servance of the principles, which he eloquently posed to bear upon the subject, many of which sets forth, would rescue the fine localities for were communicated to her on personal authority, which nature has done so much from the mon- and were first brought to the notice of the pubstrosities in wood and brick with which they lic in her volume. She has pursued her reare so often deformed. His discussion of the searches, with incredible industry, into the materials and modes of construction are of great traditions of various nations, making free use of practical value. With the abundance of designs the copious erudition of the Germans in this which he presents, for every style of rural build- department, and arranging the facts or legends ing, and the careful estimates of the expense, she has obtained with a certain degree of hisno one who proposes to erect a house in the torical criticism, that gives a value to her work country can fail to derive great advantage from as an illustration of national beliefs, without refconsulting his well-written and interesting pages.erence to its character as a hortus siccus of Tallis, Willoughby, & Co. are publishing as weird and marvelous stories. In point of style, serials the Adventures of Don Quixote, trans- her volume is unexceptionable; its spirit is lated by JARVIS, and the Complete Works of modest and reverent; it can not be justly accused Shakspeare, edited by JAMES ORCHARD HALLI- of superstition, though it betrays a womanly WELL. The Don Quixote is a cheap edition, instinct for the supernatural: and without being embellished with wood cuts by Tony Johannot. imbued with any love of dogmas, breathes an The Shakspeare is illustrated with steel engrav- unmistakable atmosphere of purity and religious ings by Rogers, Heath, Finden, and Walker, trust. The study of this subject can not be rom designs by Henry Warren, Edward Cor- recommended to the weak-minded and timorous, bould, and other English artists who are favor- but an omnivorous digestion may find a wholeably known to the public. It is intended that some exercise of its capacity in Mrs. Crowe's this edition shall contain all the writings ascribed tough revelations. to the immortal dramatist, without distinction, including not only the Poems and well-authenticated Plays, but also the Plays of doubtful origin, or of which Shakspeare is supposed to have been only in part the author. Herrman J. Meyer, a German publisher in this city, is issuing an edition of MEYER's Universum, a splendid pictorial work, which is to appear in monthly parts, each containing four engravings on steel, and twelve of them making an annual volume with forty-eight plates. They consist of the most celebrated views of natural scenery, and of rare works of art, selected from prominent objects of interest in every part of the globe. The first number contains an engraving of Bunker Hill Monument, the Ecole Nationale at Paris, Rousseau's Hermitage at Montmorency, and the Royal Palace at Munich, besides a well-executed vignette on the title-page and cover. The letter-press descriptions by the author are retained in the original language, which, in a professed American edition, is an injudicious arrangement, serving to limit the circulation of the work, in a great degree, to Germans, and to those familiar with the German language. A volume of Discourses, entitled Christian Thoughts on Life, by HENRY GILES, has been published by Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, Boston, consisting of a series of elaborate essays, intended to gather into a compact form some fragments of moral experience, and to give a certain record and order to the author's desultory studies of man's interior life. Among the subjects of which it treats are The Worth of Life, the Continuity of Life, the Discipline of Life, Weariness of Life, and Mystery in Religion and in Life. The views presented by Mr. Giles are evidently the fruit of profound personal reflection; they glow with the vitality of experi ence; and in their tender and pleading eloquence will doubtless commend themselves to many human sympathies. Mr. Giles has been hitherto most favorably known to the public in this country, as a brilliant rhetorician, and an original and piquant literary critic; in the present volume, he displays a rare mastery of ethical analysis and deduction. W. Phillips & Co., Cincinnati, have issued an octavo volume of nearly seven hundred pages, composed of Lectures on the American Eclectic System of Surgery, by BENJAMIN L. HILL, M.D., with over one hundred illustrative engravings. It is based on the principles of the medical system of which the author is a distinguished practitioner. The National Temperance Offering, edited by S. F. Cary, and published by R. Vandien, is got up in an expensive style, and is intended as a gift-book worthy the patronage of the advocates of the Temperance Reform. In addition to a variety of contributions both in prose and poetry from several able writers, it contains biograph Mrs. CROWE'S Night Side of Nature, published by J. S. Redfield, is another contribution to the literature of Ghosts and Ghost-Seers, which, like the furniture and costume