was peculiarly gifted, yet the details of which were sincerely repugnant to her.  It crackled and sparkled with naive arrogance.  It criticized a new world and fresh forms of civilization with the amusing petulance of a spoiled daughter of John Bull.  It was flimsy, flippant, laughable, rollicking, vivid.  It described scenes and persons, often with airy grace, often with profound and pensive feeling.  It was the slightest of diaries, written in public for the public; but it was universally read, as its author had been universally sought and admired in the sphere of her art; and no one who knew anything of her truly, but knew what an incisive eye, what a large heart, what a candid and vigorous mind, what real humanity, generosity, and sympathy, characterized Miss Kemble.

The dazzling phantasmagoria which life had been to the young actress was suddenly exchanged for the most practical acquaintance with its realities.  She was married, left the stage, and as a wife and mother resided for a winter on the plantations of her husband upon the coast of Georgia.  And now, after twenty-five years, the journal of her residence there is published.  It has been wisely kept.  For never could such a book speak with such power as at this moment.  The tumult of the war will be forgotten, as you read, in the profound and appalled attention enforced by this remarkable revelation of the interior life of Slavery.  The spirit, the character, and the purpose of the Rebellion are here laid bare.  Its inevitability is equally apparent.  The book is a permanent and most valuable chapter in our history; for it is the first ample, lucid, faithful, detailed account, from the actual head-quarters of a slave-plantation in this country, of the workings of the system,—­its persistent, hopeless, helpless crushing of humanity in the slave, and the more fearful moral and mental dry-rot it generates in the master.

We have had plenty of literature upon the subject.  First of all, in spirit and comprehension, the masterly, careful, copious, and patient works of Mr. Olmsted.  But he, like Arthur Young in France, was only an observer.  He could be no more.  “Uncle Tom,” as its “Key” shows, and as Mrs. Kemble declares, was no less a faithful than the most famous witness against the system.  But it was a novel.  Then there was “American Slavery as it is,” a work of authenticated facts, issued by the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1839, and the fearful mass of testimony incessantly published by the distinctively Abolition papers, periodicals, books, and orators, during the last quarter of a century.  But the world was deaf.  “They have made it a business.  They select all the horrors.  They accumulate exceptions.”  Such were the objections that limited the power of this tremendous battery.  Meanwhile, also, it was answered.  Foreign tourists were taken to “model plantations.”  They shed tears over the patriarchal benignity of this venerable and beautiful provision of Divine Providence