Atlantic Monthly by - (the reading strategies book .txt) 📖

prejudice or hypocrisy which was strong enough to resist all the arguments of reason and all the appeals of humanity. “White Lies” is full of examples of his power, and of the peculiarities of his power. Blunt and bold and arrogant as his earnestness often appears, it is capable of the most winning gentleness, the most delicate grace, and the most searching pathos. The delineation of the female characters in this novel is especially admirable. Josephine and Laure are exquisite creations, and the Baroness and Jacintha, though different, are almost as perfect, considered as examples of characterization. In the invention and management of incidents, the author exhibits a sure knowledge of the means and contrivances by which expectation is stimulated, and the interest of the story kept from flagging. We hope to read many more novels from the same pen as delightful as “White Lies.”

 

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Brazil and the Brazilians. Portrayed in Historical and Descriptive Sketches. By Rev. D.P. Kidder, D.D., and Rev. J.C. Fletcher. Illustrated by one hundred and fifty Engravings. Philadelphia: Childs & Peterson. 1 vol. 8vo.

Brazil is a country but little known to the majority of readers, and the little that is known is so fragmentary that it is as likely to convey a false idea as an incomplete one. The writers of this volume combine two qualifications for the work of dissipating this ignorance. They have a direct personal knowledge of Brazil, gained during a long residence in the country, and they have carefully studied every valuable book on its history and resources. The manners, customs, laws, government, productions, literature, art, and religion of the people have all been carefully observed under circumstances favorable for accurate investigation. The result is a valuable, interesting, and attractive volume, well worthy of being extensively read. The elegance of its mechanical execution, and the profusion of engravings illustrating the text, will add to its popularity, if not to its value.

 

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The Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt. Now first entirely collected. Revised by himself, and edited, with an Introduction, by S. ADAMS LEE. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 2 vols. 18mo.

Leigh Hunt has outlived all the enmities and enemies provoked either by his merits or his demerits, and is especially interesting as the sole survivor of the illustrious company of poets with whom the mind instinctively associates him. Some burnt out; some died out; some dried up; but he remains the same cosey, chirping, fine-natured, and self-pleased singer, who won the love of Shelley and Keats, and roused the wrath of Gifford and Wilson. We are glad to welcome his collected poems in their appropriate attire of “blue and gold,” and trust they will have a wide circulation in the United States, as the genial poet is himself to be a participant in the profits of the publication. We wish that a word of ours could be influential in assisting this veteran of letters to reap from the publication something more substantial than fame, yet in some degree the expression of it,—something which shall give him assurance that his volumes are on thousands of parlor tables, because the proofs of it are palpable in the increased comforts afforded to his old age. And certainly the poet deserves a wide circle of readers. Though he does not succeed in the delineation of the great and grand passions of our nature, he is very successful in the sphere of its humane and tender sentiments; and though open to criticism for the jaunty audacity with which he coins dainty sweetnesses of expression rejected by all dictionaries, and for an occasional pertness in asserting opinions of doubtful truth, he is so lovable a creature that we pardon his literary foibles as we would pardon the personal foibles of a charming companion and friend. He has a genuine love for all cheerful and cheering things, and power enough to infuse his cheer into other minds. Disliking all internal and external foes to human comfort, he is equally the enemy of evil, and of the morbid discontent which springs from the bitter contemplation of evil. His nature is essentially sprightly and sensuous, with here a bit of Suckling and there a bit of Fletcher, carrying us back to an elder period of British poetry by the careless grace and freedom of his movement, and proving his connection with the present by the openness of his mind to all liberal thought and philanthropic feeling. Good-humor and benevolence are so dominant in his nature, that they prevent him from having any deep perceptions of evil and calamity. He is personally affronted when he sees the thunder-cloud push away the sunshine from life; and God, to him, is not only absolute Good, but absolute Good Nature.

It would be easy to quote passages from these volumes illustrative of his acute observation, his largeness of sympathy, his delicacy and daintiness of touch, his sweetness, humor, pathos, and fancy. As a specimen of the playful and beautiful ingenuity of his mind, we extract a portion of his little poem on “Love-Letters made of Flowers.”

“An exquisite invention this, Worthy of Love’s most honeyed kiss, This art of writing billets-doux In buds and odors and bright hues! In saying all one feels and thinks In clever daffodils and pinks; In puns of tulips; and in phrases, Charming for their truth, of daisies; Uttering, as well as silence may, The sweetest words the sweetest way. How fit, too, for the lady’s bosom! The place where billets-doux repose ‘em.

