is hardly realized by us.  But words had been spoken which could not die in a hundred years, and the public temper had been thrown into a glow which could not cool in a century.  The “Morning Star of the Reformation” found its twin lighting up the dark ravines of Bohemia, and when they twain arose the day had begun to break.  The Reformation did not begin with Luther.  The elements had been made plastic to his touch; all was ready for his skilful hand to mould them into the symmetry of the Great Reformation.  The armies of the Lord had enlisted man by man before he came; it was for his clarion blast to marshal them in companies and battalions, and lead them to the battle.  We must again thank Mr. Gillett for his timely, serviceable book.  It is never unprofitable to look back and see who have kept the sacred fire of Christianity burning when it seemed in danger of extinguishment.  And in that fifteenth century its flames certainly burned low.  Whenever the Church is on the side of aristocratic power, whenever it is a conservative and not a radical and progressive force in an evil age, when the forces of Satan are in power, the men are truly worthy of immortality who go out to meet death in behalf of Christ and the religion of meekness and purity and universal love.  Such was John Huss.  He ought never to have suffered himself to be driven from the Church, and when he did so, he committed the unceasing mistake of reformers, among whom Wesley and Zinzendorf stand as the two marked exceptions; but for rectitude, zeal, and a thorough consecration to the great interests of Christ, he merits an even more sumptuous memorial than this excellent book.

Sordello, Strafford, Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day. By ROBERT BROWNING.  Boston:  Ticknor & Fields.

In his dedication to the new edition of “Sordello,” Mr. Browning says,—­“I lately gave time and pains to turn my work into what the many might—­instead of what the few must—­like; but, after all, I imagined another thing at first, and therefore leave as I find it.”

This, on the whole, he has done; for, though a prose heading runs before every page, with a knowing wink to the reader, the mystery is not cleared up.  As the view dissolves with every turn of a leaf, the showman says, confidentially,—­“Now you shall see how a poet’s soul comes into play,—­how he succeeds a little, but fails more,—­tries again, is no better satisfied,—­

    “Because perceptions whole, like that he sought
    To clothe, reject so pure a work of thought
    As language:  thought may take perception’s place,
    But hardly coexist in any case,
    Being its mere presentment,—­of the whole
    By parts, the simultaneous and the sole
    By the successive and the many.  Lacks
    The crowd perception?”

We fear so; at any rate, the exhibition fails, because the showman cannot furnish brains to his commentary.  The man who can read “Sordello” is little helped by these headings, and the man who cannot is soon distracted by continual disappointment.  We think he will end by reading only the headings.  And they doubtless are the best for him.  Otherwise, under the cerebral struggle to perceive how the prose interprets the poetry, he might become the idiot that Douglas Jerrold exclaimed that he was at his first trial of “Sordello.”