afterwards resided for many years in Words- "Burke's Works," the collection had been. worth's immediate neighborhood, and be- an eyesore for twenty years( with a digrescame acquainted with the most minute de- sion as to cacophonous words)-and how tails of his history, and the inmost arrange- | Wordsworth took down the uncut volume, ments of his household. Those details and and cut open its leaves with a knife soiled arrangements he develops perhaps with only with butter which had been eaten with dry a free use of the license which modern auto- toast. Instead of calling for a clean knife, biography assumes: but when he descends Wordsworth positively "tore his way into to chronicle the accidents of social demea- the heart of the volume with this knife, that nor; to take the most evanescent traits of left its greasy honors upon every page." It way ward humor, and give them a fixity which is right to add that the injured owner of the makes them false; and to interpret the feel-fated volume disclaims any concern for the ings which lie suppressed by the courtesies of social life, according to his impressions of long-past scenes ;-we think he unconsciously but greatly exceeds even that license, and sets a dangerous example to coarser minds. Thus, adverting to his first introduction to the companionship of Woodsworth and Southey, he says:

value of his property, as he says, "whatever might be made good by money at that time I did not regard," and explains, "I mention the case at all only to illustrate the excess of Wordsworth's outrages on books;" and, recurring afterwards to the same subject, admits that "Wordsworth's habits of using books were not vulgar, not the habits of those who turn over the page with a wet finger," an I could read at once in the manner of the two abomination which we are informed was perauthors that they were not on particularly friend-petrated at Cambridge "by a tutor and felly, or rather, I should say, confidential terms. It low of a College," who it is consoling to seemed to me as if both had silently said "We know " was bred up a ploughman and the son are too much men of sense to quarrel because we do not particularly like each other's writings; of a ploughman." we are neighbors, or what passes for such in the country. Let us show each other the courtesies which are becoming to men of letters, and, for any closer connexion, our distance of thirteen miles may always be sufficient to keep us from that." In after life, it is true, fifteen years, perhaps, from this time-many circumstances combined to bring Southey and Wordsworth into more intimate terms of friendship; agreement in politics, sorrows that happened to both in their domestic relations, and the sort of tolerance for differing opinions in literature, or, indeed, in anything else, which advancing years and experience are sure to bring with them. But, at this period, Southey and Wordsworth entertained a mutual esteem, but did not cordially like each other. Indeed, it would have been strange if they had.

And, thereupon Mr. de Quincey proceeds to give as one reason for this want of cordiality that Southey "had particularly elegant habits in the use of books," while Wordsworth, on the other hand, "was so negligent and self-indulgent in the same use, that, as Southey laughingly expressed it to me some years afterwards, when I was staying at Greta Hall on a visit, To introduce Wordsworth into one's library is like letting a bear into a tulip garden.'" And then the autobiographer proceeds to illustrate this peculiarity of his friend by a wrong of his own; and tells us how "on a level with the eye when sitting at the tea-table in his little cottage at Grasmere, stood the collective works of Edmund Burke,"-how, because lettered

These tales of the library are chiefly notable as instances of the importance which longpast trifles may assume to “ the philosophic mind" of an opium-eater; but the record, which we have also just quoted, of an impression of the hollowness of the regards of two professed friends, detected amidst courtesies by which they desired it to be hidden, and published in the lifetime of at least one of them, though referable to the same cause, and capable of the same excuse, belongs to a bitter class of social treason. It is enough that, in our day, the sportive conversations of the table should be reported, and the personal habits of the study and the drawingroom "set in a note-book, learn'd and conn'd by rote;" but if those innocent disguises, by which indifference or partial liking are hidden, which kindness itself spreads over the imperfections of temper, and which nurture the cordiality they assume, may be torn away by any guest admitted to such implied confidence as authorship has permitted society to retain, all men whose celebrity may render their intimacies the subject of public criticism must take heed whom they admit to share

them.

Mr. De Quincey does not leave us to guess at the causes which induced him to regard Mr. Wordsworth's domestic character with a hostile eye. Perhaps much is implied in the passage in which he complains-"Professor Wilson and myself were never honored with

THOMAS DE QUINCEY.

[Dec.,

one line, one allusion from his pen ; but many admiration formed his first claim to the poet's a person of particular feebleness has received acquaintance, we need not determine; this that honor"a complaint indicative of the has at least a semblance of philosopeic morbid sense with which Mr. de Quincey thought, sufficient to excuse an observer not regards his own concerns as necessarily mat- bound by ties of apparent friendship;—but ters of general interest; for, although his fine what shall be said of the sequel? Mr. de scholarship and remarkable powers of con- Quincey proceeds to develop" the strong versation had obtained for him the admira- reason tion of the small circle in which he lived, they estranged, by accusing Wordsworth of having which he alleges Coleridge had to be were, during the period to which this complaint refers, unsuspected by the world. But general efficiency as ought not to have pro"drawn such a picture of Coleridge and his in the illusions which have beset his middle ceeded from the hands of a friend," and life, even his domestic quarrels are momentous; and therefore he has devoted some ten this to a lady and gentleman who purposed pages to expound the various causes of per-don, in the hope to wean him from opium. to take Coleridge with them on a visit to Lonsonal estrangement from one who remained an intellectual idol, though an idol of mixed metal.

