The subject is inviting, but we can only add that these short stories exhibit the rarest freshness and purity of imagination, the richest humor, and the most striking suggestion of an exhaustless fertility of invention which we remember ever to have seen in any child’s book before.  There is nowhere a careless execution; and the reason of this is probably that the characters have had a leisurely growth in the author’s own mind.  Generally it is supposed, that, to suit a subject to children, it is only necessary to go through some outward manifestations and to give the thing an air of novelty; but in this treatment there is no freshness, and no very great or very permanent moral expression.  The writer of “Dream Children” will have a select audience, but he will have it pretty much to himself, and, as the best of all rewards which he could have, he will educate the thoughts of his juvenile readers imperceptibly into a greater love and reverence for the very heart of truth and beauty.

Remains in Verse and Prose of Arthur Henry Hallam; with a Preface and Memoir. Boston.  Ticknor & Fields.

A permanent, though modest, place in the literature of the English language will be accorded to this little volume.  Judged upon their intrinsic merits as compositions, the “Remains in Verse and Prose of Arthur Henry Hallam” would, nevertheless, hold no abiding position among the many pleasing poems, clever dissertations, and brilliant essays annually given to the press in Great Britain and America.  Were they brought to us as the writings of a young man dying at thirty-two, instead of ten years earlier, we might hastily say, that, sacred as they must be to the personal friends of the author, there was in them no excellency sufficiently marked or marketable to warrant republication.  But there gather other interests about them when we are told that these compositions came from the son of a very eminent man, and were written at an age at which we congratulate ourselves, if our college-boys are not oppressively foolish.  For the rare instances of hereditary transmission of distinguished mental power are well worth attention, and the maturity of thought and the subtile trains of reflection in this youth now afford that large promise of genius which may not be confounded with those specious precocities of talent the world never lacks.  Yet it is not probable that even these attractions could give to the literary remains of young Hallam that permanent place in letters which we have made bold to promise them.  Only the inspirations of a great poet could wake the noblest sympathies of noblest hearts in perennial tribute to this friend so early called from life.