ably abundant in the very heart of Massachusetts, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, etc.; the snow-bird is described as nesting in the White Mountains (p. 314), while the more remarkable fact that it nests on Monadnock is omitted; the meadow-lark is described as only remaining in New England through "mild winters" (p. 344), whereas near Newport it remains during the coldest seasons, more abundantly than any other conspicuous bird. These, however, are subordinate points, and there is no important matter in which we have seen any reason to impugn the author's accuracy. The inequality which marks the internal execution of this book marks also its externals. The plates of eggs - four in number, comprising thirty eggs -are admirable; while the plates representing birds are of the most mediocre description, and do discredit to the work. With all these merits and demerits, the book is of much value, because an unsatisfactory manual is far better than none. It does not take the place of that revised edition of Nuttall, which is still the great desideratum, but we may use meanwhile an eminently ornithological proverb, and say that a Samuels in the hand is worth two Nuttalls in the bush. Richmond during the War. Four Years of Personal Observation. By a Richmond Lady. New York: G. W. Carleton and Company. MR. CURTIS, in his charming book, "Prue and I," speaks of the novel effect of landscape which Mr. Titbottom got by putting down his head, and regarding the prospect between his knees; and we suppose that most ingenious boys, young and old, have similarly contemplated nature, and will understand what we mean when we say that the world shows to much the same advantage through the books of Southern writers. Especially in Southern histories of the late war is the effect noticeable. The general outline is the same as when viewed in the more conventional manner, with ideas and principles right side up; the objects are the same, the events and results are the same; but there is a curious glamour over all, and the spectator has a mystical feeling of topsy-turvy, ending in vertigo and a disordered stomach. The present book is in the spirit of all other subjugated literature concerning the war, a vainglorious and boastful spirit as to events that led only to the destruction of the political power of the South; a wronged and forgiving, if not quite cheerful, spirit as to the end itself. Vivid and powerful presentation of facts would not perhaps be expected of an author who calls herself "A Richmond Lady," and there is nothing of the sort in the book. It contains sketches of public Rebels in civil and military station, washed in with the raw yellows, reds, and blues of Southern eulogy; and there is a great deal of gossip concerning private life in Richmond, where everybody appears to have spoken and acted during the four years of the war as if in the presence of the photographers and short-hand writers, and with an eye single to the impression upon posterity. It is an eloquent book, and need we say?— a dull one. Kathrina: her Life and mine, in a Poem. By J. G. HOLLAND, Author of "BitterSweet." New York: Charles Scribner and Company. LET us tell without any caricature of ours, in prose that shall be just if not generous, the story of Mr. Holland's hero as we have gathered it from the work which the author, for reasons of his own, calls a poem. The petted son of a rich widow in Northampton, Massachusetts, whose father has killed himself in a moment of insanity, reaches the age of fourteen years without great event, when his mother takes him to visit a lady friend living on the other side of the Connecticut River. In this lady's door-yard the hero finds a little lamb tethered in the grass, and decked with a necklace of scarlet ribbon, and, having a mind for a frolic with the pretty animal, the boy unties it. Instantly it slips its tether from his hand, leaps the fence, and runs to the top of the nearest mountain, whither he follows it, and where, exalted by the magnificence of the landscape, he is for the first time conscious of being a poet. Returning to his anxious mother, she too is aware of some wondrous change in him, and says: "My Paul has climbed the noblest mountain height In all his little world, and gazed on scenes As beautiful as rest beneath the sun. I trust he will remember all his life Resolved to give him the best education al advantages, his mother sends him to Mr. Bancroft's school; or, as Mr. Holland sings, permits him "To climb the goodly eminence where he In whose profound and stately pages live His country's annals, ruled his little realm." Here the hero surpasses all the other boys in everything, and but repeats his triumphs later when he goes to Amherst College. His mother lives upon the victories which he despises; but at last she yields to the taint which was in her own blood as well as her husband's, and destroys herself. The son, who was aware of her suicidal tendency, and had once overheard her combating it in prayer, curses the God who would not listen to her and help her, and rejects Him from his scheme of life. In due time he falls in love with Kathrina, a young lady whom he first sees on the occasion of her public reception into the Congregational Church at Hadley. Later he learns that she is staying with the lady whose pet lamb led him such a chase, that she is in fact her niece, and that she has seen better days. We must say that this good lady does everything in her power to make a