Fm arb of the MS of Mrs. Stephens as has are so much the creatures f berprat: e ta favor te seat on a piece of Fa werpses after a dif Freach artist that Haz every sense of t pass nately f adred the ve nent traits. A are : 1 REVIEW OF NEW BOOKS. Religio Medici. Its Sequel, Christian Morals. By Sir | sentiment, mostly commingled in their operations, and Thomas Browne, Kt., M. D. Philadelphia, Lea & Blanchard. One vol., 12mo. "And herefore at my death I mean to make a total adieu of the world, not caring for a monument, history, or epitaph, not so much as the bare memory of my name to be found any where but in the universal register of God." Thus wrote Sir Thomas Browne, just after the warm blood of his youth had cooled in the meditations of his manhood. But no person can wish himself into oblivion. In the case of Browne this was doubly difficult; and posterity, without doubting that his name is found in the register of God, has chosen to preserve it also in the memory of man. The very work in which he expressed his majestic indifference to fame, has been the bearer of it down the stream of time. There has been no age in English literature when "Religio Medici," the religion of a physician, wanted readers. The strange, complex character of the author, if not the intrinsic excellence of the book, would always attract attention, as a psychological curiosity. In the present edition we have, as an appropriate sequel, his work on Christian morals, and together they give as correct a picture of the interior life of man as could be drawn from his multifarious writings. Sir Thomas Browne's life extended through a period in which a signal change occurred in English style and manners. He was a cotemporary of Raleigh, of Suckling and Dryden; being born in 1605, and dying in 1682. His own style smacks of the Elizabethan period as much almost in his last as in his first composition. He belonged to a school of authors who wrote with a singular combination of sweetness and dignity, of pedantry and learning. Their sentences, at times, seem to flow from their minds with a sort of majestic and sonorous ease; at others they betray vast elaboration, and are merely ponderous vehicles of trivial conceits. We know, however, of few authors who, generally, are characterized by a more prevailing greatness of soul. Their rich fullness and sober majesty of diction is in strange contrast to the quick sparkle and colloquial jauntiness of style, which came into fashion with the wits and rakes of Charles II's time. They possessed a deeper sense of the "dignified" in composition than any succeeding writers; and they expressed the results of their studies and meditations with corresponding gravity and seriousness. Still, they are not to be classed so much with the pedants and pedagogues as the princes and kings of rhetoric; and their works should be pondered carefully by all who desire to know the elevation and grandeur of expression of which the English language is capable, when it is the instrument of a full and capacious mind. Among this class of our elder writers Sir Thomas Browne takes a high rank, although the strangeness of his individual peculiarities distinguishes him from them, as from all other authors. The epigramatic hyperboles of Hazlitt contain perhaps the most suggestive description of his character and style. Indeed, epigram and hyperbole are both inadequate to convey the impression which Browne leaves upon the reader's mind. We find almost every thing in his writings-understanding, imagination, laced over with a marvelous variety of whimsicalities and peculiarities, which gravel sadly the analysis which would trace them to their source, or define the point in which they meet and harmonize. Sometimes as comprehensive as Bacon, sometimes as acute as Hume; combining assured faith with the most skeptical refinements, or skepticism; believing what nobody else could believe, and doubting what nobody else doubts; full of the shrewdest common sense, yet running his idealism far beyond the boundaries of human thought; combining a lordly selfesteem with deep humility; abounding in queer knowledge and strange conceits; delighting in imaginations which bewilder both himself and his readers, and hunting a thought through a tangled wilderness of speculation to the very verge of the impossible and the inscrutable, yet remaining undeceived by his own ingenuity, and capable of the serenest practical wisdom; with all these seeming inconsistencies we are conscious of no contradiction, for they are all connected by one thread of individuality, they all seem consonant with the mind of Sir Thomas Browne. In Hazlitt's description, we have one phase of his character delineated, in what may be called a style of felicitous obscurity. We are told that "His is the sublime of indifference; a passion for the abstruse and imaginary. He turns the world round for his amusement, as if it were a globe of pasteboard. He looks down on sublunary affairs, as if he had taken his station in one of the planets. The antipodes are next door neighbors to him; and doomsday is not far off. The finite is lost in the infinite. The orbits of the heavenly bodies, or the history of empires, are to him but a point in time, or a speck in the universe. The great Platonic year revolves in one of his periods. Nature is too little for the grasp of his style. He scoops an antithesis out of fabulous antiquity, and rakes up an epithet from the sweepings of chaos. It is as if his books had