to see him's rare sport Step in Emerson's tracks with legs painfully short.

It would be unfair to judge Henry D. Thoreau by the indiscreet laudations of his friends. He was cut out more nearly in the pattern of a hermit than any man of modern time. His love of solitude was probably sincere, his surliness was his breeding, and he extracted from his painful, unsocial habitudes the peculiar poetry which suits with hardship. It was not for him to sing of summer and nectarines, nor to honestly appreciate or kindly judge those who did so; but he sang of winter, of crab-apples, of cranberries, of reptiles, of field-mice, with just the right accent and with a tingling vibration of life in his chords. The Bernard Palissy of literature, he modeled his frogs and water-snakes so true that they seemed better than birds of paradise.

Babolain. From the French of Gustave Droz. New York: Henry Holt & Co.

This is a tragical little romance which draws the reader along with it by every line in every page, yet its power is derived from the resources of caricature: it is rather the hollow side of a comic mask than a true expression of pathos. Scientific and stupid, Professor Babolain enters the world of Paris armed with his innocence, his uncle's legacy, his deep learning and his utter ignorance. A couple of adventuresses, mother and daughter, swoop down upon him as a lawful prey, and he is quickly a doting husband and a terrified son-in-law. The sole redeeming trait about the younger woman, who is a beauty and who paints, is that she never makes the least pretence of loving him: in his first moments of adoration she mystifies him heartlessly, crushing him with her wit and confounding him with her art: "Difficult? oh no! In the first place, you need rabbits' hair: that is indispensable. If you had no rabbits, or if you were in a country where rabbits had no hair, painting could not be thought of." She never melts, except when he presents her with a riviere of diamonds, and, after finding a leisure moment to give birth to a little girl, rushes off to Italy with Count Vaugirau, followed promptly by a certain Timoleon. This Timoleon, who loves her unsuccessfully, is the beneficiary of poor Babolain, borrowing his money at the same time that he tries to borrow his wife, and returning with outrageous reproaches to the hero impoverished and desolate. This precious friend is a specimen of all the rest. The very daughter, sole consolation of her parent's straitened existence, but ill fulfills the rapturous anticipations of early fatherhood. He is at first her nurse and teacher: "I saw the satin-like skin of her little neck, and behind her ear, fresh and pink like the petal of a flower, the soft curls upon the nape of her neck, half hair, half down, sucking in with their greedy roots the sweet juices of this living cream." He throws his hat into the river to teach her the laws of gravity. But she grows up ungrateful and estranged, and, having married an ambitious physician, allows her father to live as a neglected pensioner under a part of her roof. The details of Babolain's decline are exquisitely painful, but partake of that style of exaggeration and caricature which causes even the heartless beings who make up his world to seem more like grotesque puppets with bosoms of wood than responsible beings to be really execrated and condemned. As the abused victim, starving and ragged, treads the road of sacrifice to death, our sympathy is checked by the consciousness of his unmitigated and needless pliancy, until we withhold the tribute of sorrow due to the misfortunes of a Lear or a Pere Goriot. The romance, however, though sketched out extravagantly between hyperbole and parable, fairly scintillates with brilliancies and good things: we could hardly indicate another imported novel of the length actually containing so much. Nothing can be more comical than the grand airs of the ladies, whether in their poor or rich estate, or than the perpetual suite of victimizations endured by the helpless Babolain: the muses of Comedy and Tragedy rush together over the stage to crush this fly with their buskins. The translator of Babolain reveals his quality by calling pantaloons, in several places, pants, and by adopting an ugly locative common enough in New York—"Perhaps I did not have that amount," for "perhaps I had not," etc. The work revels in that buff binding which has given to the Leisure Hour Series the popular sobriquet of the "Linen Duster Series," a livery now well known as the certain indication of honest entertainment and literary excellence.

Impressions et Souvenirs. Par George Sand. Paris: Levy Freres; New York: F.W. Christern.

This little collection of papers is made from Madame Sand's private journal, the extracts being sometimes recent and sometimes thirty years old, sometimes short and sometimes improved into essays, and in any case stitched together by the slightest of threads. A few allusions, hardly important enough to be called anecdotes, reveal the relations of the authoress with the great men of the time, and the least momentous recital becomes charming from the assured ease and native grace of this veteran artist's style. One amusing reminiscence is the odd paradox of Theophile Gautier, that plants are unwholesome absorbents of vital air, and that for him the ideal of a garden would be a succession of asphaltum paths, with fine-cushioned seats, and narghiles for ever burning in the guise of flowers and shrubbery. A retort of Sainte-Betive's shows the sincerity of his free-thinking opinions. Madame Sand having declared that she was sure we had three souls—one for our bodily organs, one for society and one for worship—the critic replied, "I wish we could be sure that we had one." There is a delightful chapter, dated 1831, where Chopin and Delacroix encounter each other at the author's Paris home, where the painter explains the principle of reflections to Maurice Sand, and Chopin plays the piano so entrancingly for his auditor that the episode of a bed-room on fire passes by unnoticed. Of Maurice Sand, gifted son of an inspired mother, there is an exquisite chapter of literary criticism tempered with maternity. Other papers treat of infantine instruction as practiced by the writer herself, and readers are conscious of a thrill of envy at the thought of that little circle of Dudevantine grandchildren learning the elements of spelling and grammar from such a mistress of style, and with all the advantages due to the noble teacher's genius for simplification. A chapter on punctuation, which has been largely quoted both in French and English, is incorporated, and there are eventless and fascinating records of the wonderful drives around Nohant. The little brochure is a pure cup of refreshment.



Books Received.

The Nesbits; or, A Mother's Last Request, and Other Tales. By Uncle Paul. New York: Catholic Publication Society.

Rouge et Noir. From the French of Edmond About. By E.R. Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen & Haffelfinger.

Florida and South Carolina as Health Resorts. By William W. Morland, M.D., Harv. Boston: James Campbell.

Third Annual Report of the Board of Education of the State of Rhode Island. Providence: Providence Press Co.

High Life in New York. By Jonathan Slick. Illustrated. Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson & Brothers.

Pay-day at Babel, and Odes. By Robert Burton Rodney, U.S.N. New York: D. van Nostrand.

Report of the Commissioner of Fisheries of the State of New York. Albany: The Argus Company.

Lord Hope's Choice. By Mrs. Ann S. Stephens. Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson & Brothers.

The New Japan Primer. Number One. San Francisco: A.L. Bancroft & Co.

Miss Leslie's New Cook Book. Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson & Brothers.

Artiste: A Novel. By Maria M. Grant. Boston: Loring.

THE END