match between the young people; and she is more pleased than surprised at the success of her efforts. It has been the hero's idea that human love will fill up the void left in his life by the rejection of God and religion; but he soon finds himself vaguely unhappy and unsatisfied, and he determines to glut his heart with literary fame. He goes, therefore, to New York, and succeeds as a poet beyond all his dreams of success. For ten years he is the most popular of authors; but he sickens of his facile triumph, and imagines that to be happy he must write to please himself, and not the multitude. He writes with this idea, but pleases nobody, and is as unhappy as ever. Meanwhile, Kathrina has fallen into a decline. On her death-bed she tells him that it is religion alone which can appease and satisfy him; but she pleads with him in vain, till one day, when he enters her room, and is startled by a strange coincidence the lamb, which led him to the mountain-top and the consciousness of poetic power, had a scarlet ribbon on its neck, and now he finds this ribbon "at her throat Repeated in a bright geranium-flower!" Then Kathrina tells him that his mother's spirit has talked with her, and bidden her say to him this : — "The lamb has slipped the leash by which his hand Held her in thrall, and seeks the mountain-height; And he, if he reclaim her to his grasp, Must follow where she leads, and kneel at last Whereupon, having delivered her message, Kathrina bids him kneel. It is the supreme moment of her life. He hears his mother's voice, and the voice of the innumerable heavenly host, and even the voice of God repeating her mandate. He kneels, and she bids him pray, and, as before, all the celestial voices repeat her bidding. He prays and is saved. Such is the story of Kathrina, or rather of Kathrina's husband, for she is herself scarcely other than a name for a series of arguments, with little of the flesh and blood of a womanly personality. We have too much reverence for high purposes in literature not to applaud Mr. Holland's good intent in this work, and we accept fully his theory of letters and of life. Both are meagre and unsatisfactory as long as their motive is low; both must yield unhappiness and self-despite till religion inform them. This is the common experience of man; this is the burden of the sayings of the sage from the time of Solomon to the time of Mr. Holland; and we can all acknowledge its truth, however we may differ as to the essence of religion itself. But we conceive that repetition of this truth in a long poem demands of the author an excellence, or of the reader a patience, all but superhuman. How Mr. Holland has met the extraordinary demand upon his powers is partly evident from the outline of the poem as we have given it. It must be owned that it is rather a feeble fancy which unites two vital epochs by the incident of the truant lambkin, and that the plot of the poem does not in any way reveal a great faculty of invention. A parable, moreover, teaches only so far as it is true to life; and in a tale professing to deal with persons of our own day and country, we have a right to expect some fidelity to our contemporaries and neighbors. But we find nothing of this in "Kathrina,". not even in the incident of a young gentleman of fourteen sporting with a lambkin; or in the talk of young people who make love in long arguments concern a nicer touch. If this is not yet shown in the way of literature, it is only because the time has not come. It is visible everywhere else. The aim which Bonaparte avowed as his highest ambition for France, to convert all trades into arts, is being rapidly fulfilled all around us. There is a constant tendency to supersede brute muscle by the fibres of the brain, and thus to assimilate the rudest toil to what Bacon calls "sedentary and within-door arts, that require rather the finger than the arm." It is clear that this same impulse, in higher and higher applications, must culminate in the artistic creation of beauty. And to fortify this fine instinct, we may trust, secondly, in the profound earnestness which still marks our people. With all this flexibility, there is yet a solidity of principle beneath, that makes the subtile American mind as real and controlling as that of the robust race from which it sprang. Though the present tendency of our art is towards foreign models, this is but a temporary thing. We must look at these till we have learned what they can teach, but a race in which the moral nature is strongest will be its own guide at last. And it is a comfort thus to end in the faith that, as the foundation of all true greatness is in the conscience, so we are safe if we can but carry into science and art the same earnestness of spirit which has fought through the great civil war and slain slavery. As "the Puritan has triumphed" in this stern contest, so must the Puritan triumph in the more graceful emulations that are to come; but it must be the Puritanism of Milton, not of Cromwell only. The invigorating air of great moral principles must breathe through all our literature; it is the expanding spirit of the seventeenth century by which we must conquer now. It is worth all that has been sacrificed in New England to vindicate this one fact, the supremacy of the moral nature. All culture, all art, without this, must be but rootless flowers, such as flaunt round a nation's decay. All the long, stern reign of Plymouth Rock and Salem Meeting-House was well spent, since