. Like the rest of Mr. Ponsonby Ferrars's clique, he thought to redeem by printed morality and philanthropic fine sentiments the practical immorality of his own life, and the arid absence of all good feeling. He was not agreeable in society, as he always, like the beggars, appeared to be keeping any stray good thing that he might chance to pick up till he got home, when it was duly booked:' or it might be that his hair, of which he had an immense profusion, overlaid his brains, and that that made him appear stupid." -Miss MITFORD appears, in the evening of life, in a new volume of tales, entitled "Atherton, and other Tales," which appear to have been written under great physical disabilities. About two years ago, she was thrown from a pony-chaise, by which accident she was so crippled, as to have been obliged to keep her room since, almost unable to rise, or lift one foot before the other. Even in writing, she was obliged to have the ink-glass held for her, in order to enable her to drop the pen in the ink. Yet, in this enfeebled state, she composed Atherton, by far the longest of any of her stories. It is a wonderful instance of the power of the mind over the body. We do not see that it is inferior, in any respect, to any of her previous writings, while it is marked by many of the same characteristics, the genial descriptions of English scenery and country life, the natural and hearty sentiment, the quiet touches of feeling, and the cordial sympathy, with genuine character. As a story, it has few incidents, which are rather affecting than animated, but the conversations are always lively, and the moral tone excellent. The heroine, Katy, a farmer's daughter, who suddenly becomes a princely heiress, the gossiping mother, Mrs. Bell, the noble old matron, the grandmother, the kindly old bachelor lawyer, the embarrassed noblemen, are all drawn with remarkable fidelity and discrimination of portraiture. The other tales have already appeared in one of the English annuals. His -Few writers on musical subjects are "better known than HENRY F. CHORLEY, long the musical critic of the London Athenæum, whose most recent work is called Modern German Music: Recollections and Criticisms." It is a record of experiences obtained during several visits to the north and south of Germany, in the study of the art in which he is a distinguished connoisseur. opinions are freely expressed. and will not give satisfaction to all classes of critics; but they are always intelligent, and seemingly unbiased. He thinks Glück the greatest of opera composers, compares Handel to Shakespeare, discovers defects in Beethoven, and does not quite share in the orthodox admiration of Mozart. But the reminiscences of Mr. Chorley are more agreeable than his criticisms, especially those relating to his beloved friend, Mendelssohn. Here is a description of the great composer, as he first saw him: "I thought then, as I do now, his face one of the most beautiful which has ever been seen. No portrait extant does it justice. A Titian would have generalized, and, out of its many expressions, made up one which, in some sort, should reflect the many characteristics and humors of the poet-his carnest seriousness-his childlike truthfulness-his clear, cultivated intellect-his impulsive vivacity. The German painters could only invest a theatrical, thoughtful-looking man, with that serious cloak which plays so important a part on the stage, and in the portraits of their country; and conceive the task accomplished, when it was not so much as begun. None of them has perpetuated the face with which Mendelssohn listened to the music in which he delighted, or the face with which he would crave to be told again some merry story, though he knew it already by heart. I felt, in that first half hour, that in him there was no stilted sentiment-no affected heartiness; that he was no sayer of deep things, no searcher for witty ones; but one of a pure, sincere intelligence-bright, eager, and happy, even when most imaginative. Perhaps there was no contemporary at once strong, simple, and subtle enough, to paint such a man, with such a countenance." -We had begun to think that Dean Milman's "History of Christianity" was to have no sequel, when we were surprised to see one announced, under the |