brilliant dramatic imagination is naturally accompanied by a tendency to reckless, picturesque statement, and it is through the strength and the defects of these qualities that her stories always appear more like the work of a man than of a woman. "The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain" is full of weird, fan

irrelevant widows, all are in a way characteristically of New England, but Miss Jewett goes deep enough to link them with a wider world and to insure them greeting as kin, ir- | respective of geographical limitation and local accident. When a thing is perfectly well done, it is profitless to try to explain how and why. Nature's special endowments defy analy-tastic toucbes and description that excites but sis, and those curious about seemingly wonderful achievements are restricted to guessing what has been added by care and industry to the original, inexplicable faculty, the unknown and incalculable quantity. What Miss Jewett appears to have gained by her sincere and loving application to letters is facility of expression which shows neither haste nor waste, and a classic beauty of form and serenity of manner. She has certainly proclaimed that beauty and truth are not antagonistic, and that the real and the ideal are inextricably wo ven in the warp of human life.

does not describe. The tale is not well held to. gether, and suffers in interest by opening with an event so dramatic that all the rest seems tame. The second story, which describes the competition for the Blue Ribbon offered to the best rider at the Kildeer County fair, goes splendidly, and is as good as anything in Miss Murfree's first famous volume. By his tender unselfishness Justus Hoxon, in "The Casting Vote," is doomed to failure as a mountaineer. The terrestrial globe, in fact, is but a poor place for such a noble spirit. His sacrifices for bis "fambly," his pride in its progress, and his betrayal by the best loved brother, make a sequence of miseries intolerable to follow were it not for the comic interludes which mitigate the pathos without jarring it too roughly. The robustness of Miss Murfree's comedy has, like her imagination, a noticeably masculine quality, and she is the only woman who has been able to give expression to that grim, ironical humor which is as abundant as ozone in outlandish America.

Bret Harte has used up a good deal of it, but not all, for it smiles all through the volume

Mrs. Foote's talent is smaller and less mysterious than Miss Jewett's, and it is easier to discern the increase from cultivation. She gives us the appearance, the effect, and leaves us to infer the true inwardness or to give it up. Her stories are drawn from the mountains, plains, and cañons of the very far West-places where, when anything happens, it startles, terrifies, frequently kills somebody. The event has great self-reliance and speaks for itself, indifferent to the character of the people implicated. It loves a tragic mask and identifies itself with nature's vastness and de-Red Men and White,' by Mr. Owen Wister, a solation. In the tale of "Maverick" the lasting impression is not that of pity for a young girl flying from life made intolerable by the blackguardism of male relations and the too great solicitude of an ugly lover, but of hor. ror of the Black Lava fields eager to grant death to any who enter their hideous solitudes. So, in the title story, no great compassion is felt for the fate that overtook a very frail woman, but a penetrating realization of the awfulness of the avalanche biding its time to hurl God's judgment upon the sinful. The sentiment of the dreary isolation of miners on the mountain slopes when work has stopped and winter closed in, is vividly rendered in the same story, and the author's phrase has a sad, poetic quality very inspiring to imagination. The local element in Mrs. Foote's stories is all supplied by the event and scene. With the natives she does not concern herself, perhaps because there are none, except a lone Skitwish Indian, an unmalleable being. At all events, her people have always come from somewhere else, and one feels sure that, if they are permitted to live long enough, they will go home again.

Miss Murfree, on the contrary, is rigidly local. Her Tennessee mountains are purpler, bluer, and yellower than any other; they are at times more remote and forbidding, at times more close and tender, than the peaks and summits of other ranges; their moon is distinctly superior, and, unlike other moons, constant. Their inhabitants bear little resemblance to the natives of other altitudes and gorges, but they make up for variation from the type by close family likeness. The occasional stranger who invades these fastnesses is a revenue offi. cer, a bailiff, or a handsome adventurer seeking game, gold, or health. If he is handy with his pistol, he has a chance to get away and repent of his rashness, but he frequently meets one who is handier, and his bones bleach in the eternal moonlight. We do not mean to disparage Miss Murfree for an inaccurate observation of mountains, moon, and natives, but rather to admire her creative power. Her

