The national era. [volume] (Washington [D.C.]) 1847-1860, 1852-08-12
LITERARY NOTICES.
|THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE. By Nathaniel Haw
thorne, Boston Ticknor, Reed, Fields. For !
sale byTaylor & Maury, Washington, ID. C.

| greatest OF Mr.. Hawthorne = works, but not IN
all, if breadth of purpose is the umpire of ex-
| cellence True, the book is filled with evil
dences of genius, and of Mr.. Hawthorne's ge-
MUS at that but no great, distinctive aim is
manifest; none of life's great problems are
taken hold of earnestly; no great individual
fact is demonstrated He gives us three or
four chief characters, each the representative
of a class; and in vividness of conception, sub
tlety of delineation, and intensity of indiyidu-
atty, they are unsurpassed if equalled, by any
of his previous creations; but they and their
lives prove almost nothing extrinsically; they
simply act and react upon each other through
the medium Of personal contact First we
have Miles Coverdale the "story teller "a
cultivated quiet, non-interyentiOn lin the abso-
lutte sensc) bachelor and poet He is but
passive actor in the play observing rather than
participating. Next is Hollingsworth, with his
granite physique and his ponderous intellect,
originally capable of infinite good, if he had
but suffered his great heart to work according
to its God-given instincts; but, accepting one
ray only of the great sun of philanthropy, and
concentrating his vision exclusively upon what
that revealed to him, he has become blind to
all else slave to his one idea. He is the
focus of action in the play. Then we have
Zenoba the gorgeous magnificent as
tropic night, full jewelled-a very Cleopatra in
! Orientalism of character-laying the imperial
splendor of her nature at the feet of Holdings
worth, to he trod upon and crushed at his next
step Next comes little Priscilla, one Of those
semi-supernatural characters wherein the indi-
viduality of Mr. Hawthornes genius evidences
itself Priscilla gradually degenerates into
New England woman, proves to be Zenobia's
sister, and becomes her successful rival in the
contest for Hollingsworth, in consequence of
which Zenobia browns herself Such and so
related are the characters.
Looking at the book as simply and strictly
tragedy and measuring its merit by the amount
of dramatic effect produced, it is a wonderful
| performance. We can recall nothing that will
surpass the midnight search for the body. By
some mysterious agency of art, we are brought
into immediate, personal, physical contact with
the whole scene. Coverdale calling to Hol-
lngsworth to come down, seems to startle ,ts
from sleep, and that strange tone, which he
could not keep out of his voice, shivers through
our hearts and quckens their throbs rs we
step forth into the ghostly light of the midnight
moon, and follow their footballs through the
silence We stand upon the brink of the river
and look into its dark face, sprinkled here and
there with quivering flakes of moonlight, and
involuntarly the picture of Zenobia, as we
knew her. comes before us" Zenobia, the
beautiful, the gorgeous lin the very zenith of
her magnificent womanhood; and we try to
think of her as dead, but we cannot; so in
tensely uitai was she in every element and at
! tribute of her nature--such an incarnation of
absolute life And rs we stand, v feel, with
| Coverdale that fore-shock of the fact that Hol-
lingsworth has struck the body. We see it
! lying beneath the tree--cold CHASTITY, dripping,
and fercely contorted and not till it is left
with the "tire-women are we released from
the terrible thraldom.
There are throughout the book manifold in
stances of that exquisite arrangement of light
and shade, and that wonderful capacity for de-
lineating all the subtlest tints of the subtlest
emotions which SO distinguish Mr.. Hawthorne
as an author Now and then, too, we are
treated to a quiet ramble through meadows
and woods; while from out those dreamy twi-
light moods of his. heavy-freighted thoughts
come gliding so quietly so unObtrusively, that
we almost fail to note them sometimes, in our
eager enjoyment of the exquisite fancies that
twinkle like fire-llies along the pages And
what charming, episodal descriptions of land
scape he gives us, too, as We pass along!
We have been struck i'm this book, more than
ever before, with the marvellous beauty OF MIR.
liawthorne's style. The sentences roll along
with the rich, swelling harmony OF sea-waves,
laden with poetry and humor, that flash IN
sprayey brilliancy from their crests as they
break upon the periods
One other thing, and we have done The
singular aptness with which words are fire.
ouently used--for instance, what an exquisite
stroke is the application of gorgeous to Ze-
noba That single word comprehends the
whole woman.
LlrrLr PrpILNGroN AND THE PEDLISGToNTANs.
| BY John Poole. New York ID. Appleton Co.
| For sale by r. Farnham, Washington, ID. G.
During these August days, when the atmOs-
nhere is /" molten gold, not only in complexion
but in temperature, and when ones thoughts
piH wander yearningly back to those good, an
tcdiluyian times when sans culOHeS was the
,nodo, such book as the one before us is a
very God-send Ludicrous incident, racy de-
scription, keen satire, and an omnipresent hui
NOR, are its Notwithstanding altogether
| lust the book to counterfeit that undue tend
ency to languor which the season is prone to
engender in ones intellect.
The publishers deserve to be heartily sus-
tanned in this endeavor to iamarize us with
standard English literature; and we think the
public needs only to know that the present
happy selection owes its paternity to the same
pen as that notorious piece of ubquty, Paul
Pry,7 to insure a rapid sale.
And now we want tO utter our protest
against the abomnabc ugness of the style of
binding adopted for this series of publications..
1t il positive insult to the really handsome
typography, to associate it with such hyper
horrible, dngy-red cover.
LoNpoN LABOR AND rHE LONDON Pooh. No 90.
BY Henry Mayhem. New York Harper 4 Broth
crs. For sale by Franck Taylor, Washington D. c.
Nothing but the most determined energy and