of gratulation. But deem him premature and presumptuous in imagining that he has already reached that high angle of vision. If Foster's discolored sight, on the one hand, gave "Hell a murkier gloom," and made sin yet uglier than it is, Emerson refines it away to nothing, and really seems to regard the evil committed by man in precisely the same light as the cunning of the serpent and the ferocity of the tiger. Who has anointed his eyes with eye-salve, so that he can look complacently, and with incipient praise on his lips, upon the loathsome shapes of human depravity? What genius of the western mountains has taken him to an elevation, whence the mass of man's wickedness, communicating with hell, and growing up toward retribution, appears but a molehill, agreeably diversifying the monotony of this world's landscape? The sun may, with his burning lips, kiss and gild pollution, and remain pure; but that human spirit ought to be supernal which can touch and toy with sin. And if, in his vision of the world, there be barely room for guilt, where is there space left or required for atonement ?

no other; and has learned that piercing yet musical note to which nations are beginning to listen, directly from the fontal source of all melody. We are sure that he would rather be an owl, hooting his own hideous monotone, than the most accomplished of the imitative race of mocking birds or parrots.

We think that we can observe in many of Emerson's later essays, and in some of his poems, symptoms of deepening obscurity; the twilight of his thought seems rushing down into night. His utterances are becoming vaguer and more elaborately oracular. He is dealing in deliberate puzzles - through the breaks in the dark forest of his page you see his mind in full retreat toward some remoter Cimmerian gloom. That retreat we would arrest if we could, for we are afraid that those who will follow him thither will be few and far between. Since he has gathered a large body of exoterick disciples, it his duty to seek to instruct, instead of perplexing and bewildering them.

Of Emerson's history we have little to tell. He was one of several brothers- all men of It was once remarked to us of John Foster, promise and genius-who died early, and "pity but he had been a wickeder man." The whose loss, in one of his little poems, he deplores, meaning of which strange expression was this as the "strong star-bright companions" of his -pity but that, instead of standing at such an youth. He officiated for some time as a clergyaustere distance from human frailty, he had man in Boston. An American gentleman, who atcome nearer it, and in a larger measure partaken tended his chapel, gave us lately a few particuof it himself; for, in this case, his conceptions of lars about his ministry. Noted for the amiabilit would have been juster, mellower, and less ity of his disposition, the strictness of his morals, terribly harsh. Without fully coinciding with and attention to his duties, he became, on these this sentiment, we may parallel it by saying, accounts, the idol of his congregation. His pity almost but Emerson had been a worse and preaching, however, was not generally popular, an unhappier man; for thus might he have nor did it deserve to be. Our informant defelt more of the evil of depravity, from its re-clared, that while Dr. Channing was the most, morse and its retribution, and been enabled to counteract that tendency, which evidently exists in his sanguine temperament, to underrate its virulence.

Like every really original mind, Emerson has been frequently subjected to and injured by comparison with others. Because he bears certain general resemblances to others, he must be their imitator or feebler alias. Because he is as tall as one or two reputed giants, he must be of their progeny! He has been called, accordingly, the American Montaigne - the American Carlyle — nay, a “Yankee pocket edition of Carlyle." Unfortunate America! It has been so long the land of mocking birds, that when an eagle of Jove at last appears, he must have imported his scream, and borrowed the wild lustre of his eye! A great original standing up in an imitative country looks so sudden and so strange, that men at first conceive him a forced and foreign production. We will, on the contrary, cling to our belief, that Emerson is himself, and

Emerson was the least, popular minister in Boston, and confessed that he never heard him preach a first-rate sermon till his last, in which he informed his congregation that he could conscientiously preach to them no more. The immediate cause of his resignation was his adoption of some peculiar views of the Lord's Supper. In reality, however, the pulpit was not his pride of place. Its circle not only confined his body, but restricted his soul. He preferred rather to stray to and fro along the crooked serpent of eternity! He went away to think, farm, and write (as the Hutchinsons so sweetly sing) in the "old granite state." Thence, save to lecture, he has seldom issued, till this present pilgrimage to Britain. One trial, he has himself recorded, to have shot like lightning through the haze of his mystic tabernacle, and to have pierced his soul to the quick. It was the death of a dear child of rare promise, whose threnody he has sung as none else could. It is the most touching of his strains to us, who have felt how the blotting out

of one fair young face (albeit not so nearly re- | Emerson that they are unworthy of his genius lated) is for a season the darkening of earth and of heaven.

