Many of the pieces in this volume having already shone as captain jewels in Mana’s carcanet, need no comment from us; and we should, perhaps, have avoided the delicate responsibility of criticizing one of our most precious contributors, had it not been that we have seen some very unfair attempts to depreciate Mr. Longfellow, and that, as it seemed to us, for qualities which stamp him as a true and original poet.  The writer who appeals to more peculiar moods of mind, to more complex or more esoteric motives of emotion, may be a greater favorite with the few; but he whose verse is in sympathy with moods that are human and not personal, with emotions that do not belong to periods in the development of individual minds, but to all men in all years, wins the gratitude and love of whoever can read the language which he makes musical with solace and aspiration.  The present volume, while it will confirm Mr. Longfellow’s claim to the high rank he has won among lyric poets, deserves attention also as proving him to possess that faculty of epic narration which is rarer than all others in the nineteenth century.  In our love of stimulants, and our numbness of taste, which craves the red pepper of a biting vocabulary, we of the present generation are apt to overlook this almost obsolete and unobtrusive quality; but we doubt if, since Chaucer, we have had an example of more purely objective narrative than in “The Courtship of Miles Standish.”  Apart from its intrinsic beauty, this gives the poem a claim to higher and more thoughtful consideration; and we feel sure that posterity will confirm the verdict of the present in regard to a poet whose reputation is due to no fleeting fancy, but to an instinctive recognition by the public of that which charms now and charms always,—­true power and originality, without grimace and distortion; for Apollo, and not Milo, is the artistic type of strength.

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Thoughts on the Life and Character of Jesus of Nazareth.  By W.H.  FURNESS, Minister of the First Congregational Unitarian Church in Philadelphia.  Boston:  Phillips, Sampson, & Co. 1859.

Here is a book, written, not for “orthodox believers,” but for those whom the orthodox creeds have wholly repelled from its subject.  It is quite distinct from three other books on the same general theme, by the same author.  It has, indeed, some objects in view, at which neither of those books directly aimed.

It will overwhelm with horror such readers as may stumble upon it, who do not know, till they meet it, that there is any view of Jesus Christ but that which is presented in the widely circulated issues of the Tract Society and similar institutions.  Our attention has already been called to one very absurd and unjust attack upon it, in a Philadelphia paper, intended to catch the prejudices of such persons.  But the views by which we found this attack accompanied, in the same journal, led us to suspect that some political