a new pleasure. Our friend's house was a kind of gathering place for loungers like ourselves. That morning they were all there before us, a silent group around the table; and the first sound that struck the ear was that beautiful sentence in the introduction to Columbus, "which seems to bring back by one bold stroke of the pencil, all the darkness of that veil which had so long shrouded the mysteries of the ocean.”

Columbus carried us back to the Sketch Book. We had given away our only copy, and when we got back to our quiet home in Sienna, were not a little at a loss where to go for another. At length chance brought home, after many wanderings, a little old man by the name of Montucci. He was a dapper little man, scarcely five feet high, with a bright Italian eye and a fluent tongue, over which Italian, English, French, and German rolled with equal volubility; he had lived everywhere, had known Alfieri, had written a Chinese dictionary, and was now returned to purge Italy of Gallicisms, and lay his bones in his native soil. But the great labor of his life had been the publication of a Berlin edition of the Sketch Book, under the very eyes of the author, who had written him a letter beginning with "Dear Doctor," and subscribed, "Truly yours." He showed us the letter and sold us the book. Blessings on his memory! how many exquisite hours we owe him.

We have said that Mr. Putnam has rendered a very important service to American literature. We can use this term now, and use it boldly, for we have a literature whose claims none but a snarling critic in his most snarling mood can deny. The past is sure. It was of the future that we were thinking when we made our assertion. Men in this bookmaking age of ours read everything, and the new crowds upon us so thickly, that we are in constant danger of forgetting the old. Then every new invention brings in new words; with every new incident, whether great or little, comes some new phrase; our daily wants, enlarged by a thousand sources, give rise to new forms of speech every day ;) and while the great current sweeps us onward, all those old landmarks which guided our fathers so surely are sinking one after the other in the receding horizon. We would not wish to be misunderstood. We know that progress requires movement, and that language like everything else must change, to meet the wants of those that use it. King can never mean again what it meant a hundred years ago, any more than the virtue of the heroic age could express the virtue of Socrates. And we rejoice that it is so, and we thank Heaven for this law of

progress, which we accept freely with all its requisitions and all its consequences. But progress is development, not destruction. It respects the labors of others. It rejects nothing because it is old. It casts off dry branches, but never tears up a living root. There is nothing with promise in it to which it does not hold fast, and not a seed that it does not treasure up with grateful acknowledgment. We are no conservatists of dried bones. Away with what has no life in it, be it new or old. But we would dig an honorable grave for it and bury it respectfully, and set a tablet there to tell future ages that this too was useful in its day and generation.

Now the tendency of the present day is to forget this useful past, and to make the fertility of our current literature an excuse for neglecting those classic periods in which our language received its definitive form. Look upon the centre table. That antique binding, with its silver clasps and rich embossing, must surely betoken some father of our literature. No, it is only a Book of Beauty. Go to the library. What a superb copy of Macaulay's Miscellanies and Emerson! But is there no Swift, no Dryden there? No little nook for the Spectator, that used once to lie well-thumbed upon every table? Yes; take the ladder and climb up to the top of the book-case and you will find them on the upper shelf, but with such a shroud of dust about them, that it will well nigh cost you both eyes and lungs to get them into a readable shape. We once met a graduate of one of our oldest Universities, a man of much general culture, and remarkable for his refined and elegant tastes, who had never read "Alexander's Feast;" and it was not more than a month ago that we put the “Tale of a Tub" into the hands of a man whose whole nature was formed to enjoy it, and yet who had passed twenty years in the midst of books without ever seeing this boldest and most vigorous of all satires. And our school-books, our Readers, our Elegant Extracts, those collections which go first into the scholar's hand and stay there longest, which give him his first notions of language and taste, and, so to speak, the key-note to his mind, which are so full of "taste and morals" in the preface, and so classic on the title-page,-what are they but conservatories of magazine poetry, newspaper wit, and Congressional eloquence? One would think that English literature was just born, or at the best but just escaped its swaddling clothes. And is it not a crying shame to do so heedlessly what might be done so well, and waste the embalmer's art on what has hardly form enough to make a shrivelled mummy? But we have Webster and Bryant and Longfellow,

and other great names there too. True, and strange enough they look in such sorry company. But Webster would send you to Pitt and Burke, and to a daily and nightly thumbing of Demosthenes; and Bryant would tell you that if you would feel all the delicacy of his language and his exquisite modulation, you must go back to his masters and study them, as he did and does. When a sculptor wants a cast of some master-piece of his art, he has a mould made upon the original, and draws from his mould an exact fac-simile in form, feature, and expression. But every time you use the mould you take something from its perfection. There will be some slight, almost indefinite change in the expression,something wanting to the finish of the surface and the exactness of the outline; and if you want a fresh and faithful copy you must go back again to the original and form your mould anew.