NEW BOOKS ON ROME.*

VICARY AND SAVONAROLA.

ing points, on the outside. A word, therefore, respecting the covers of the two volumes on our table, before we proceed to their contents.

of our Protestantism, Mr. Vicary's neighbour- | upon a performance, presenting strong redeemhood, we are confident, will nerve us to bear up against it. Should any atmosphere of insular prejudice, borne along with us as we travel, present us a distorted or exaggerated picture of things at Rome, we count on Don Jeremy to blow away the deceptive medium, and let us see the ways of Romans as Romans themselves see them. Our Benedictine guide will teach us to "give honor due" to the brave man on whose brows the triple crown promises to become such a "cap of liberty" as the world has not yet seen. Our Anglican monitor will remind us that, after all, the Pope is the Pope: that he who is now breaking the political fetters of his Romans may, for any thing we know, be at the same time preparing fetters far more crushing for the souls of our own free fellow-Britons and Brito-Hibernians: and that he who will not have Italy Austrian, will have Ireland (and England, too, if he can manage it) Italian.

Thus, we shall return from the banks of the Tiber, neither a better Protestant than we arrived there, nor a worse one: and that we consider a decided advantage. The seven hills will restore us to our home and our parish church, a victim neither to Romanomania nor to Romanophobia. Neither Exeter Hall nor Oscott will have a chance of us. From the regions over which the Pope casts out his shoe, we shall come back, neither to moan with Miss Miggs over the blindedness of the Papists who kiss it, nor to exult with Mr. Ward in the growing disposition (if such there be) of this Protestant realm to unite in the osculation. Under auspices so full of promise, we pause no longer on the threshold of our pilgrimage we "take the road" with a good heart, and, if fortunate enough to have the reader for a fellow-pilgrim, will do "our possible" to make the time pass pleasantly for him, and profitably for ourselves; we will beguile the way for him, and he shall pay the turnpikes for us.

There are two things indispensable to every book- an outside and an inside, and the criticism that overlooks either of these is plainly one-sided. Few books are equal throughout, uniformly good or uniformly bad. Some are admirable to the end of the title-page, and from that point fall off. Others break down at an earlier stage: shut, they dazzle you with their brilliancy, but from the time you open them they begin to be dull. Now to say that such books are bad, would be harsh, and even untrue: the most you can say of them is, that they are unequal. It is only the inside that is bad; and the way into which reviewers have got, of judging books as if they were all inside, has led to many an unjust, or, at most, half-just sentence, by which unqualified condemnation has been pronounced

The color of an author's mind is supposed to be reflected in his works, but it is clear that the color of his coat is not, or we should have Mr. Vicary coming up to the visitation in a full suit of scarlet, and Father Prout glancing like a portent from one European capital to another, in yellow from top to toe. Both these gentlemen, on the contrary, wear black coats. However, there is, no doubt, a mystic meaning in the colors in which they have respectively chosen to invest the offspring of their brains. The Protestant clergyman, by giving a scarlet frame to his picture of the seven-hilled city, probably meant to convey, in the most delicate manner, his opinion of the identity of the Pope with a lady who need not be more particularly defined. The Benedictine, as we know already, sent his records of an eventful epoch into the world in yellow, as a token of homage to Pius IX., that being the armorial color of Mastai Ferretti. Knights, in those glorious old times, which, by the blessing of goodness, are gone by for ever, used to wear the colors of the fair lady in whose honor they broke a lance: and Don Jeremy very properly wears not personally, but by his book as proxy-the colors of the pontiff, in whose quarrel he flings down the gauntlet to devil and devil's advocate, and to all the devil's brood of liars, detractors, and grudgers at good men, in this in some respects dirty world — and who, if not exactly a lady, yet is in so far like one, that he wears petticoats.

--

So much for the outsides of our two books, the scarlet and the yellow, which, as they lie side by side on our table, in as loving proximity as if the Council of Trent had never anathematized a Protestant, have a fine, warm, Claude Lorrainish effect, and remind us in a very lively manner of sunset as seen from Monte Pincio.

