No one should be a prophet who can possibly avoid it, and so far we have kept ourselves pretty free from prediction. It is well for Mr. Keeler to have here grouped together these singular facts of his life, but it will be no surprising fortune if he shall come after a while to regard his work as crude in some ways: at least, he has given such evidence of growth since his first book as to make us hope this. But with these haunting reminiscences once fairly uttered, and, as far as he is concerned, dismissed to the limbo of all known facts and accomplished purposes, he can turn to more imaginative tasks with an expectation of success which will be fulfilled in proportion as he remembers (what he ought to know better than any one) that, truth is stranger than fiction, and not only this, but is better even in the airiest regions of the ideal, and that the only condition of making life like ours tolerable in literature is to paint it exactly as it is.

Monsieur Sylvestre. A Novel. By GEORGE SAND. Translated from the French by FRANCIS GEORGE SHAW. Boston: Roberts Brothers.

It is owing, no doubt, to a greater difference in the constitution of society in France that, judged by the rules regulating our social life, many French books written with a manifest moral purpose are immoral to us, because the improper is made so very conspicuous when absent. In situations where the Anglo-Saxon would not suspect, Lamartine, for instance, in his most impossible Platonic stories, is sure to tell with gratuitous solemnity that everything was perfectly correct. If "Monsieur Sylvestre," therefore, is not free from this species of nega tive impurity, it would appear to be not so much the fault of Madame Dudevant as of her nation and its literature. And it is due her to say that her seeming honesty, even in her errors, has placed George Sand, at her worst, on a moral plane far above that of the abandoned English female novelists of the period.

The book "Monsieur Sylvestre" is exceedingly philosophical; a fact which accounts, it may be, for the somewhat slow movement of the story itself, and the philosophy varies in quality.

The characters of the story are made to form a sort of exploration party after happi

ness.

Monsieur Sylvestre the hermit, divides the command of the expedition with M. Pierre Sorède, a young gentleman who is dissatisfied with the matrimonial scheme of his worldly uncle. A young physician is the next important person, in a philosophical point of view, and Mademoiselle Vallier, the heroine, the most important one of all in point of story-telling interest. Before Pierre married the heroine, and just before his duel with a pretender to her hand, he states the results of his search after happiness as fol lows: "Happiness has never been defined and cannot be; each man forms an idea of it which is peculiar to himself, and even this varies according to the state of his mind; nothing is happiness, properly speaking, and everything is happiness to a fully living soul; therefore the question is, not to seek after happiness, but to develop life which gives it to us, humble or magnificent, ardent or calm, ecstatic or sweet, as it gives us talent or genius, according to the organization which we possess. And I may well add that, for youth, the true and the best employment of life is love!"

As Pierre does not afterward state definitely any other opinion concerning happiness, we may take that to be his last one on the subject. This, however, gives no idea of the beauty and breadth of some of the sentiments of "Monsieur Sylvestre." It is a work entirely of George Sand's latest manner, and the traces of a master are almost everywhere apparent. As a story it is not quite so attractive as "Antonia," or even "Mauprat," the two others of her works which have preceded this in the series of translations. "Mauprat" has more of the writer's early fire in it, and of her early crudeness. "Antonia" is a charming lovestory, in which Madame Dudevant approaches what she seems to us to have reached in "Le Marquis de Villemer," namely, her greatest purity, though not her greatest strength. Mr. Shaw has given us an admirable translation, notwithstanding an occa sional difficulty with his pronouns, and the use of too much translatable French everywhere in the volume.

Helps's essays as might be urged why we should like them by some one who does; and yet we are very certain of not finding them satisfactory. They have a quaintness without humor, a prejudiced and narrowminded benevolence, an elaborate and fatiguing ease. The author is apt to be very subtle about some interest purely factitious and quite unworthy consideration, and then for compensation to treat with one-sided petulance and impatience some most serious and important problem. He is a humane thinker to no particular purpose; his sympathies embrace misfortunes upon the understanding that the conditions producing the misfortunes are not to be essentially changed. He is a conservative who would like to see the world improved, but not particularly advanced; but at the same time he has some very startlingly radical sentiments in abeyance. In the literary management of his book he concerns himself so much with getting into a proper and impressively careless attitude to say something, that you are usually quite worn out before he says any thing. When he refers to an expression of one of his characters as humorous or sarcastic, in which his reader is able to discern only a cold and colorless flippancy, it is touching, though pathos is not Mr. Helps's strong point; in fact, he seems to have only a vague faiblesse, and no forte at all. Yet, as we must say again, one might found a contrary opinion upon his book, if one had a mind to discover only its good things. Here, for example, is a passage which might persuade us that Mr. Helps had made a shrewder study than any one else of German character, for the German people are now realizing upon the French battle-fields the terribleness he guessed to be in them, when one day he stepped into a Protestant church in Germany: "They sang psalms such as I fancy Luther would have approved of; and I thought it would be a serious thing for a hostile army to meet a body of men who had been thus singing." Or he might almost make us believe that he had acquainted himself intimately with things in this country, so cursed by the brutality of people in small authority, when he wrote beseeching those wretched little despots to bethink themselves that "it is a great privilege to have an opportunity many times in a day, in the course of their business, to do a real kindness which is not to be paid for. Graciousness of demeanor is a large part of the duty of any official person who comes in