of the middle ages, seems to be coming into fashion with many curious amateurs of novelties. The reviving taste for this kind of speculation is a singular feature of the age, showing the prevalence of a dissatisfied and restless skepticism, rather than an enlightened and robust faith in spiritual realities. Mrs. Crowe is a decided, though gentle advocate of the preternatural ical sketches of some distinguished Temperance character of the marvelous phenomena, of which probably every country and age presents a more or less extended record. She has collected a large mass of incidents, which have been sup men, accompanied with their portraits, among whom we notice Rev. Dr. Beecher, Horace Greeley, John H. Hawkins, T. P. Hunt, and others. FIG. 1. A PROMENADE DRESS of a beautiful lavender taffetas, the front of the skirt trimmed with folds of the same, confined at regular distances with seven flutes of lavender gauze ribbon, put on the reverse of the folds; a double fluted frilling, rather narrow, encircles the opening of the body, which is made high at the back, and closed in the front with a fluting of ribbon similar to that on the skirt; demi-long sleeves, cut up in a kind of wave at the back, so as to show the under full sleeve of spotted white muslin. Chemisette of fulled muslin, confined with bands of needle-work. Scarf of white China crape, beautifully embroidered, and finished with a deep, white, silk fringe. Drawn capote of pink crape, adorned in the interior with half-wreaths of green myrtle. FIG. 2. COSTUME FOR A YOUNG LADY.-A dress of white barège trimmed with three deep vandyked flounces put on close to each other; high body, formed of worked inlet, finished with a stand-up row round the throat; the sleeves descend as low as the elbow, where they are finished with two deep frillings, vandyked similar to the flounces. Half-long gloves of straw-colored kid, surmounted with a bracelet of black velvet. Drawn capote of white crape, adorned with clusters of the rose de mott both in the interior and exterior. Pardessus of pink glacé silk, trimmed with three frillings of the same, edged with a narrow silk fringe, which also forms a heading to the same; over each hip is a trimming en tablier formed of the fringe; short sleeves, trimmed with one fulling edged with fringe; these sleeves are of the same piece as the cape, not cut separate; the trimming over the top of the arms being similar to that under, and formed also of fringe; this pardessus is perfectly round in its form, and only closes just upon the front of the waist. MORNING CAPS which are slightly ornamented, vary more in the way in which they are trimmed, than in the positive form; some being trimmed with chicorées, wreaths of gauze ribbon, or knobs of ribbon edged with a festooned open-work encircling a simple round of tulle, or what is perhaps prettier, a cluster of lace. A pretty form, differing a little from the monotonous round, is composed of a round forming a star, the points being cut off; these points are brought close together, [From the Eclectic Review.] WORDSWORTH-HIS CHARACTER IN AND GENIUS. a late article on Southey, we alluded to the solitary position of Wordsworth in that lake country where he once shone the brightest star in a large galaxy. Since then, the star of Jove, so beautiful and large, has gone out in darkness-the greatest laureate of England has expired-the intensest, most unique, and most pure-minded of our poets, with the single exceptions of Milton and Cowper, is departed. And it were lesemajesty against his mighty shade not to pay it our tribute while yet his, memory, and the grass of his grave, are green. It is singular, that only a few months have elapsed since the great antagonist of his literary VOL. I.-No. 5.-0 p fame-Lord Jeffrey (who, we understand, persisted to the last in his ungenerous and unjust estimate), left the bench of human, to appear at the bar of Divine justice. Seldom has the death of a celebrated man produced a more powerful impression in his own city and circle, and a less powerful impression on the wide horizon of the world. In truth, he had outlived himself. It had been very different had he passed away thirty years ago, when the "Edinburgh Review" was in the plenitude of its influence. As it was, he disappeared like a star at midnight, whose descent is almost unnoticed while the whole heavens are white with glory, not like a sun going down, that night may come over the earth. One of the acutest, most ac complished, most warm-hearted, and generous of men. Jeffrey wanted that stamp of univer ence. 66 sality, that highest order of genius, that depth | without identifying it with the Divine presof insight, and that simple directness of purpose, not to speak of that moral and religious consecration, which "give the world assurance of a man." He was the idol of Edinburgh, and the pride of Scotland, because he condensed in himself those qualities which the modern Athens has long been accustomed to covet and admire -taste and talent rather than genius-subtlety of appreciation rather than power of originationthe logical understanding rather than the inventive insight-and because his name had sounded out