young, more particularly those of her own sex. Miss Yonge is said to have given £2000, the profits of her tale Daisy Chain, towards the building of a missionary college at Auckland, New Zealand, and also a portion of the proceeds of the Heir of Redclyffe' to fitting out the missionary ship Southern Cross, for the use of Bishop Selwyn.

ELIZABETH MISSING SEWELL, a native of the Isle of Wight, born in 1815, is authoress of various works of what is called High Church fiction,' but works affording moral instruction, blended with delicate womanly pictures of life and character. The best known of these are Amy Herbert,' 1844; Gertrude' and 'Sketches,' 1847; 'Katherine Ashton,' 1854; Margaret Percival,' 1858, &c. Miss Sewell has written various religious works, sketches of continental travel, &c.

GERALDINE JEWSBURY is more ambitous in style, but not always so successful. Her works are- Zoe,' 1845; The Half-Sisters,' 1848; 'Constance Herbert' and Right or Wrong,' 1859, &c. Of these, 'Constance Herbert' is the best, both for the interest of the story and its literary merits. Miss Jewsbury has written a story for children, Angelo, or the Pine Forest in the Alps,' 1855. The elder sister of this lady, Maria Jane, wife of the Rev. W. Fletcher, accompanied her husband to India, and died at Bombay in 1833; she was an amiable, accomplished woman, authoress of various essays, sketches, and poems, including two volumes, Phantasmagoria,' 1829, which Professor Wilson characterised as always acute and never coarse.'

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.

This distinguished American author was born on the 4th July 1804 -the American Independence Day. He was a native of Salem, Massachusetts, and was early in the field as a contributor to periodical literature. Two volumes of these pieces were collected and published under the title of Twice-told Tales' (1837 and 1842.) In 145 appeared Mosses from an old Manse,' and in 1850 The Scarlet Letter, which may be said to have given its author a European reputation. He afterwards joined with some friends in a scheme like the contemplated Pantisocracy of Southey and Coleridge-a society called the Brook Farm Community, from which Arcadian felicity and plenty were anticipated, but which ended in failure. In 1851, Mr. Hawthorne produced 'The House of the Seven Gables,' and in 1852 The Blithedale Romance.' He published also a 'Life of General Pierce,' and 'A Wonder Book,' a second series of which, called Tanglewood Tales,' was published in 1853. On the accession of General Pierce to the presidency in 1852, Hawthorne was appointed consul for the United States at Liverpool, which he held for about five years. A visit to Italy gave occasion to his writing "Transformation' (1860)-a novel which gives an admirable view of

Roman life, antiquities, and art. How graphic and striking and true, for example, is the picture presented by the opening scene!

The Capitol at Rome.

Four individuals, in whose fortunes we should be glad to interest the reader, happened to be standing in one of the saloons of the sculpture-gallery in the Capitol at Rome. It was that room (the first after ascending the staircase) in the centre of which reclines the noble and most pathetic figure of the Dying Gladiator, just sinking into his death swoon. Around the walls stand the Antinious, the Amazon, the Lycian Apollo, the Juno: all famous productions of antique sculpture, and still shining in the undiminished majesty and beauty of their ideal life, although the marble that embodies thein is yellow with time, and perhaps corroded by the damp earth in which they lay buried for centuries. Here, likewise is seen a symbol (as apt at this moment as it was two thousand years ago) of the human soul, with its choice of innocence or evil at hand, in the pretty figure of a child, clasping a dove to her bosom, but assaulted by a snake.

From one of the windows of this saloon, we may see a flight of broad stone steps descending alongside the antique and massive foundation of the Capitol, towards the battered triumphal arch of Septimus Severus, right below. Farther on, the eye skirts along the edge of the desolate Forum (where Roman washerwomen hang out their linen to the sun), passing over a shapeless confusion of modern edifices, piled rudely up with ancient brick and stone, and over the domes of Christian churches, built on the old pavements of heathen temples, and supported by the very pillars that once upheld them. At a distance beyond-yet but a little way, considering how much history is heaped into the intervening space-rises the great sweep of the Coliseum, with the blue sky brightening through its upper tier of arches. Far off, the view is shut in by the Alban Mountains, looking just the same, amid all this decay and change, as when Romulus gazed thitherward over his half-finished wall.

We glance hastily at these things at this bright sky, and those blue, distant mountains, and at the ruins, Etruscan, Roman, Christian, venerable with a threefold antiquity, and at the company of world-famous statues in the saloon-in the hope of putting the reader into that state of feeling which is experienced oftenest at Rome. It is a vague sense of ponderous remembrances; a perception of such weight and density in a bygone life, of which this spot was the centre, that the present moment is pressed down or crowded out, and our individual affairs and interests are but half as real here as elsewhere. Side by side with the massiveness of the Roman Past, all matters that we handle or dream of nowadays look evanescent and visionary alike.