dropped from the clouds, or as if Friar Bacon's head could speak. He stands on the edge of the world of sense and reason, and gets a vertigo by looking down on impossibilities and chimeras. He had the most intense consciousness of contradictions and nonentities; and he decks them out in the pride and pedantry of words, as if they were the attire of his proper person. The categories hang about his neck like the gold chain of knighthood, and he walks gowned' in the intricate folds and swelling drapery of dark sayings and impenetrable riddles." "Religio Medici," the first work of Browne, and not written for publication, presents his character in all its lights. It would be impossible to convey an idea of it by description and quotation, and heartily do we commend it to any of our readers who have not yet enjoyed its perusal; but we cannot refrain from selecting a few sentences, though they be but mere bricks from an edifice. Speaking of Nature, he says, to ascribe God's actions unto her "is to devolve the honor of the principal agent upon the instrument; which if with reason we may do, then let our hammers rise up and boast they have built our houses, and our pens receive the honor of our writing." A little farther on he remarks, in speaking of the distinction between nature and art, "Now nature is not at va XXX. XXXVII. Nature hath secrets mortals ne'er suspect At some we glance, while some are sealed in night;The optician, by his skill, Ev'n now can show, at will, Long-absent pheers-in shapes of moving light,—(6) If man so much can do, what cannot Heaven effect? XXXI. Shade, image, manes, all the ancient priest Told, to his votarists, in fraud or zeal, May be, and might have been By means and arts we ween No more of, in this age :-for wo or weal Of man, full much fore-known to this late race hath ceased. XXXII. That souls may take ambrosial forms, in heaven, These forms may sleep and smile Midst heaven's fresh roses, while Their spirits free, roam o'er this world's whole scope XXXIII. I have not sung of meeting those we've loved, On earth, while passion reigned, To wreak redress upon themselves they seek And bless, for each stern deed, the pain they now have proved. XXXIV. I have not sung of the first fairest court, XXXV. Haply, the Sire of sires may take a form (9) And give an audience to each set unfurled With bands of sympathy, Wreathen in mystery, Round those who've known each other, in this world;Perfecting all the best, and breathing beauty warm. XXXVI. Essence, light, heat, form, throbbing arteries, To deem each possible enough I see! Edgar, thou know'st-I wait: Guard my expectant state Console me, as I bend in prayers for thee, Aid me, ev'n as thou mayst, both Heaven and thee to please! This song to thee alone!-tho' he who shares Another bore a part While thou hadst never other love than me Sprites, brothers, manes, shades, present my tears and prayers! Patricio, Island of Cuba, July 24, 1844. NOTES. (1) It is well known that Ovid, among the ancients, and J. J. Rosseau, among the classical moderns, are two of those who have found this fable a fine subject for their genius. Many once-flourishing nations would now be entirely unknown, were it not for the fables and personifications left by them to the after world. Many of these manes are so very beautiful that it is hard to consider them as nothing:-an eminent historian, of modern times, has supposed that some of the finest systems of ancient mythology may still be realized somewhere;"—that is, in some part of the dominions of the supreme father of worlds. (2) Pythagorus (who probably gathered the belief from a more remote antiquity) advanced that the seven primary planets gave out the seven notes of music; being so arranged as to produce the most ecstatic harmony. The same philosopher declared that when alone, and "retired (as he expressed it) within the depths of his being," he could, sometimes, even hear these celestial sounds. Christians of the present age connect, always, an idea of music with that of heaven. (3) Mohecan, or Moaëcan, is the aboriginal name of the river Hudson. (4) Ladaiianna is the aboriginal name of the river St. Lawrence;-as it was written in the year 1826, by the "grand chief" (as he was styled) of the diminished tribe of Indians called Hurons. This chief was in a great degree civilized, and spoke both French and English. (5) The Lake Derwent, in Keswick, Cumberland, near the mountain Skidaw. In freshness and scenery this place is perfectly charming. The hills are beautifully grouped, and (being bare, rocky, and far to the north) take softer and deeper tints than those I have seen in the new world, which are generally shagged to the summit with forests. (6) A successful experiment of this kind was to me very astonishing;-whether the same be or be not common to men of science, I do not know; but several whom I have met, in my wanderings, appeared never to have witnessed the same effect. A vase, containing nothing but earth, was placed upon a pedestal surrounded by steps, not far from the corner of an apartment. After ascending two of the steps, roses were seen growing out of the same vase, and a little bird pecking the earth around them. one would have supposed that the bird and flowers were real; but on attempting to touch them they were found to be nothing but light. The real objects were in the next room; and this exact semblance of them was produced by an arrangement of concealed glasses. (7) Mesmerism. Any (8) Most Christians will remember the expression, "In my Father's house are many mansions." (9) Respecting those forms which the Supreme Being gives and confers, in heaven, a beautiful opinion has been advanced by Bonaventura, one of the Catholic fathers. OCEAN MUSIC AT EVENING. PRAISED be thy music, ever-chanting main, I stand, this eve, not lonely though alone; For though the day's bright chariot rolls its wheels Low, 'neath the horizon, and the twilight star Scarce shows her jeweled forehead from afar, 20* Fairest 'mid ether's hall; and though there steals MARY E. LEE. OUR CONTRIBUTORS.