to the ends of the earth. But nature and man, not Edinburgh Castle, or the Grampian Hills merely, might be summoned to mourn in Wordsworth's departure the loss of one of their truest high-priests, who had gazed into some of the deepest secrets of the one, and echoed some of the loftiest aspirations of the other. To soften such grief, however, there comes in the reflection, that the task of this great poet had been nobly discharged. He had given the world assurance, full, and heaped, and running over, of what he meant, and of what was meant by him. While the premature departure of a Schiller, a Byron, or a Keats, gives us emotions similar to those wherewith we would behold the crescent moon, snatched away as by some "insatiate archer," up into the Infinite, ere it grew into its full glory-Wordsworth, like Scott, Goethe, and Southey, was permitted to fill his full and broad sphere. What Wordsworth's mission was, may be, perhaps, understood through some previous remarks upon his great mistress-Nature, as a poetical personage. The notions suggested by this view, which is that of Scripture, are exceedingly comprehensive and magnificent. Nature becomes to the poet's eye a great sheet let down from God out of heaven," and in which there is no object common or unclean." The purpose and the Being above cast such a grandeur over the pettiest or barest objects, as did the fiery piilar upon the sand, or the shrubs of the howling desert of its march. Every thing becomes valuable when looked upon as a communication from God, imperfect only from the nature of the material used. What otherwise might have been concluded discords, now appear only stammerings or whisperings in the Divine voice; thorns and thistles spring above the primeval curse, the meanest flower that blows" gives "Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." The creation is neither unduly exalted nor contemptuously trampled under-foot, but maintains its dignified position, as an embassador from the Divine King. The glory of something far beyond association-that of a divine and perpetual presence-is shed over the landscape. and its golden-drops are spilled upon the stars. Objects the most diverse-the cradle of the child, the wet hole of the centipede, the bed of the corpse, and the lair of the earthquake, the nest of the lark, and the crag on which sits, half asleep, the dark vulture, digesting bloodare all clothed in a light the same in kind, though varying in degree "A light which never was on sea or shore." There are three methods of contemplating nature. These are the material, the shadowy, In the poetry of the Hebrews, accordingly, and the mediatorial. The materialist looks upon the locusts are God's great army;"-the it as the great and only reality. It is a vast winds are his messengers, the thunder his voice, solid fact, for ever burning and rolling around, the lightning a "fiery stream going before him," below and above him. The idealist, on the the moon his witness in the heavens, the sun a contrary, regards it as a shadow-a mode of strong man rejoicing to run his race—all creamind-the infinite projection of his own thought. tion is roused and startled into life through him The man who stands between the two extremes,its every beautiful, or dire, or strange shape in looks on nature as a great, but not ultimate or everlasting scheme of mediation, or compromise, between pure and absolute spirit and humanity -adumbrating God to man, and bringing man near to God. To the materialist, there is an altar, star-lighted heaven-high, but no God. To the idealist, there is a God, but no altar. He who holds the theory of mediation, has the Great Spirit as his God, and the universe as the altar on which he presents the gift of his poetical (we do not speak at present so much of his theological) adoration. It must be obvious, at once, which of those three views of nature is the most poetical. It is surely that which keeps the two principles of spirit and matter distinct and unconfoundedpreserves in their proper relations-the soul and the body of things-God within, and without the garment by which, in Goethe's grand thought, we see him by." While one party deify, and another destroy matter, the third impregnate, the earth or the sky, is God's movable tent; the place where, for a season, his honor, his beauty, his strength, and his justice dwell-the tenant not degraded, and inconceivable dignity being added to the abode. His mere "tent," however-for while the great and the infinite are thus connected with the little and the finite, the subordination of the latter to the former is always maintained. The most magnificent objects in nature are but the mirrors to God's face-the scaffolding to his future purposes; and, like mirrors, are to wax dim; and, like scaffolding, to be removed. The great sheet is to be received up again into heaven. The heavens and the earth are to pass away, and to be succeeded, if not by a purely mental economy, yet by one of a more spiritual materialism, compared to which the former shall no more be remembered, neither come into mind. Those frightful and fantastic forms of animated life, through which God's glory seems to shine |