contact with the world. Where a man's business is, there is the ground for his reli< gion to manifest itself."

The companions of Mr. Helps's solitude are his reveries upon all manner of subjects, and he talks on with a looseness at times which it is no great violence to call maundering. He laments for a long time the existence of prostitution, which he sees clearly enough comes from the aristocratic constitution of society in some degree; and then of the folly that tends to ruin he says: "For women are the real aristocrats; and it is one of their greatest merits. Men's intellects, even some of the brightest, may occasionally be deceived by theories about equality and the like, but women, who look at reality more, are rarely led away by nonsense of this kind." If you feel like answering that this admirably disastrous aristocratic sentiment of women is an effect of their false education and narrow life, a relic of their ancient slavery, in fact, rather than a finer instinct, spare yourself the pains; Mr. Helps is going to tell us very shortly that "there is a cultivation in women quite independent of literary culture, rank, and other advantages. They are more on a level with each other than men."

We do not recollect to have read any. thing upon the social evil quite so aimless and inconclusive as the speculations in Mr. Helps's book, though we recognize a certain nervous and distracted good-will in the essay that at any rate does honor to his heart. There may be more reason for the existence of this and the other essays than we have allowed, but we should be at a loss how to express it. There seems to be no occasion for uniting the sentiment of Tupper to the logic of Ruskin, and presenting the result in the form of reveries and dialogues; and yet there may be.

Valerie Aylmer. A Novel. By CHRISTIAN REID. New York: D. Appleton & Co.

IT must often have happened to our reader, if he is also a play-goer, and especially a play-goer of these later times, when the theatre has taken to holding the mirror up to nature with so much freedom, — to have seen upon the stage among the masculine characters certain figures - very pretty and charming figures sometimes-which were rather puzzling. They were dressed, these

figures, in men's clothes, and they behaved as much like men as any persons upon the stage, and more. Were they faithful lovers and devoted husbands? Such fidelity in lovers and devotion in husbands was never seen before. Were they seducers and roués ? They were incomparably beguiling and abandoned. Were they dandies? Their foppishness exceeded all other foppishness. Were they assassins? The murderousness of those assassins!—it made one's blood run cold.

And yet, there was something which rendered the spectator doubtful if they were all that they seemed to be. Perhaps it was the very excess with which they developed the dramatist's ideas, the extreme vigor with which they represented masculine character, that awakened misgiving. You might not declare that they were women, but it was incredible that they were men like other men, though they might be such men as the ladies would be could they gratify that aspiration of theirs, "If I were only a man!"

We are confirmed in this suspicion, which is very likely unfounded, by the appearance of the ladies when they wreak this desire in fiction; for in their personation of lovers, husbands, and brothers there, they remind us of the surpassing manliness of those mystifying figures on the stage. Even when they would deceive us as authors, and call themselves by men's baptismal names upon their title-pages, they are defeated by the behavior of their people in men's clothes; and we should know that Christian Reid was a lady, because all the men in the book are ladies, or at the best, ladies'-men, and are severally much better and much worse than they could be if they were what they pretend to be. In such minor personages as Valerie's father, General Aylmer of Aylmers, and her uncle, M. Vacquant, this fact does not appear so strikingly; but there is no doubt of it when you come to her lovers, Charley Hautaine, who had loved Valerie from childhood, who was "clever, high-spirited, brave to a fault, thorough-bred within and without, and handsome as a prince in a fairy tale," whom everybody loved, "even the girls with whom he flirted, and the men whom he rivalled," and who had done warlike wonders in the Confederate Navy during the war, and had light clustering curls, and played upon the guitar, and sang duets, and had fought duels, and had thrown his dear. est friend out of a window and crippled him for life; Julian Romney, M. Vacquant's