new.comer in fiction. These stories are about adventurers, soldiers, and Indians, and describe what they were all doing west of the Missouri a quarter of a century ago. They were generally doing what they should not have done, except the soldiers, who went astray only when acting under direct orders from the gentlemen of the War Office in Washington. "Specimen Jones," who appears in several of the tales, is a most attractive vagabond, with a reserve of sentiment uttering itself at odd moments through the medium of old English songs. Full of expedients as well as of strange oaths, army discipline represses his impulsiveness without quenching his ingenuity. The trick by which he effects "The Second Missouri Compromise" is as clever as it is unexpected. This tale of a deadlock between the Governor of Idaho and his Legislature is indeed delightful. The situation is most serious, but the attendant circumstances are so humorous that even the Governor and his treasurer must have been spared the bare horror of impending death. Barring a slight defect in construction (a superfluous scene between the captain, his wife, and the surgeon), "The Second Missouri Compromise" is as good a frontier tale as has ever been written, and, apart from the general excellence of the other stories, makes the volume memorable.

In the story of 'Clarence,' which is neither short nor very long, the veteran sponsor for the pioneers, Bret Harte, goes back to the days that tried men's souls and women's faith. Several old friends reappear on the scene-Clarence Brant, who gives the tale a name; Jim Hooker, dirty, swaggering, and dishonest as of old; and Colonel Starbottle, still extravagant in shirt ruffles and rhetoric. The story turns on the implication of Brant in the plots of his Southern wife, an inveterate conspirator. The first part, which narrates the gathering and dispersal of the conspirators in San Francisco, is swift, clear, and dramatic; the second wavers and drags, with such confusion of signals, disguises, and other paraphernalia of the spy business, such a mixing up of a haughty

Southern girl, a mysterious mulatto, and Mrs. Brant, that President Lincoln's unravelling is more confirmatory of his astuteness than any anecdote that his biographers have been able to provide. The President is reported to have said to Brant, "In Illinois we wouldn't hang a yellow dog on the evidence before the department "-which is creditable to the administration of justice in Illinois, but we feel that the State would stand within its rights in declining to examine such evidence even if the alternative were the hanging of a thousand yellow dogs.

Local color again and a Sam Slick personality, quaint, shrewd, eccentric, sententious, and ungrammatical, are among the expectations awakened by the title of Mr. Mitchell's tale, 'Amos Judd.' The editor of Life may be accused of deliberately misleading the public, but not of disappointing it. Cold is the imagi. nation that cannot forget the improbability of the incident in appreciation of its romantic beauty, and dull the mind untouched by the surprising contrast between the manner and the matter, the clever adaptation of a light, neat, pointed, modern style to the narration of circumstances including both the mystic and the wonderful. What these circumstances are nobody should tell, but every one should read. Criticism of bold experiments in literature, as in life, is silenced by unequivocal success. To our mind there is but one flaw in Mr. Mitchell's story, and that is the means employed to bring about the inevitable end. His expedient here is too literally actual. We can bear to let Amos Judd go because we must; but the manner of his going adds to the pang of sorrow an emo. tion of resentful horror, throwing us back for consolation on the reflection that, after all, it is only a story, therefore we must pluck up courage to go about our business, and, after a decent interval, smile again.

No easier way could be tried for determining the differences between original and imitative fiction than that of reading, after Amos Judd,' 'The Gypsy Christ, and Other Tales.' No other reason for commending Mr. Sharp's volume occurs to us. The title story echoes Edgar Allan Poe-a disorderly, intoxicated echo; “Madge o' the Pool " brings back to us modernized, brutalized in unromantic nakedness, Dickens's Bird of Prey and Lizzie Hexham; "The Coward" is the sort of thing Pierre Loti might do without the aid of his temperament, and every one can imagine how valuable that sort of thing would be; "The Lady in Hosea" is as old as the story of another Biblical dame, Potiphar's wife, but it has a novel touch at the end with which Mr. Sharp must be credited, assuming that he means to be quite savagely sarcastic. Paral. lels for the remaining tales abound, and all their labored obscurity and artificiality cannot disguise the antiquity of their origin.