He gives this alleged conduct of Wordsworth as the cause of a rupture "which rather healdim of fierce recollections, than by any formal ed itself by lapse of time, and the burning reconciliation or pardon exchanged between the parties;" so that, if there was such a Coleridge died;-whatever Wordsworth had rupture, it was healed many years before said or done, had long been forgiven by the only sufferer. We ask, then, whether an as

They consist first of an exposition of the alleged arrogance of Wordsworth, not generally exhibited, but allied to particular themes; a failing at least that we should scarcely have thought "a fee grief due to a single breast." But afterwards descending to nearer griefs, the autobiographer acquaints us with the fact that he "had for the comp-sociate of these poets, who, in aid of his own troller of his domestic menage a foolish, selfish, and ignorant old maid," one, too, who had " once lived with the Wordsworths," and who "for his service had been engaged at high wages by Miss Wordsworth herself;" -that this servant made false statements about her master to the Wordsworths, which he would not descend to contradict;--and "the result was," says Mr. de Quincey-

"That ever after I hated the name of the woman at whose hands I had sustained the wrong, so far as such a woman could be thought worthy of hatred; and that I began to despise a little some of those who had been silly and undeceiving enough to accredit such representations; and one of them especially, who, though liberally endowed with sunshiny temper and sweetness of disposition, was perhaps a person weak intellectually, beyond the ordinary standard of female weakness. Hence began the waning of my friendship with the Wordsworths. But, in reality, never after the first year or so from my first introduction, had I felt much possibility of drawing the bonds of friendship tight with a man of Wordsworth's nature. He seemed to me too much like his own Ped

resentments, calls such a scandal from the depth of years and the oblivion of forgiveness, does not regard his relation to the party whom he accuses, through a medium so disturbed by the accidents of his being, as to render him incompetent as a judge, and questionable as a witness?

We have occupied so large a space in the ungracious duty of urging the readers of these volumes to apply the passages which disclose those in which he delineates his associates, its author's resentments to the appreciation of that we have left ourselves little space to estimate the excellences with which they

ly life, studies, and boyish successes, are adabound. All the details of the author's earmirably told in them-overlaid sometimes by illustration, and encrusted with perpetual episodes but even in their exuberance redeemed by a singularly pure and impressive style. One of his extravagances "A Vision of Sudden Death," may vie with the Confessions, out of which, indeed, it seems to and terrible voluntary played by a magician's "arise like an exhalation." hand on the most awful chords of existence. It is a fantastic Reminiscences there are of Lamb, of Lloyd, and others, in which (although there are some palpable inaccuracies, as the multiplying the Whether the illustration of Wordsworth's wright into two sisters, and dividing the infemale victim of the literary murderer Waintemperament, drawn from Wordsworth'ssurances between them, whereas poor Helen genius, is graciously exhibited by one whose Abercrombie alone bore the insured life and

.

ler, in the Excursion,' a man so diffused amongst innumerable objects of equal attraction, that he had no cells left in his heart for strong individual attachment. I was not singular in this feeling: Professor Wilson had become estranged from him ; no one could be deemed fervently his friend."

| he prefers; we admire the richness of his fancy, the acuteness of his reasoning, and the occasional elevation of style so becoming to stately thought;-and when we reflect how nearly akin the weaknesses to which we impute his errors of vision and judgment, are to the solemn strengths exhibited in his inward revelations, we are reminded that others, like him, are of such stuff as dreams are made of," and may need, in their degree, the allowance they should give to one more gifted, but more visionary than themselves, until our little life is rounded by a sleep."

LITERARY MISCELLANIES.

stituting a sort of half-way station on the vast route which emigrants have to traverse on their way from the civilized confines of the States to the Eldorado of California and the shores of the Pacific. Capt. Stansbury was the head of this exploring Expedition, and Lieut. Gunnison was his assistant. The work of the former consists of an elaborate official Report of the progress of the Expedition towards the destined spot,-of its proceedings there during the autumn of 1819 and the winter of 1849-50,-and of its reconnaissance, on its journey back, of a new route through the Rocky Mountains. The Captain occupies himself chiefly with the geology, topography, and natural history of the regions traversed or surveyed; glancing but briefly and incidentally at the Mormons and their doings as a community,— which subject he leaves to be more fully discussed in the unofficial volume of his assistant, Lieut. Gunnison. The Lieutenant's work is, therefore, a kind of appendix to that of the Captain, and is to be read in connexion with it. We cannot but wish that the Captain had also undertaken the Lieutenant's part of the work; for, though the Lieutenant has the advantage of a subject of great general interest, he writes in such an unpractised and helpless, yet am

