THE DESTROYER OF THE SECOND REPUBLIC, BEING NAPOLEON THE LITTLE. By WITH FATE AGAINST HIM. By AMANDA M. DOUGLAS. New York: Sheldon & Co. NUMBERS OF THE LIVING AGE WANTED. The publishers are in want of Nos. 1179 and 1180 (dated respectively Jan. 5th and Jan. 12th, 1867) of THE LIVING AGE. To subscribers, or others, who will do us the favor to send us either or both of those numbers, we will return an equivalent, either in our publications or in cash, until our wants are supplied. PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY LITTELL & GAY, BOSTON. TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION. FOR EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually for warded for a year, free of postage. But we do not prepay postage on less than a year, nor where we have to pay commission for forwarding the money. Price of the First Series, in Cloth, 36 volumes, 90 dollars. Second " 66 Third The Complete Work, Any Volume Bound, 3 dollars; Unbound, 2 dollars. The sets, or volumes, will be sent at the expense of the publishers. PREMIUMS FOR CLUBS. For 5 new subscribers ($40.), a sixth copy; or a set of HORNE'S INTRODUCTION TO THE BIBLE, unabridged, in 4 large volumes, cloth, price $10; or any 5 of the back volumes of the LIVING AGE, in numbers, price $10. From Fraser's Magazine. AMONG THE FIR-TREES. I. On the bare hill-top, by the pinewood's edge, how joyously rang the noise Of the mountain wind in the topmost boughs! a spell there was in its voice. It drew me to leave the goodly sight of the plain sweeping far away, And enter the solemnly shaded depths to hear what the trees would say. II. VII. But neither passion nor sorrow I hear in this rhythmic steady course, Only the movement resistless and strong of some all-pervading force; The one universal life which moves the whole of the outward plan, Which throbs in winds, and waters, and flowers, in insect, and bird, and man. VIII. O would that the unknown finer touch which makes us other than those, But no sooner I trod the russet floor than hushed Did not hold us so far asunder in soul from were the magic tones; No stir but the flight of a startled bird, no sound but my foot on the cones. All silently rose the stately shafts, kirtled with lichens gray, And the sunlight-flakes on their reddening tops were as still and unmoved as they. III. Was it joy or dread that pressed my heart? I felt as one who must hear Some long-kept secret, and knows not as yet if it bring him hope or fear; I stood as still as the solemn firs, and hearkened with waiting mind; Then I heard far away in the topmost boughs the eternal sough of the wind. IV. And the thrill of that mystic murmur so entered my listening heart, That the very soul of the forest trees became with my soul a part; I seemed to be raised and borne aloft in that ever-ascending strain, With a throb too solemn and deep for joy, too perfect and pure for pain. V. Many voices there are in Nature's choir, and none but were good to hear Had we mastered the laws of their music well, and could read their meaning clear; But we who can feel at Nature's touch cannot think as yet with her thought, And I only know that the sough of the firs with a spell of its own is fraught. VI. For the wind when it howls in the chimneys at night hath the heavy and dreary sound Of the dull everlasting treadmill of life which goes so wearily round; And the choirs of waves on the long-drawn sands, too well I hear in their strain The throb of our human anguish deep, where triumph wrestles with pain. their harmony and repose! The selfsame fountain doth life and growth to us and to them impart, But only at moments we taste and know the peace which is Nature's heart. From The North British Review. society. It would be unjust to forget or to depreciate Shelley's practical and habitual generosity; and to say that freehandedness is an aristocratic virtue is not a reflection on Shelley, but a compliment to aristocracies. tions. It is hardly unfair to Shelley to connect his great and undeniable superiorAFTER all that has been written about ity to Rousseau with the fact that one was Shelley, his personality is still a riddle; an aristocrat born and bred, and the other he is the only one of that group of great a bourgeois born and bred. Much of poets which adorned the first quarter of Rousseau's sordid sensuality is the natural the nineteenth century in England, whose exuberance of keen and overwrought feellife is too unaccountable to throw light ings in a nature never trained to refineupon his writings. Even Byron, whose ment by any early influence, and including reputation has been so much debated, is coarse fibres of its own. His insane jeal really less perplexing. Of him we know ousies, his ferocious ingratitude, inexcusaenough at any rate to discuss; there is ble as they were, are only too like what evidence to support a theory. Whenever might have been expected from a man of Shelley's life comes to be written, the the people, with an hysterical temperaevidence will be of a different kind; many ment, whose eloquent writings had given minute circumstances will have to be him a precarious hold upon an aristocratic accumulated, many inconspicuous habits will have to be established, before we shall be able to understand the impression which he made upon all or almost all who lived with him. While we have to look at his life in outline, many things seem strange, grotesque, irrational; some apIt is certainly impossible to separate pear positively repulsive; there is an in- Shelley's personality from his poetry, in explicable medley of loftiness and petti- the way in which Scott and Shakspeare ness, of shrewdness and childishness, of can be separated from their writings. It self-devotion and self-indulgence. It is has been said that Wordsworth could only impossible upon such data to entertain represent three characters - Wordsworth the question-with which Mr. Rossetti at his best, and Wordsworth at his worst, sums up the biography prefixed to his edi- and somebody else. Byron could embody tion of his poems-whether Shelley the no men, except his recollection of Ali man was worthy to be Shelley the poet, Pasha, thrown into different attitudes, and or to ascertain by what standard he de- relieved against different backgrounds, sired to be tried, or by what standard we and tinged more or less deeply with his ought to try him. We cannot ascertain, own remorse. His women all ring the with the materials before us, what was changes on "the love of the vulture, the the charm of manner and of character rage of the turtle;" they are all sultanas, which made it possible for so many good soft or furious as the case may be. Byron, judges not only to love but to esteem a however, was at any rate a master of local man whose organization was certainly colour; and his figures were never phandiseased, whose habits were full of eccen- toms, though they might sometimes seem tricities, some of them unpleasing, and theatrical. But Shelley started with himwhose conduct was more than once incom- self in fairyland, instead of with a distorted patible with any theory of what was due and idealized projection of himself in the to others. Perhaps, as a provisional theo- Levant; he conceived poetry as embodyry, it would be most reasonable to con- ing the highest moments of the highest ceive Shelley as something of a patrician minds; he knew no mind except his own; Rousseau; there was the same abstract and he was certainly justified in ranking and ideal benevolence, the same tendency his own among the highest. His more to find self-pity the choicest of luxuries, ambitious poems are reflections of his the same susceptibility to fanciful dangers aspirations: his lighter poems are reflecand imaginary wrongs, the same neglect tions of his moods and his circumstances. in the discharge of trifling obligations, the The " Adonais" and the "Cenci " are the same impatience of ordinary social conven-only two considerable poems where the |