Mr. Cram, the author of 'Black Spirits and White,' is as careful as Mr. Sharp in guarding us from the agitation of hearing new things. His originality, however, asserts itself by the discarding of the author's preface (endeared to us by time and custom) and the substitution of a postscript. Here he disclaims ownership of the germs of the things we have been reading, and defines these things as "norms," telling us that he is more than content if he has succeeded in clothing the norms in new vesture. A reviewer of fiction must pass the germs and norms, knowing that his opinions on these sacred objects would justly excite contempt, if not derision. Again, having in mind the little wherewith Mr. Cram may be contented, a hu. mane reviewer must desist even from scanning

offend those whose votes may possibly be obtained. Mr. Scott will find that such questions as that of the right to coerce a State give little trouble nowadays. The wonder is that they ever troubled any body. The truth is, that the Constitution provides for the same means of coercing a State that violates its obligations that it does for a single citizen. The third article provides for making a State either a plaintiff or a defendant in controversies before the courts of the United States. Judgment and execution are coercion. The principle established, the rest is only a question of form. The willingness to avoid unnecessary issues led to distinguishing between the coercion of a citizen and coercion of a State, but the logic of events taught that there was no need of making even a sentimental distinction, and that a State in insurrection should be coerced as well as a collection of individuals. The State is one of the political corporations within the national Union and owing many important obligations to it. Either the State or its citizens or both may be guilty of violating those obligations, and may be compelled to perform them or made to bear the penalty.

It was always part of the elementary law that there are matters in which a party wronged may redress his own injury. If I am assaulted, I am not limited in redress to suing for damages I may repel force with force. To say that this power is less in the nation than in a private person is to expose the ridiculous ness of the assertion. These are principles of interpretation which the terrible lessons of the civil war taught so cogently that the old doctrine of impotence is scouted. It never was held except as a logic-chopping method of up. holding the institution of slavery, and efforts to revive its discredited and discreditable sophistries will be utterly futile. Mr. Scott says the letter of the Constitution remains to show how far the people have been swept from their moorings. The answer is that no such thing was ever found in the letter. It was read into it by partisans of a wrong, as implied interpretations for which no solid basis was ever shown, contrary to the natural meaning of the instrument. They precipitated upon us an unparalleled civil war in their endeavor to enforce such a theory of the fundamental law, and the appeal to arms was decided against them, as was the appeal to reason. It is difficult to characterize properly the fatuity of a fresh attempt to write history with the discarded doctrine as a standard.

The subordinate propositions are as transparently weak as the leading ones. In regard to Reconstruction measures we are told that it was an "untenable position that, though these States were still members of the Federal Union, and their citizens had not ceased to be citizens of the United States, these citizens had become incapable of exercising political privileges." So far from being untenable, it describes one of the commonest things in the world. Loss of political privileges as a consequence of unlawful acts meets us at every turn. We see it in the case of every counterfeiter of the coin. He is still a citizen of one of the States, but the United States puts him in prison, where his "political privileges" are denied him. Or does Mr. Scott suppose that the inmates of penitentiaries regularly "go home to vote"? In certain classes of offences the deprivation of political privileges is specifically made part of the punishment. Now, strange as it seems to appear to Mr. Scott, a resort to war is a method of enforcing rights and of imposing penalties for wrongs. It is a court of last resort when peaceful means shall fail. It has its

Mr. Palmer's death. In that work Mr. Palmer narrated his experiences during a two-years' visit to Russia, which he made with the express

It is the unique glory of the United States that, when victory left the late insurgents at its mercy, the nation did not raise the cry of Vae victis! Having fully established the principle of national sovereignty, and vindicated both its right and its power, its leniency astonished the world. It gave the lie to all the prophecies of cruelty, and proved that the discretion which it exercised as conqueror was a law of reason and conciliation to itself. The columns of this journal during the Reconstruction period show how ardent Unionists urged that it was not in the interest of good government to exclude from participation in it those who represented the capital and the intelli gence of the South. Such counsels prevailed more quickly than was to be expected, and of penalties there were practically none.

