the morbid imagination to supernatural sight, and for a brief moment reveals through rolling mist and portentous cloud the perfect likeness of the one longed for by the rapt gazer, so Frederick is restored in this biography for the perpetual consolation and admiration of all coming heroes.  In comprehension and judgment of the actions and hearts of men, and in vividness of writing, not that which shook the soul of Belshazzar in the midst of his revellers was more powerful, or more sure of approval and fulfilment.  It is not only one of the greatest of histories and of biographies, but nothing in literature, from any other pen, bears any likeness to it.  It is truly a solitary work,—­the effort of a vast and lonely nature to find a meet companion among the departed.

1. The Rejected Stone; or, Insurrection vs.  Resurrection in America. By a Native of Virginia.  Second Edition.  Boston:  Walker, Wise, & Co. 1862.

2. The Golden Hour. By MONCURE D. CONWAY, Author of “The Rejected Stone.” Impera parendo. Boston:  Ticknor & Fields. 1862.

Seldom have political writings found such accomplices in events as these, whose final criticism appears in the great Proclamation of the President.  Two campaigns have been the bloody partisans of this earnest pen:  the impending one will cheerfully undertake its final vindication.  Not because these two little books stand sole and preeminent, the isolated prophecies of an all but rejected truth, nor because they have created the opinion out of which the President gathers breath for his glorious words.  Mr. Conway would hardly claim more, we think, than to have spoken frankly what the people felt, the same people which hailed the early emancipationing instinct of General Fremont.  We see the fine sense of Mr. Emerson in his advice to hitch our wagon to a star, but there must be a well-seasoned vehicle, with a cunning driver to thrust his pin through the coupling, one not apt to jump out when the axles begin to smoke.

At the first overt act of this great Rebellion, anti-slavery men perceived the absurdity of resisting a symptom instead of attacking the disease.  They proclaimed the old-fashioned truth, that an eruption can be rubbed back again into the system, not only without rubbing out its cause, but at the greatest hazard to the system, which is loudly announcing its difficulty in this cutaneous fashion.  But Northern politicians saw that the inflammatory blotches made the face of the country ugly and repulsive:  their costliest preparations have been well rubbed in ever since, without even yet reducing the rebellious red; on the contrary, it flamed out more vigorously than ever.  Their old practice was not abandoned, the medicines only were changed.  The wash of compromise was replaced by the bath of blood.  And into that dreadful color the tears and agony of a million souls have been distilled, as if they would make a mixture powerful enough to draw out all our trouble by the pores.  The very skin of the Rebellion chafed and burned more fiercely with all this quackery.