Mr. Hawthorne returned to America, and published Our Old Home,' two vols., 1863, giving an account of England, but written in a tone of querulous discontent and unfairness which pained his friends on both sides of the Atlantic. Part of this must be attributed to ill-health, which continued to increase till the death of the novelist, which took place at Plymouth, New Hampshire, May 19, 1864. An interesting volume of Memorials of Hawthorne has been published by HENRY A. PAGE. His widow also edited and published Passages from the American Note-books of Nathaniel Hawthorne,' two vols., 1868; Passages from the English Note-books of Nathaniel Hawthorne,' two vols., 1870; and Septimius,' an unfinished romance, 1871. The three early romances, The Scarlet Letter,' 'Seven Gables,' and ' Blithedale,' are the most popular and original of Mr. Hawthorne's works. The first of these pictures of New England life and Puritanism is on a painful subject, for The Scarlet Letter' is the badge of the heroine's shame, and her misery and

The

degradation form the leading theme of the story. But it is intensely interesting, and its darker shades are relieved by passages of fine description. Perhaps its only fault is one which attaches also to Scott's Waverley-a too long and tedious introduction. second romance does not possess the same harrowing interest, but it has greater variety, and the inmates of the old house are drawn with consummate skill. The Blithedale Romance' is a story founded on the Socianst experiment at Brook Farm. A strain of weird fancy and sombre thought pervades most of Hawthorne's writings.

A Socialist Experiment.

The peril of our new way of life was not lest we should fail in becoming practical agriculturists, but that we should probably cease to be anything else. While our enterprise lay all in theory, we had pleased ourselves with delectable visions of the spiritualisation of labour. It was to be our form of prayer and ceremonial of worship. Each stroke of the hoe was to uncover some aromatic root of wisdom, heretofore hidden from the sun. Pausing in the field, to let the wind exhale the moisture from our foreheads, we were to look upward, and catch glimpses into the far-off soul of truth. In this point of view, matters did not turn out quite so well as we anticipated. It is very true that, sometimes, gazing casually around me, out of the midst of my toil, I used to discern a richer picturesqueness in the visible scene of earth and sky. There was, at such moments, a novelty, an unwonted aspect, on the face of nature, as if she had been taken by surprise and seen at unawares, with no opportunity to put off her real look, and assume the mask with which she mysteriously hides herself from mortals. But this was all. The clods of earth which we so constantly belaboured and turned over and over, were never etherialised into thought. Our thoughts, on the contrary, were fast becoming cloddish. Our labour symbolised no hing, and left us mentally sluggish in the dusk of the evening. Intellectual activity is incompatible with any large amount of bodily exercise. The yeoman and the scholar-the yeoman and the man of finest moral culture, though not the man of sturdiest sense and integrity-are two distinct individuals, and can never be melted or welded into one substance.

In quaint description and love of odd localities, Mr. Hawthorne, in his short pieces, reminds us of Charles Lamb. He is a humorist with poetical fancy and feeling. In his romances, however, he puts forth greater power-a passionate energy and earnestness, with a love of the supernatural, but he never loses the simplicity and beauty of his style.

Autumn at Concord, Massachusetts.

Alas for the summer! The grass is still verdant on the hills and in the valleys; the foliage of the trees is as dense as ever, and as green; the flowers are abundant along the margin of the river, and in the hedgerows, and deep among the woods; the days, too, are as fervid as they were a month ago; and yet, in every breath of wind and in every beam of sunshine, there is an autumnal influence. I know not how to describe it. Methinks there is a sort of coolness amid all the hest, and a mildness in the brightest of the sunshine. A breeze cannot stir without thrilling me with the breath of autumn and I behold its pensive glory in the far, golden gleams among the huge shadows of the trees.

The flowers, even the brightest of them, the golden rod and the gorgeous cardinals the most glorious flowers of the year-have this gentle sadness amid their pomp. Pensive autumn is expressed in the glow of every one of them. I have felt this influence earlier in some years than in others. Sometimes autumn may be perceived even in the early days of July. There is no other feeling like that caused by

this faint, doubtful, yet real perception, or rather prophecy of the year's decay, so deliciously sweet and sad at the same time. .

I scarcely remember a scene of more complete and lovely seclusion than the passage of the river through this wood (North Branca] Even an Indian canoe, in olden times, could not have floated onward in deeper solitude than my boat. never elsewhere had such an opportunity to observe how much more beautiful reflecI have tion is than what we call reality. The sky and th clustering foliage on either hand, and the effect of sunlight as it found its way through the shade, giving lightsome hues in contrast with the net depth of the prevailing tints-all these seemed unsurpassably beautiful when beheld in upper air. were, the same even to the minutest particular, yet arrayed in ideal beauty, which But on gazing downward, there they satisfied the spirit incomparably more than the actual scene. I am half convinced that the reflection is indeed the reality, the real thing which Nature imperfectly images to our grosser sense. At any rate the disembodied shadow is nearest to the soul. There were many tokens of autumu in this beautiful picture. Two or three of the trees were actually dressed in their coats of many co.curs-the real scarlet and gold which they wear before they put on mourning.