During the progress of Reconstruction there were disputes between the departments of the Government which well deserve careful study and judicial analysis. There were examples of misgovernment under the so-called "carpetbag rule" which were deplorable. A history of these from the standpoint of a thorough Unionist who could appreciate the difficulties of the situation, would be most valuable and full of political instruction. To have it written by one who condemns the whole war as wicked on the part of the United States, who can see nothing in Mr. Lincoln but a usurping dictator, who can find nothing lawful or right that Congress could do, promises, we fear, but little profit. A historian should have the faculty of throwing himself sufficiently into the position of parties to comprehend their views. He should be able to judge them, not wholly by his own political creed, but by theirs. He should know that to them there would be some theory of consistency by which their policy would have some unity of purpose. He should be above the vulgar assumption that all who oppose him are scoundrels, and all who disagree with him are liars.

If Mr. Scott were able to assume the rôle of the judicious critic and the judicial historian, the vigor and clearness of his style, with the evident industry of his reading, should insure a noteworthy book. But the doctrines of this preliminary work give little hope of a valuable result. From the pen of one who affects to believe that nothing would have been right but immediate, unqualified, and unconditional restoration, we cannot look for impartial narrative or appreciative criticism.

Russia and the English Church during the Last Fifty Years. Edited by W. J. Birkbeck, M.A., F.S. A. Vol. I. Published for the Eastern Church Association. London: Rivington, Percival & Co.

the Russian Church, not as a convert, but on the ground that, if the Anglican and Russian churches were, in reality, "catholic," as they profess to be, a member of one is, necessarily, a member of the other. His discussions with the Russian ecclesiastics and ordinary members of high educated society on the different points of dogma and on the interpretation of the creeds are very fully reported. To a certain extent the failure of his attempt to establish church unity in that particular direction, and the arguments for and against it, are finally summed up in that volume. But the present volume is, in no sense, a repetition of the former, though it treats of the same theme, viz., the assumption that the Anglican, Roman, and Russian churches are simply local forms of "the Church."

After his return to England from his Russian journey, Mr. Palmer came into correspondence with a remarkable Russian who has had an incalculable influence on the religious life of his fellow-countrymen, and even on the Church itself, as Mr. Birkbeck explains in his "Introduction." Alexei Khomiakoff was a layman, of noble, not of priestly, birth; an exofficer in the Guards, whose chief interest and pleasure in life were his Church and theology. The extent of his influence can be accurately judged only by those who, in addition to knowing the facts which Mr. Birkbeck sets forth, have had the opportunity of hearing his contemporaries speak of his personality and of the book by which he is chiefly known at home and abroad-so far as he is known at all abroad

L'Église Latine et le Protestantisme au point de vue de l'Église de l'Orient.' Several of his sayings therein have become part of the current language-coin of the country, such as bis famous retort to the Protestant accusation that the ikoni, or sacred pictures, are fetishes and are worshipped as such: "The Protestants have a true fetish of their own, the Bible; they adore it but do not read it." There is nothing of this sort in the letters which Mr. Birkbeck collected in Moscow and St. Petersburg, neither is there much to show us Khomiakoff in his character of universal genius, practical man of business, and clearheaded reasoner in many other departments besides theology. He appears, mainly, as the gentle, devout, persuasive reasoner.

The religious movement in which he played so prominent a part was, as his editor rightly explains, different from the English Tractarian Movement in that it represented the religious and national movements in combination. "The great work of Khomiakoff's life was undoubtedly the definite direction which he gave to the Slavophile movement in Russia in its relation to the Orthodox Church. It is not an exaggeration to say that his theological writings have given a logical form to the idea of the Church which, although it has never received the sanction of an Ecumenical Council, nor even of a general council of the Eastern churches, nevertheless undoubtedly underlies the teaching of the Orthodox Church wherever she is to be met with," says Mr. Birkbeck, and he adds: "If any one wishes to estimate what Khomiakoff has done for Orthodox theology, let him first read Mr. Palmer's

Khomiakoff. It forms a valuable sequel to Mr.