step-son, who had "all of boyhood's smoothness of outline and clearness of tint in the face, whose refined features and waxen complexion suited its rich brown curls and lustrous eyes; all of boyhood's grace in the slender figure that bore upon it the stamp of such thorough-bred elegance, yet who had a curve of disdain about the mouth, and a cloud of petulance on the brow, which deepened and lightened continually, without ever quite vanishing, and made the most careless observer sure that this man had never in his life known the curb of wholesome restraint, imposed either by others or himself,” and who, in fact, after being flirted with by Valerie (la belle des belles they called her in her native Louisiana, where they know ever so much French), takes more and more to gambling and is finally killed in a duel; and, above all, Maurice Darcy, the soldier. artist, Valerie's cousin, of Irish blood, and a prodigy of coolness, suppressed passion, cutting sarcasm, and generosity and genius, such as is found only in ladies' novels, who hates Valerie's coquetries, and saves her life, and wins her, and breaks with her, and has "quick gleams flash into his deep-gray eyes," or as it were "a stone mask fitted over the features," or "a cloud, heavy and dark as night," rolled over them, according to his moods; who is often the guest of M. Vacquant, his uncle, whom he tells plainly he does not forgive, and never shall forgive, for his ill-treatment of his mother, who paints the most wonderful pictures, and is with "the Emperor Maximilian" up to the last moment in Mexico.

We should fear that the worst effect of this sort of thing might not be the bad literary art, but that after a while the young men might think of taking the lady novelists at their word, and instead of remaining the sensible, slow, easy-going fellows we all know and like, might begin to ask themselves whether, if women liked those pretty monsters they painted, it was quite worth while to behave with any sort of sanity and goodtemper. But fortunately it is worth while, for the sake of one's own comfort, and besides, in novels like "Valerie Aylmer" any one may see that the whole tone of society is as flagrantly unnatural as the men. We speak now for the North; we cannot declare that, in Baltimore and Louisiana people do not talk and act as Christian Reid says. The circle is very, very patrician, and in parity of blood and breeding alone is one which we cannot hope to see in the North, or ever

associate with on equal terms. Pretty nearly everybody has been a champion of the Lost Cause, and has fought with unspeakable heroism; and some have become so joined to lost causes, that they follow the failing fortunes of despotism in Austria and Mexico. They are mostly of French extraction, and they are of the Catholic religion; and we have an uneasy feeling (which we dislike to express) that they would think themselves much better than one of our best Boston families. They read nothing commoner than "Blackwood," in the thin air of those heights, and they interweave in common parlance genteel morceaux of the langue Française, like qu'importe, tapis, atelier, mes amis, voila tout, par exemple, début, and au revoir. Hardly any conversation is without these embellishments, and the feebleness of the book is forever staggering into italics.

It would be difficult to give a general idea of the comprehensive absurdity of "Valerie Aylmer," and we are not even going to tell the plot of it. We do not know whether it is more sad or more amusing to note how entirely it seems to be evolved from a young girl's ignorance of the world and knowledge of the most unnatural literature, and how it seems unconsciously to have been put together from this deplorable reading. The art of doing this at all is something in the author's favor, and youth is something; and at times we fancied that the dialogues of the book, preposterous as they were, had a movement of their own, and did not leave the development of the characters altogether to the author's explanations; but we are not sure of this, and the only kindness at parting which we can think of is to remind the author that she can easily outlive "Valerie Aylmer," and that she cannot help doing better in another novel.

Thayer Expedition. — Scientific Results of a Journey in Brazil. By L. AGASSIZ and his Travelling Companions. Geology and Physical Geography of Brazil. By CH. FRED. HARTT, Professor of Geology in Cornell University. Boston: Fields, Osgood, & Co.

IT will be seen by the title of this work that it constitutes a part of the long-expect ed report of the scientific results of the Thayer Expedition to Brazil. This expedi tion, was on all accounts the most remark

able enterprise of the kind ever undertaken in America, indeed, considering the time occupied and the extent of country trayersed, one of the most fruitful journeys ever undertaken, not excepting the great enterprises by our own and other governments. Mr. Hartt's report on the physical geography and geology of the region studied by himself and the other assistants of Professor Agassiz may well serve to show to the public the spirit of investigation which guided, and the magnitude of the work done, by the gentlemen who co-operated in this investigation of the great empire of the South.

