at Lucerne, made to commemorate the Swiss guards at Paris who fell in defending the Tuileries, August 10, 1792, is known to every tourist:  it is altogether conventional, but it is not commonplace.  “Never having seen a live lion,” says his biographer, “he went to antique statues for inspiration:”  he thus, at two or three removes from Nature, secured a grand, monumental conception, fully charged with human intelligence.  The colossi of Christ and his Twelve, now to be seen with the artist’s other works at Copenhagen, and formerly exhibited at the World’s Fair in New York, are imposing and classical, while they perhaps show the absence of the Christian idea noted in his other clerical subjects.  Thorvaldsen, born a Lutheran, was a spectator in Rome of bigotry and skepticism, and took refuge in artistic impartiality.  A friend once observing that his want of religious faith must make it difficult to express Christian ideas in his works, “If I were altogether an unbeliever,” he replied, “why should that give me any trouble?  Have I not represented pagan divinities?—­still, I don’t believe in them.”  The life of this artist was one of consummate worldly success; the kings of Bavaria and Denmark were the personal friends of the unlettered son of the ship-carver, as were Horace Vernet, Walter Scott, Andersen, and Mendelssohn; his casket of decorations was the amusement of his lady visitors; and his invitations were so constant that he could not always remember the name of his host:  he was at once parsimonious and charitable, cheerful and melancholy.  His artistic influence was very strong, exhibiting itself in the style of Tenerani, Galli, Rauch, Drake and Bissen.  The life of him by Plon is methodical and complete, and the American version is illustrated by thirty-five careful engravings printed in Paris and gummed upon the sheets.

    Expiation.  By Mrs. Julia C.R.  Dorr, author of “Sibyl
    Huntington,” etc.  Philadelphia:  J.B.  Lippincott & Co.

Expiation is an interesting American story, with a background of lonely woods that protect the rustic privacy of Altona, and a list of characters that combine city culture and country eccentricity.  Patsy, the grim and self-sacrificing “help,” who observes drily of a statue representing Eve with the apple that “some things is decent and some things ain’t,” is the best delineation in it, but the style is always lively, always feminine and pure, and the conception of the high-bred, aristocratic family, come to bury their mistakes and miseries in a forest seclusion, would have been thought worthy of being worked up by Emily Bronte.  The catastrophe, where a dumb nun turns out to be a lost wife given over to the undertakers in a state of catalepsy, is perhaps not quite new, but it is striking and vigorously told, and her union at last with her husband’s sons and the girlish bride of one of them is very touching.  The novel is full of local American color, and entices the attention from the reader’s first plunge to the end.