“What delight, in some sweet spot Combining love with garden plot, At once to cultivate one’s flowers And one’s epistolary powers! Growing one’s own choice words and fancies In orange tubs and beds of pansies; One’s sighs and passionate declarations In odorous rhetoric of carnations; Seeing how far one’s stocks will reach; Taking due care one’s flowers of speech To guard from blight as well as bathos, And watering every day one’s pathos!”

From the exquisite little poem entitled “Songs of the Flowers” we should like to cut a few stanzas; but our limits forbid.

 

MUSIC.

 

What will the Muses do in these hard times? Must they cease to hold court in opera-house and concert-room, because stocks fall, factories and banks stop, credit is paralyzed, and princely fortunes vanish away like bubbles on the swollen tide of speculation? Must Art, too, bear the merchant’s penalties? or shall not rather this ideal, feminine element of life, shall not Art, like woman, warm and inspire a sweeter, richer, more ideal, though it be a humbler home for us, with all the tenderer love and finer genius, now that man’s enterprise is wrecked abroad? Shall we have no Music? Has the universal “panic” griped the singers’ throats, that they can no longer vibrate with the passionate and perfect freedom indispensable to melody? It must not be. The soul is too rich in resources to let all its interests fail because one fails. If business and material speculation have been overdone, if we are checked and flung down in these mad endeavors to accumulate vast means of living, we shall have time to pick ourselves up, compose ourselves to some tranquillity and some humility, and actually, with what small means we have, begin to live. Panic strangles life, and the money-making fever always tends to panic. Panic is the great evil now, and panic needs a panacea. What better one can we invent than music? It were the very madness of economy to cut off that. Some margin every life must have, around this everlasting sameness of the dull page of necessity,—some opening into the free infinite of joy and careless ideality, or the very life-springs dry up.

Music is a cheap luxury; the more so as one seeks real music for its own sake, and not the music which is imported like the Paris fashions. This winter it will be a question between whether we can afford to pay for it, and whether we can afford to do without it. We think the absolute necessity of some diversion, something to lift the leaden cloud, and keep us in a state of natural buoyancy and courage, already settles the question. Music we shall have, simply because we need it. Or view it from the opposite side, from the point of mere political economy. Music, in many ways, has built itself up into a great industry among us,—music-publishers, musical instrument-makers, music teachers, musical performers,—all mutually dependent, and together swelling the national industry to the amount of many millions. It is the opportunities of hearing music, it is the concerts and the operas, that give the impulse to this whole many-branched machine. Taken together, it feeds many mouths, and helps turn many other very different sort of mills, and plays its part in Wall Street and in State Street, and its notes in that sense enter as much into the general currency as they do into the general ear in another. Now which is cheaper, which is wiser, to employ these artists, and the crowds of workers whom the public exercise of their talent keeps in motion, or cast them off upon society to be a general burden in a more hopeless form? Surely, we can afford the stoppage of some banks and factories, quite as well as we can that of music. Let us look around, then, upon its prospects for the winter.

While we write (the first week in October) the musical season, in what we take to be the most music-loving of our cities, Boston, has not commenced, or shaped itself into much distinctness of plan. The season is late; hard times may make it later; yet shall “the winter of our discontent be glorious summer” ere long. Boston, for its best music,—best in artistic tendency, though not perhaps the most exciting or most fashionable,—has always relied more than New York on its own quiet, domestic resources. Our musical societies have been the centres of our musical activity, and have more or less successfully provided us with sterling opportunities of making ourselves acquainted with the master compositions in the various forms of Oratorio, Orchestra, Chamber Music, etc., where the end has been more to get at the intrinsic worth and beauty of the music, than to go into fashionable raptures about some new-come singer or solo-playing virtuoso. Yet virtuosodom and the Italian opera come in to reap an annual harvest here too, and have and long will have their zealous party of admirers. Were Opera an organized home industry among us, as much as other forms of music,—were there some meaning in the name “Academy of Music” worn by operatic theatres, it would be more useful to our artistic progress. But Italian Opera, as managed, and “star” concerts generally, are no part of the healthy, permanent development of our own musical resources. They are speculations; they attack us from without, exploiting a factitious enthusiasm, and exhausting the soil in one short season, so they may only carry off the present fatness of the land. Operas and virtuoso concerts are wholly in the hands of speculators, musical Jew-brokers, who do a formidable business in old clothes, the worn-out musical celebrities of Europe;—often with great skill, often much to our pleasure and advantage; for it is much to us to hear great artists, even when the voice has lost some of its freshness, and to admire now what long ago perhaps exhausted admiration in the Old World. But the effect is bad on our domestic industry. We almost need a musical protective system. Our good old society concerts have been much thrown out of joint. Few of them of late, as compared with former years, have paid. The dazzling novelties, that come trumpeted with all the cunning speculators’ arts, debauch us somewhat from our wholesome, quiet love of pure, high music for its