CRITICISM.

TAYLOR'S greatest success as an author is to be found ir his books of travel. The reading public owe much to him, not only for the interesting facts which he has recorded as the results of his observation, but also for the clear and captivating style which he employs in his narrative. He had the happy faculty of discriminating between the unimportant and uninteresting personal details which are to be found as incidents of travel, and the knowledge of men and countries which is eager ly sought for by the reader in search of information. He met with great success in his admirable translation of Faust, but he will be remembered kindly also for the glow of warmth and beauty of coloring in his original poems, particularly his Poems of the Orient.

KILIMANDJARO.

[For study and analysis.]

HAIL to thee, monarch of African mountains,
Remote, inaccessible, silent, and lone-

Who, from the heart of the tropical fervors,

Liftest to heaven thine alien snows,

Feeding for ever the fountains that make thee
Father of Nile and Creator of Egypt!

The years of the world are engraved on thy forehead;

Time's morning blushed red on thy first fallen snows;
Yet lost in the wilderness, nameless, unnoted,
Of man unbeholden, thou wert not till now.
Knowledge alone is the being of Nature,
Giving a soul to her manifold features,
Lighting through paths of the primitive darkness
The footsteps of Truth and the vision of Song.
Knowledge has born thee anew to Creation,
And long-baffled Time at thy baptism rejoices.

Take then, a name, and be filled with existence,
Yea, be exultant in sovereign glory,

While from the hand of the wandering poet
Drops the first garland of song at thy feet.

Floating alone, on the flood of thy making,
Through Africa's mystery, silence, and fire,
Lo! in my palm, like the Eastern enchanter,
I dip from the waters a magical mirror,
And thou art revealed to my purified vision.
I see thee, supreme in the midst of thy co-mates,
Standing alone 'twixt the Earth and the Heavens,
Heir of the sunset and Herald of Morn.
Zone above zone, to thy shoulders of granite,
The climates of Earth are displayed as an index,
Giving the scope of the Book of Creation.
There, in the gorges that widen, descending
From cloud and from cold into summer eternal,
Gather the threads of the ice-gendered fountains-
Gather to riotous torrents of crystal,

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35

And, giving each shelvy recess where they dally

The blooms of the North and its evergreen turfage,

Leap to the land of the lion and lotus!

There, in the wondering airs of the Tropics.

Shivers the Aspen, still dreaming of cold:

10

There stretches the Oak, from the loftiest ledges,

His arms to the far-away land of his brothers,

And the Pine tree looks down on his rival, the Palm.

Bathed in the tenderest purple of distance,

Tinted and shadowed by pencils of air,

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Thy battlements hang o'er the slopes and the forests,
Seats of the Gods in the limitless ether,

Looming sublimely aloft and afar

Above them, like folds of imperial ermine,

Sparkle the snow-fields that furrow thy forehead--
Desolate realms, inaccessible, silent,

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Chasms and caverns where Day is a stranger,
Garners where storeth his treasures the Thunder,

The Lightning his falchion, his arrows the Hail!

Sovereign Mountain, thy brothers give welcome:
They, the baptized and crownèd of ages,
Watch-towers of Continents, altars of Earth,
Welcome thee now to their mighty assembly.
Mont Blanc, in the roar of his mad avalanches,
Hails thy accession; superb Orizaba,
Belted with beech, and ensandaled with palm;
Chimborazo, the lord of the regions of noonday;
Mingle their sounds in magnificent chorus
With greeting august from the Pillars of Heaven
Who, in the urns of the Indian Ganges,
Filter the snows of their sacred dominions,
Unmarked with a footprint, unseen but of God.

Lo, unto each is the seal of his lordship,

Nor questioned the right that his majesty giveth:
Each in his awful supremacy forces

Worship and reverence, wonder and joy.
Absolute all, yet in dignity varied,
None has a claim to the honors of story,

Or the superior splendors of song,

Greater than thou, in thy mystery mantled

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Thou, the sole nonarch of African mountains,
Father of Nile and Creator of Egypt!

20 DR. J. G. HOLLAND,

1819-1881.

DR. JOSIAH GILBERT HOLLAND, one of America's most popular writers, was born at Belchertown, Massachusetts, July 24, 1819. Having studied medicine, he practiced his profession for several years, and then abandoned it. After having edited a literary journal in Springfield, Massachusetts, for a short time, he spent one year as superintendent of the public schools of Vicksburg, Mississippi. He then became associate editor of the Springfield Republican in 1849. Two years later he became also one of the proprietors of the paper, and retained connection with it up to 1866. Four years after this he became conductor of Scribner's Monthly (now the Century), a position which he retained to the time of his death, October 12, 1881.

Dr. Holland wrote several of his first books under the assumed name "Timothy Titcomb." These were Letters to the Young, Gold Foil, Lessons in Life, and Letters to the Joneses. His other prose works include History of Western Massachusetts, Plain Talks on Familiar Subjects, and several novels: The Bay-Path, Miss Gilbert's Career, and Arthur Bonnicastle. He also wrote a Life of Abraham Lincoln and a volume of lectures. His chief poems are Bitter-Sweet, Kathrina, and a volume issued in 1872 entitled Marble Prophecy, and Other Poems.

Dr. Holland was for a number of years a popular public lecturer, choosing for his themes topics generally of a social or a literary character.

CRITICISM BY REV. DR. NOAH PORTER.

THE art of saying plain and much-needed truth in such a manner as to hold the attention and interest the feelings, of relieving the commonplace from dullness, and yet leaving it perfectly simple, this art is the admiration, if not the envy, of those who do not possess it. This art Dr. Holland had in an eminent degree, and he used it with a most useful effect. He was not ashamed to seem commonplace: his critics might say that he could not be anything else. His aim was to be useful, and in order to be useful he must be effective; and to this end he certainly made abundant use of the time-honored maxim, "Look into thy heart and write." It has been a great blessing to the generation which he has served so variously and so well from 1868 to 1881 that he had so generous and pure a heart into which he might look, that he had the courage to express what he found there, and that he also possessed the gift of expressing what he found in a diction so facile and so clear, and with illustrations and enforcements that were so attractive.

THE READING OF PERIODICALS.

[For study and analysis.]

NOTE.--The following selection, taken from Holland's Every-Day Topics, illustrates the style of this writer.

I is lamented by many that the reading of periodicals has become not only universal, but that it absorbs all the time of those who read them. It is supposed that in consequence of these two facts the quiet and thorough study of well-written books-books which 5 deal with their subjects systematically and exhaustively-has been forsaken. As a consequence of this fact,