Sunday, September 2s.-There is a prevading blessing diffused over all the world. I look out of the window, and think: O perfect day! O beautiful world! O good God! And such a day is the promise of a blissful eternity. Our Cr. ator would never have made such weather, and given us the deep heart to enjoy it, above and beyond all thought, if He had not meant us to be immortal. It opens the gates of heaven, and gives us glimpses far inward.

The English Lake Country-Grasmere.

I question whether any part of the world looks so beautiful as England-this part of England at least-on a fine summer morning. It makes one think the more cheerfully of human life to see snch a bright universal verdure; such sweet, rural, peaceful, flower-bordered cottages-not coltages of gentility, but dwellings of the fabouring poor; such nice villas along the roadside so tastefully contrived for comfort and beauty, and adorned more and more, year after year, with the care and afterthought of people who mean to live in them a great while, and feel as if their children might live in them also And so they plant trees to overshadow their walks, and train ivy and all beautiful vines up against their walls-and thus live for the future in another sense than we Americans do. And the clin ate helps them out, and makes everything moist and green, and full of tender life, instead of dry and arid. as human life and vegetable life are so apt to be with us. Certain ly. England can present a more attrac ive face than we can. even in its humbler modes of lifeto say nothing of the beautiful lives that might be led, one would think, by the higher classes, whose gateways, with broad, smooth, gravelled drives leading through them, one sees every mile or two along the road, winding into some proud seclusion. All this is passing away, and society must assume new relations; but there is no harm in believing that there has been something very good in English life-good for all classes-while the world was in a state out of which these forms naturally grew.

MRS. STOWE.

No work of fiction, perhaps, ever had so large an immediate sale as the American Story of Uncle Tom's Cabin,' by MRS. HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. It first appeared in parts in a weekly journal, The Washington National Era,' 1850; and when completed, it was published in a collected form, and in less than a year 200,000 copies are said to have been sold in the United States. It was soon imported into this country, and there being no restraining law of international copyright, it was issued in every form from the price of a shilling upwards. At least half a million copies must have been sold in twelve months. So graphic and terrible a picture of slavery in the Southern States of America could not fail to interest all classes;

and though Uncle Tom' may have been drawn too saint-like, and Legree, the slave-owner, too dark a fiend, it is acknowledged that the characters and incidents in the tale are founded on facts and authentic documents. To verify her statements, Mrs. Stowe, in 1853, published a 'Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin,' in which she had collected advertisements of the sale of slaves, letters from the sufferers, and arguments in support of slavery from newspapers, law reports, and

even sermons.

Mrs. Stowe visited England the same year (1853), and was received with great distinction. In London she received an address from the ladies of England, presented to her in Stafford House-the residence of the Duke of Sutherland-by Lord Shaftesbury. She afterwards travelled over the country, and from England she proceeded to France and Switzerland. An account of this European tour was published by Mrs. Stowe, under the title of Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands.' There are some pleasant passages of description in this work, but on the whole it is unworthy of the authoress. So much tuft-hunting, vanity, and slip-slop criticism could hardly have been expected from one who had displayed so much mastery over the stronger feelings and passions of our nature, and so much art in the construction of a story. Receptions, breakfast-parties, and personal compliments make up a large portion of these Memories,' but here is one pleasing extract:

English Trees-Warwick Castle.

When we came fairly into the court-yard of the cast, a scene of magnificent beauty opened before us I cannot describe it minutely. The principal features are the battlements. tow. rs, and turrets of the old feudai castle, encompassed by grounds on which has been expended all that princely art of landsc pe gardening for which England is famous-leafy thickets, magnificent trees, openings and vistas of verdure, and wide sweeps of g ass, short, thick, and vividly green, as the velvet moss we sometimes see growing on rocks in New England. Grass is an art and a science in England-it is an institution. The pains that are taken in sowing, tending, cutting, clipping, rolling, and otherwise nursing and coaxing it, being seconded by the misty breath and often falling tears of the climate, produce results which must be seen to be appreciated. So again of trees in England. Trees here are an order of nobility; and they wear their crowns right kingly. A few years ago, when Miss Sedgwick was in this country, while admiring some splendid trees in a nobleman's park, a lady standing by said to her encouragingly: O well I suppose your trees in America will be grown up after a while! Since that time, another style of thinking of America has come up, and the remark that I most generaly hear made is: Oh, I suppose we cannot think of shewing you anything in the way of trees, coming as you do from America! Throwing out of account, however, the gigantic growth of our western r ver-bottoms, where I have seen sycamore trunks twenty feet in diameter-leaving out of account, I say, all this mammoth arboria-these English parks have trees ns fiue and as effective, of their kind, as any of ours; and when I say their trees are an order of nobility, I mean that they pay a reverence to them such as their magnificence deserves. Such elms as adorn the streets of New Haven. or overarch the mesdows of Andover, would in England be considered as of a value which no mon v could represent; no pains, no expense would be spared to preserve their life and health: they would never be shot dead by having gas-pipes laid under them. as they have been in some of our New England towns; or suffered to be devoured by cankerworms for want of any amount of money spent in their defence. Some of the finest