reflects faithfully a luxuriant imagination, a masculine understanding, and a strong healthy emotional nature. He is a manysided man himself, and has that tolerance, comprehension, and appreciation of various characters and forms of activity, which spring | from containing in his own highly-endowed being the elements of those characters and forms of life. His convictions are besides strong enough to be an equipoise to any amount of largeness, to any breadth of sympathy, and to prevent these from degenerating into indifference or want of definite purpose. And lastly, his artistic faculty-his keen sense of individuality in objects, and the correlative power of presenting them in language-is of so masterly an order, that each form in which he has expressed himself seems successively the one for which his talents most fit him. Take him all in all, England has no literary man of his years who can be set up beside him as his equal in variety and quality of endowments, and in richness of promise. But (and what is a critic unless he be critical?) these endowments do not seem to us to be related to the region of pure speculation, so much so as to the domain of passion and of action; and if his sympathies and his tolerance are more limited in one direction than in another, it is just in that direction in which forbitious, style, that less of coherent and intelligible the purpose of philosophical dialogue, and of philosophy itself, they ought to be most extended. In other words, Mr. Kingsley is more a man of emotion and of action than of reasoning; and his width of comprehension and of sympathy is more with passional, sensational, and active life, than with the activities and aberrations of the intellect. His writings leave upon us the impression that he cannot comprehend a man who feels or fancies himself under the necessity of refusing to accept a proposition which is not made good to his intellect, however convenient it might seem to be, if assumed true, as a basis of moral life and practical action. Differences of opinion on the most important subjects he can understand and allow for, provided they spring from motives in which the passions, the affections, or the senses are the producing forces; but that logical processes, or a love of abstract truth, or a fine sense of evidence, should rule a man's practical and moral life-this seems to him to be unaccountable, unreasonable, and a phase of human error to be vehemently combated. And he goes about his task in the spirit in which Hercules may be supposed to have donned his lion's skin, shouldered his club, and bid Deianira, or whoever was pro tempore Mrs. Hercules, good bye for the campaign.”

AMERICAN.

The Expedition to the Valley of the Great Salt Lake of Utah. By Howard Stansbury, Captain of the Corps of Topographical Engineers, United States Army. And the Mormons or Latter-day Saints, in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake; a History of their Rise and Progress, Peculiar Doctrines, Present Condition, and Prospects among them. By Lieut J. W. Gunnison. Both works, originally published by LIPPINCOTT, GRAMBO & Co., Philadelphia, have been republished in London. The Athenæum notices them with favor. The two works here named are the results of an expedition organized by the Government of the United States, in the spring of 1849, for the purpose of exploring and surveying the Great Salt Lake of Utah and its vicinity :-a spot doubly inter esting at present, as being the scene of that curious social anomaly, the Mormon community; and as con

information regarding the Mormons than might have been expected is to be derived from his account of them. Capt. Stansbury, on the other hand, writes in a plain, clear, and business-like manner: -so that what he does say about the Mormonites is more to the purpose than his friend Lieut. Gunnison's more ample descriptions."

Reuben Medlicott, Mr. Savage's new novel, republished by the Messrs. APPLETON, does not obtain universal applause. The Athenæum feels "bound to state that Mr. Savage does not improve as a novelist. My Uncle the Curate,' as the Athenæum said on the occasion of its appearance, was a dull book,-but this is a duller one;-not solely because of its subject, but in part from the manner in which that subject is wrought out."

The Napoleon Dynasty, or History of the Bonaparte Family, by the Berkeley Men," originally published by CORNISH, LAMPORT & Co., has been republished in London. The Athenæum, noticing it at length, says:

·

"Few readers, we imagine, will turn over a dozen pages of the Napoleon Dynasty' without exclaiming-Is this book really American? First of all, the style is French, the sentences are short, ringing, pungent, the incidents and characters are grouped artistically, the story moves on with a rapid and dramatic variety, in the fashion of Dumas,-the moral reflections are of the epigrammatic and paradoxical kind so natural in the valley of the Seine, and the adulation of the Napoleon family is in the manner of Cassagnac, Guerronière, and the other paid scribes of the Elysée. The glozing, the reticence, the suppression, the misconstruction, are all achieved with bold front and vigorous hand. Whoever may be the authors of this volume, its purpose is clear enough:-to create in America an opinion favorable to the policy of Louis Napoleon in Europe. In other respects, apart from its inspirations, the book, as a collection of gossiping biographies, is readable and convenient. No other publication do we know in which to find in equal compass such a mass of facts concerning the several members of the Bonaparte family. The writers have travelled over the whole ground made noticeable by Napo