it had this for an end,— to plough into the American race the tradition of absolute righteousness, as the immutable foundation of all. This was the purpose of our fathers. There should be here no European frivolity, even if European grace went with it. For the sake of this great purpose, history will pardon all their excesses, overwork, grim Sabbaths, prohibition of innocent amusements, all were better than to be frivolous. And so, in these later years, the arduous reforms into which the life-blood of Puritanism has passed have all helped to train us for art, because they have trained us in earnestness, even while they seemed to run counter to that spirit of joy in which art has its being. For no joy is joyous which has not its root in something noble. In what awful lines of light has this truth been lately written against the sky! What graces might there not have been in that Southern society before the war? It had ease, affluence, leisure, polished manners, European culture, all worthless; it produced not a book, not a painting, not a statue; it concentrated itself on politics, and failed; then on war, and failed; it is dead and vanished, leaving only memories of wrong behind. Let us not be too exultant; the hasty wealth of New York may do as little. Intellect in this age is not to be found in the circles of fashion; it is not found in such society in Europe, it is not here. Even in Paris, the world's capital, imperialism taints all it touches; and it is the great traditions of a noble nation which make that city still the home of art. We, a younger and cruder race, yet need to go abroad for our standard of execution, but our ideal and our faith must be our own. Sometimes the temptation to seize him and shake him was too strong for poor human nature. But I always regretted it afterwards. When I saw him asleep in his tiny bed, with one tear dried on his plump velvety cheek and two little mice-teeth visible through the parted lips, I could n't help thinking what a little bit of a fellow he was, with his funny little fingers and his funny little nails; and it did n't seem to me that he was the sort of person to be pitched into by a great strong man like me. "When Johnny grows older," I used to say to his mother, "I'll reason with him." Now I don't know when Johnny will grow old enough to be reasoned with. When I reflect how hard it is to reason with wise grown-up people, if they happen to be unwilling to accept your view of matters, I am inclined to be very patient with Johnny, whose experience is rather limited, after all, though he is six years and a half old, and naturally wants to know why and wherefore. Somebody says something about the duty of "blind obedience." I can't expect Johnny to have more wisdom than Solomon, and to be more philosophic than the philosophers. At times, indeed, I have been led to expect this from him. He has shown a depth of mind that warranted me in looking for anything. At times he seems as if he were a hundred years old. He has a quaint, bird-like way of cocking his head on one side, and asking a question that appears to be the result of years of study. If I could answer some of those questions, I should solve the darkest mysteries of life and death. His inquiries, however, generally have a grotesque flavor. One 'night, when the mosquitoes were making lively raids on his person, he appealed to me, suddenly: "How does the moon feel when a skeeter bites it?" To his meditative mind, the broad, smooth surface of the moon presented a temptation not to be resisted by any stray skeeter. I freely confess that Johnny is now and then too much for me. I wish I could read him as cleverly as he reads me. He knows all my weak points; he sees right through me, and makes me feel that I am a helpless infant in his adroit hands. He has an argumentative, oracular air, when things have gone wrong, which always upsets my dignity. Yet how cunningly he uses his power! It is only in the last extremity that he crosses his legs, puts his hands into his trousers-pockets, and argues the case with me. One day last week he was very near coming to grief. By my directions, kindling-wood and coal are placed every morning in the library grate, in order that I may have a fire the moment I return at night. Master Johnny must needs apply a lighted match to this arrangement early in the forenoon. The fire was not discovered until the blower was one mass of red-hot iron, and the wooden mantelpiece was smoking with the intense heat. When I came home, Johnny was led from the store-room, where he had been imprisoned from an early period, and where he had employed himself in eating about two dollars' worth of preserved pears. "Johnny," said I, in as severe a tone as one could use in addressing a person whose forehead glistened with syrup,— "Johnny, don't you remember that I have always told you never to meddle with matches?" It was something delicious to see Johnny trying to remember. He cast one eye meditatively up to the ceiling, then he fixed it abstractedly on the canary-bird, then he rubbed his ruffled brows with a sticky hand; but really, for the life of him, he could n't recall any injunctions concerning matches. "I can't, papa, truly, truly," said Johnny at length. "I guess I must have forgot it." "Well, Johnny, in order that you may not forget it in future — " Here Johnny was seized with an idea. He interrupted me. "I'll tell you what you do, papa, you just put it down in writin'." With the air of a man who has set |