We have touched unawares upon a difficult question, and now we must say a few words more before we turn back. Every man must live in the present. It is his true field,-the only one in which he can be truly or happily useful. He must submit, too, to the influence of his contemporaries, enter into the great questions of the day, and move with the world that is moving around him. How silly would it be to know Demosthenes or Cicero by heart, and not be able to give a sentence from Clay or Webster ! Would you understand Thucydides? Would you fathom the depths of that vast mind of Tacitus? Read the newspapers, watch the polls, squeeze into the living history of a mass meeting. For history is life, and can only be understood by those who have read the living page. But on that page even how dead the letter, how imperfect the lesson without the comment of the past. You may watch the shadow as it slowly moves across the dial, and read the numbers on which it successively falls, but the numbers will be an enigma, and the shadow itself a

mystery.

Now what is the time for laying this foundation of serious study,—in the age of preparation, or when the mind is engrossed by the active duties of life? Will the man who did not learn from his daily exercises to admire the natural grace and ingenuous simplicity of classic literature, find time or taste for the study when his eye has been dazzled and his ear vitiated by the extravagance of transient fashion? There can be but one answer. We read in old legends of rings of such virtue that they change their color at the touch of poison. Arm yourself with this ring. It is within the reach of all.

Homer has lent it to thousands. Shakspeare and Spenser and Milton have wrought it anew, and Dryden and Pope have learned the secret from them. Go to them meekly and humbly, as they went each to his master; let them be waking hope, your nightly vigil; believe, trust, and above all grow not weary in the probation, and the reward is sure.

your

There is one great merit which we must allow Voltaire, even while we deplore most the fatal use which he too often made of his shining talents. He wrote, as it is well known, upon a great variety of subjects,-poems, histories, plays; recorded many incidents of his life in beautiful odes; interpreted Newton and commented Corneille; and it was a growing wonder with his contemporaries, that while he was obliged to read so much he could always write so well. Sismondi has pleaded the bad style and different languages of the books he was drawing from as an excuse for the occasional incorrectness of his own. Voltaire managed this better. He had begun by writing carefully and studying correctness in his prose as well as in his poetry. But without trusting to the memory of his early studies, he kept constantly by him a volume of Racine and Massillon's Petit Carême. If he was going to write verse, he read a page in Racine,-if prose, one of Massillon; and with this key-note for his ear, preserved the harmony of his own style without ever sinking into negligence or weakening his individuability by imitation.

Now one of the reasons for which we rejoice in this republication of Irving's works is, that they bring you back to all the best traditions of the language.) Mr. Irving's style possesses that exquisite charm, which nothing but the study of books, combined with that of nature, can give. You feel that he has drunk deep at the pure wells of literature, and looked on men and nature with a loving eye. If style be a reflection of the mind, Mr. Irving's must be a beautiful one. And yet clearly marked as the characteristics of his style are, we are at a loss to seize upon the secret of its power. It is natural, for you feel all the while you are reading him as if you ought to have written just so yourself. It is simple, for there is not an overstrained expression or a cumbrous epithet in it. It is elegant, for it has all the richness which imagery and language can give. It is picturesque, for it paints to the eye like poetry. It is harmonious, for it falls on the ear like music. It is transparent-the meadow-brook is not more so. And yet of these and of all the qualities which it possesses in so eminent a degree, which are those that mark him out as a

writer by himself, and make it impossible for you to confound him with any other?

One of them doubtless is his peculiar felicity in the choice of epithets. This is, as every writer knows, one of the greatest difficulties in the art of writing. It is one thing to describe a scene accurately, another to throw into your description some happy expression which shall imprint it on the memory and become permanently associated with it. It is the poet's gift, requiring quick sensibilities and a lively fancy. Mr. Irving has it in an eminent degree. He never plucks a flower without seeing something in it that you never saw there before,-some connection between the visible and the invisible world, some new alliance betwixt thought and feeling, which embalms it in odors richer than its own. His landscapes show with what a thoughtful and confiding spirit he has looked upon nature, drawing in cheering inspirations and a soothing trust for the hour of gloom. Did you ever look, kind reader, upon an Italian landscape in October? We will suppose it to be a mountain scene,-Florence, if you choose, for there the mountains are drawn in a semicircle around you, and that sweet valley of the Arno lies like a sunbeam between. Look upon that valley and those mountains. They are the same that you saw a few months ago,—the same sharp outline on the clear blue sky, the same mingling of olive and vineyard below. But there is something hanging over it all, something which softens down every rougher feature, and gives a deeper, yet a calmer glow to the sunlight that rests upon it like a smile of love. It is nothing but a thin veil of unsubstantial mist, which the first rough breeze will scatter, or which may rise up to float away with the clouds, and fall back to earth or ocean again in rain; and yet with that veil over it with what a new and magic power does the spell of the landscape steal into your soul.

Now this is just the effect of Mr. Irving's epithets. You knew the object before, its form and history, and could tell, as you thought, all about it; and yet how different it appears when you look at it through the magic of his words.

It is easy to fix upon the distinctive characteristic of Dr. Arnold's style-it is earnestness. You cannot but be struck with the freshness of his language, and the easy construction of his sentences. You feel that he has studied at the best sources, and comes to his task with a mind fully imbued with the pure spirit of classic literature. But what you feel above all in reading him is, the earnest conviction with which he writes. You may not agree with him in all that he says, but