Palmer's Notes of a Visit to the Russian Church,' which Cardinal Newman edited after

of theology which existed before Khomiakoff, as set forth in those discussions, and then "let him go to Russia and study the Church as she exists there at the present day. He will not be

long in realizing how completely the channel into which the Slavophiles led contemporary Russia in theological thought corresponds with actual facts."

years, he came to believe that the Creed without the filioque clause was the only one possible, and that it included the other, as many eminent theologians now admit. While in this mood, he made a long visit to Athens, which is

recorded at length in this volume, and tried to be received into the Greek Church. But, at that time, the Greek Church required that converts should be rebaptized, though the Russian Church did not. Although he had refused to enter the Russian communion otherwise than unconditionally, he was now willing to enter the Greek Church by baptism, provided that the baptism should be administered to him conditionally "in case the former baptism should be declared invalid," which he did not believe, as he held that the rite could be performed and received only once. But the Greek ecclesiastical authorities, as was natural, refused to administer any other than unconditional baptism, and Mr. Palmer gave up that attempt also. He printed some Dissertations, and writes to Khomiak off that he has sent copies thereof to Russia; if a Russian translation is permitted unaltered, or altered only in such measure as will not affect the theological completeness (which he does not at all expect), he might then seek admission to the communion of the Russian Church. It will be seen that he had now reached the point where he had made up his mind not to remain in the Anglican communion, but was unwilling to enter any other where he would not be allowed to discuss freely and publicly matters which were of essential importance to religion. He has repeatedly expressed irreconcilable non-concurrence with the dogmas and practices of the Roman Church, yet he has, by this time, become so unsettled that he announces to Kho miakoff: "After, then, I have done all I can towards the Russian as well as the Greek Church, I should probably, as I have said, go to Rome, with the hope of learning something there to enable me to change my mind and submit to her claims, since I can no longer defend the Anglican nor find a satisfactory entrance into the Eastern Church,"

Now, while there is not the slightest doubt that Mr. Palmer was thoroughly sincere in his unhappy search for truth, and in his conscientious splitting of theological hairs "twixt south and south west side," the upshot of it all, at the end of this volume (which breaks off at the epoch of the Crimean war as a natural division), is decidedly startling:

"Having arrived at Rome," he writes, "and having been persuaded by some very enthusiastic friends of mine to make a retreat, I came into connection with a very distinguished theologian, Father Passaglia, who informed me of an opinion' which I had never thought of, and which served to facilitate my convictionnamely, that having, as I had, Greek rather than Latin convictions upon certain important points of controversy, I could all the same be

but, as for my intellectual position, it has remained almost without change; only, in re spect to the Roman See, and, in general, in respect to general arguments favorable to the pretensions of Catholicism, I find it much more agreeable to be on the side of the stronger rather than on that of the less strong."

from Coleridge and other poets, the whole succession being very happily conceived.

The selections made could all without much violence, if any, be brought under four heads: observations of nature; comments upon friends; self criticism; approaches to things ethical, religious, theosophical. The observations upon nature are occasionally scientific, but generally æsthetic. For one so introverted as Coleridge they show a remarkable intensity of engagement with things visible and tangible. Shelley is generally regarded as par excellence our meteorological poet, but Coleridge's predilection for the lovely mysteries of the weather does not seem to have been less pronounced. Reading many of these observations, it is evident that the atmospheric felici. ties of 'The Ancient Mariner' were not evolved

Mr. Birkbeck has performed his task extremely well, and his foot-notes are very helpful not only to the understanding of this correspond

ence, but also to that of the subject in general.