His work being a part of a series of reports on the same region, Mr. Hartt has evidently felt himself limited in the scope of his treatise to the range of subjects properly falling under this title. This takes away from the book the general interest which would naturally be attached to a journey by a careful observer in the ever-new tropical region of South America. The book has few of those traits which will make it popular in the worse sense of that word. It differs entirely from the class of books to which, for instance, the "Brazil and the Brazilians" belongs, and though it may want the few good traits of that eminently popular volume, it wants equally its many bad characteristics. A glance at the table of contents shows at once that it is as a scientific report that the volume is to be considered, though the matters of which it treats, as well as the methods in which they are considered, makes it interesting even to the unscientific student of South America. Although Mr. Hartt's observations extend over only a small part of the whole surface of the Empire of Brazil, they have covered by far the larger part of the coast line of that region, and extended far enough into the interior to give us a great deal of information about the most important commercial provinces, those containing the diamond districts of Diamantina, Chapada, Sincora, etc., and the extensive coal basins whose development is to play so large a part in the future of the continent.

Beginning with the province of Rio Janeiro, Mr. Hartt takes up the several other provinces, and gives a succinct description of each, drawn from his own note-books or from the journals of his fellow-travellers, compared with and illustrated by the work of other observers in the same region. We cannot follow him through the encyclopædic detail of this part of his work. The last

chapter contains the only important generalizations which his book affords, for during the first eighteen chapters our author sticks very closely to his facts. Some of these general conclusions are of the highest value. Mr. Hartt seems to have satisfied himself that the gneissic rocks of the province of Rio de Janeiro and the Serra do Mar are of Laurentian age, and that they were lifted above the sea as early as the beginning of the Paleozoic time. While acknowledging the probability of these two conjectures, we must confess that the evidence does not warrant us in the supposition that these opinions are to be admitted into the facts of the science without further evidence. The admirable criticism levelled against the hasty conclusions of geologists, in the chapter on "Illogical Geology," by Mr. Spencer, should make that class of naturalists see the dangers involved in this sort of reasoning. It must be confessed, however, that Mr. Hartt's opinion concerning the age of these rocks receives striking confirmation from the parallelism between the lithological and mineralogical features of the materials of which they are composed and rocks from the Laurentian system in this country. This comparison has been made by Dr. T. Sterry Hunt, whose opinion on such points is of the highest value.

Unquestionably the most important matter discussed by Mr. Hartt concerns the evidences of glacial action in the region from Rio to the Amazon. When Professor Agassiz, in 1865, first announced the existence of glacial drift in the neighborhood of the equator, the scientific world pretty generally believed that the judgment was hasty; that it was too much influenced by a desire to extend the domain of that geological agent, of which he had been to a singular degree the discoverer, to regions where it would seem impossible for it to have operated. We hope the clear statements of Professor Hartt will at least give pause to the illogical talk of those who, ignorant of the facts, have in a very unscientific way hastened to protest against Agassiz's conclusions. Mr. Hartt tells us distinctly that he was at the outset opposed to the view of his master (and of his complete scientific independence the writer can testify), that he conceived it to

be in the highest degree improbable that ice could have worked in Brazil as it has worked in British America. Yet he has by careful study been drawn to believe that the whole of the shore region of Brazil was, during the last geological period, covered with ice to a great depth, which performed then precisely the same part which it performed probably at the same time in North America. We cannot give Mr. Hartt's argument in detail; it is, however, convincing to any right-minded man that further objections to Agassiz's view must come from persons who have studied the facts at least as carefully as he and Mr. Hartt have done.

The same good reasons which would deter the critic from criticising the style of a "blue book" might be urged against carping about the rhetorical shape of Mr. Hartt's book. There is so little, however, to be said against the way in which the author has presented the matters of which he treats, that we may, without risk of prejudice to him, say that he has considered clearness of statement very much more than elegance of diction; that he is laconic to the extreme of being dry. The reader meets so many full points in the course of a page, that he feels as if he were travelling over an intellectual corduroy road. But the worst form of this offence is something venial compared with the sin of fine writing.

Of the work as a whole it is not too much to say that it is the most valuable contribu tion yet made towards the development of the physical history of the noble Empire of Brazil. It was the great good fortune of the Thayer Expedition that it secured the earnest and intelligent co-operation of the most enlightened of modern sovereigns, Don Pedro II. We are heartily glad that this important event in the exploration of his country should have come from the energy and talent of our own. South America may or may not come to be the home of the emigrants from its overcrowded sister continent in the last decades of the next century, but it is certainly the fairest field now open to the exploring ambition of our American students who long for uncultivated fields. We hope there may be many to follow the way in which Mr. Hartt has led.