Mr. Vicary's "Notes of a Residence at Rome," which we now open, have one great fault-they are out of date: they tell us of a Rome that has ceased to exist, that had ceased to exist when the book was published, though not when the "Notes" which have supplied its material were taken. It was, in fact, a serious contretemps for Mr. Vicary that the New Era began at Rome between the writing of his book and its issuing from the press. It was good for the Romans, indeed, for it is an ill-wind that blows nobody good; but it was (if we may use the expression) the mischief for Mr. Vicary. His "Notes," owing to this unlucky turn in affairs, are become very much like the notes of a bank that has succumbed to the "mon

etary pressure;" or like notes of invitation to viewed with jealousy and alarm by the occudinner, the hospitable inditer of which has sud- pants of the Vatican. They fear, and perhaps, denly dropped dead when on the point of send- not without foundation, that the elements of ing them out, but which an over-scrupulous change and innovation, which have been workflunky makes a point of delivering notwithstanding amid society, in commerce, science, and literature, would, if they were suffered to approach the Roman capital, be at once transferred to the religious system, which, enthroned here, as a great heart, sends forth its streams to so large a portion of the world. Their strength consists in resisting change,' and they are but too well aware, that if its influences were but once permitted to operate, the religion of Rome, with its mitred prince, and all the proud superstructure which has held in vassalage, for ages, both the minds and bodies of men, would run the hazard of crumbling into the dust."

ing; or like the notes that were frozen in the bugles of Baron Munchausen's postillions, and that came out, quite mal à propos, with the next year's thaw. You cannot, as you read, divest yourself of the impression that Mr. Vicary is Rip Van Winkle: you are convinced that he has been asleep since somewhere about April or May, 1846, and that his soul harbors no suspicion of the strange things that have been going on in the world in the meanwhile. By no other hypothesis can you explain, to your own satisfaction, his onslaughts on abuses already fast and far on the road to oblivion; and his fulminations against a system of policy which lives now but in the traditions of the dim past. For really, these eighteen months, during which Mr. Vicary has been rapt in a blest unconsciousness of earthly things, have done the work of about half that number of centuries at Rome, and Pius IX. throws Gregory XVI. into a hardly less dreamy distance than Gregory VII. Mr. Vicary, however, is awake now, and some vague rumor seems to have reached his ear, that things in the Eternal City are not exactly what he remembers them, eight hundred years ago. How and to what extent they may be changed, his notions are probably indistinct, but he knows enough, or guesses enough, to suspect, that in some of his outpourings of indignation upon the blunders of the Papal government, he may have been, to use an expression which we hope the reader will not find coarse, ducking a drowned dog. A symptom of some such feeling shows itself at page 11, where the following passage occurs:

"To improve the navigation of the Tiber, from Rome to Ostia, would be productive of the greatest prosperity to both these cities. That classic river is only navigable for boats of about twenty tons burden, and has evidently disimproved, from the times the Cæsars bore upon its waters the ponderous spoils of Egypt. A railroad, also, from Civita Vecchia, a distance of forty miles, could easily and expeditiously convey merchandise and passengers from that excellent port. This would be a national benefit, and would, without contradiction, steadily, and to a large extent, increase the revenue. These subjects have been brought under the notice of government; but, from the peculiar short-sightedness and narrow views which have ever characterized the measures of the Papal executive, they have been either postponed, or abandoned. The reason of which is evident; the march of improvement, and the general change in the minds of men and things which have strongly marked the last quarter of a century, have been

Now, Mr. Vicary appears to have felt — as it was natural he should- that there was some awkwardness in presenting the above to the world, as an exposition of the Papal policy, just when the "occupant of the Vatican," with the eyes of all waking mankind upon him, was laying down railroads, building iron bridges, lighting gas-lamps, abolishing street and state beggary, opening his ports, emancipating his press, and in other ways, which we have not time now to reckon up, making the "Roman capital" a very nidus of the "elements of change and innovation." Accordingly, at the words, " march of improvement," about the middle of the paragraph we have extracted, an asterisk directs the reader's attention to a note at the foot of the page, and here it stands written :

"These remarks apply chiefly to the late government."

Observe, "chiefly to the late government; " in some measure, then, though an inferior one, to the government now existing. That is the meaning of "chiefly," or it means nothing. Mr. Vicary's "remarks," on the opposition of "the Papal executive" to national progress, apply "chiefly" to the government that opposed national progress, and only in a subordinate degree to the government which promotes it in every possible way! This is candor with a vengeance. Just as if a Huguenot, writing about England a year or two after the revolution of 1688, had inveighed against the Popery of the court, and subjoined a note to inform his readers that "his remarks applied chiefly to the late reign."

should, at once, have drawn his pen through the | We have never felt our own Protestant convic