-NO. XV. MRS. ANN S. STEPHENS. WITH A PORTRAIT. BY CHARLES J. PETERSON. THE magazines of America have called forth a yet been induced to present them in a collected form. species of fictitious writing comparatively little culti-But we indulge the hope that she will, at no distant vated in England. The short tales, occupying from day, publish an edition of her more elaborate fictions; five to fifteen pages, such as fill our periodicals, are for we do not know, in the whole range of our light almost peculiar to the literature of this country. In literature, any thing that surpasses "Malina Gray," the "Metropolitan," indeed, we sometimes meet with "Alice Copley," "The Beggar Boy," and "Anna such contributions, but they are much inferior to Taylor." articles, of the same character, published even in our newspapers. The powerful stories for which Blackwood is celebrated are really novels, and by their length afford scope for that full development of character and incident, which so materially increases the incident of a fiction. But we know not where to find, in the periodical literature of Great Britain, any thing equal to the light, airy romances of Mrs. Osgood, the serious tales of Mrs. Embury, or the life-like and thrilling stories of Mrs. Stephens. Mrs. Ann S. Stephens was born in an interior village of Connecticut, and is now about thirty-three years old. The district where she spent her childhood is full of romantic scenery, and its influence on her can be traced throughout her writings. At an early age she married, and soon after removed with her husband to Portland, Maine. Subsequently they changed their residence to New York, where they have ever since remained. Her literary career began in Portland, and was purely accidental in its commencement. Among the first of her friends was John Neal, Esq., of that place, who early appreciated her genius. She projected, and for some time published, "The Portland Magazine," a work that was subsequently transferred to other hands, when her editorial charge over it ceased. It is not too much to say that its reputation arose chiefly from her contributions to it. After her removal to New York she engaged in writing for a more extensive circle of readers, and her fame now rapidly widened. The publication of "Mary Derwent," for which she received a prize of $400, immediately placed her in the first rank of American authors. Since that period she has been one of the most fertile of the fictitious writers of the day. Her tales, sketches and novels would fill several volumes if collected; but we are not aware that any of them exist in print, except in the fugitive form in which they at first appeared, or were subsequently copied, in magazines and newspapers. This, however, is to be attributed to her own neglect; for she rigidly reserves the copy-rights of her stories; and has never We shall not attempt a rigid analysis of Mrs Stephens' genius. This is always difficult, but especially so when the subject of criticism is living We are so apt to be biassed by friendship-or deceived by the peculiar turn of our own minds-or misled by a tendency to severity on the one hand, or leniency on the other, that few, if any, have been able to do exact justice to the intellect of a cotemporary. But, on the prominent characteristics of Mrs. Stephens' writings, all dispassionate critics will agree. Her powers of description are of the first order. She has an eye quick to perceive, and a pen skillful to trace the prominent parts of a picture. Like a painter, she throws her whole force on the objects in the front, finishing the background with a few bold masses of light and shade. No writer, since Sir Walter Scott, has excelled her in this. We might point to many instances in her romances that justify our assertion. We shall content ourselves with a single one. In the "Two Dukes," a tale which appeared in this magazine, for 1812; there is a description of a riot in London, quite equal to anything of the kind by the author of Waverly. In sketching rural scenery, she is perhaps without a rival. The village school-the white church on the hill-the walk through the twilight woods-the search aster wild strawberries-the romp on the green-the old elm by the water side, and all the various pictures that pertain to country life, start into view with a few skillful touches of her pencil, and are remembered afterward, not as ideal scenes, but as familiar objects we have often visited. Her characters, and their actions, are described graphically, and often with minute skill. There is, in her story of "Malina Gray," a scene where a grey-headed father supplicates Mrs. Gray that her daughter, who was to have been married to his child, may see the dying young clergyman; and we shall never forget the elaborate detail with which the author describes the old man, trembling with heart-breaking emotion as he leans on his cane, while the Pharisaical mother |