There are one or two trifling errors which it would be well to correct on p. xix: "The deliverance of the Church and State from the attack of the Gauls and of the twenty nations which accompanied them," should read "twelve nations." The error arises from mis

he did not write with his eye on the object, he did write remembering his emotion in tranquillity. The precious sonnet,“ Fancy in Nubibus," is evidently a genuine report of doings to which Coleridge was much addicted, but in most of the examples given here of his dealings with cloud land he is content with the actual appearance; only there must be something of mysterious fascination in it to attract and hold him. In many of these ob

Anima Poeta: From the Unpublished Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1895.

་

THE editing of this volume is by the same careful hand that edited for us recently the 'Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.' Much labor must have gone to the preparation of it, but the outcome is its ample justification and reward. There is nothing better here, nothing more characteristic, than we have had heretofore in the ' Table Talk' and 'Friend' and 'Biographia Literaria,' but there is a fresh instalment of what attracted us in those delightful books, good in itself and calculated to send one acquainted with those books back to them for the renewal of his pleasure in them and to win for them some new appreciation. From 1795 to 1832 Coleridge filled more than fifty pocket notebooks with his observations and lucubrations on a very great variety of material and spirit. ual things. Scanty use has hitherto been made of this great accumulation of material. Mr. Coleridge gives a careful list of the various drafts that have been made upon it, ending with "a few quotations from diaries of tours in the Lake Country and on the Continent" that appear in the foot-notes of the 'Letters.' At the risk of injuring his collection, Mr. Coleridge has omitted from it what has been used already. But the aim of the editor is something more than to give a selection of admirable sentences and aphorisms. He would enable the reader to form some estimate of those strange self-communings to which Coleridge devoted so much of his intellectual energies, and by means of which he hoped to pass through the mists and shadows of words and thoughts to a steadier contemplation, to the apprehension if not the comprehension of the mysteries of Truth and Being." Mr. Coleridge has made it easy for the reader to find what he seeks and to skip what he doesn't care for by a series of marginal notes, many of them brief quotations

the poet's mind out of which came the skyscape of the ode "Dejection" and the loveliest of all the marginal readings of 'The Ancient Mariner'-that about "the Journeying Moon and the stars that still sojourn and still move onward." For example:

"A most remarkable sky! The moon, now waned to a perfect ostrich egg, hangs over our house almost, only so much beyond it, gardenward, that I can see it, holding my head out of the smaller study window. The sky is covered with whitish and with dingy cloudage, their dingiest scud close under the moon, and one side of it moving, all else moveless; but there are two great breaks of blue sky: the one stretches over our house and away towards Castlerigg, and this is speckled and blotched with white cloud; the other hangs over the road, in the line of the road, in the shape of an ellipse or shuttle, I do not know what to call it -this is unspeckled, all blue, three stars in it -more in the former break, all unmoving. The water, leaden white, even as the gray gleam of water is in latest twilight. Now while I have been writing this and gazing between whiles (it is forty minutes past two) the break over the road is swallowed up, and the stars gone; the break over the house is narrowed into a rude circle, and on the edge of its circumference one very bright star. See! already the white mass, thinning at its edge, fights with its brilliance. See! it bas bedimmed it, and now it is gone, and the moon is gone."

Of the comments upon friends, those upon Wordsworth are the most interesting and valuable. But not all his readers will agree with Coleridge's disparagement of Wordsworth's sherter poems as compared with "The Prelude":

"In those little poems his own corrections, coming of necessity so often, wore him out, difference of opinion with his best friends irritated him, and he wrote, at times, too much with a sectarian spirit, with a sort of bravado. But now he is at the helm of a nobler bark; now he sails right onward; it is all open ocean and a steady breeze, and he drives right before it, unfretted by short tacks, reefing and unreefing the sails, hauling and disentangling the ropes. His only disease is in having been out of his element; his return to it is food to condition of health." famine; it is both the specific remedy and the

This lofty praise, however, is shortly followed by this harsh disparagement:

"But surely always to look at the superfi. cies of objects for the purpose of taking delight in their beauty, and sympathy with their real or imagined life, is as deleterious to the health