A Summer Cruise on the Coast of New England. By Robert Carter.  Boston:  Crosby & Nichols, pp. 261.

In these days, when the high price of paper makes it easy for authors to sell by the pound what no one would take by the single copy, he is luckiest who has made the heaviest book.  Our morning newspaper nowadays is a kind of palimpsest, and one cannot help wondering how many dead volumes, how many hopes and disappointments, lie buried under that surface made smooth for the Telegraph (sole author who is sure of readers) to write upon.  We seem to detect here and there a flavor of Jones’s Poem or Smith’s History, something like the rhythm of the one and the accuracy of the other. Quot libras autore summo invenies? is the question for booksellers now.

In a metaphysical sense, one is apt to find many heavy books for one weighty one, and it is as difficult to make light reading that shall have any nutriment in it as to make light bread.  Mr. Carter has succeeded in giving us something at once entertaining and instructive.  One who introduces us to a new pleasure close by our own doors, and tells us how we may have a cheap vacation of open air, with fresh experience of scenery and adventure at every turn, deserves something of the same kind of gratitude as he who makes two blades of grass grow where one grew before.  Americans, above all other men, need to be taught to take a vacation, and how to spend one so as to find in it the rest which mere waste of time never gives.  Mr. Carter teaches us how we may have all the pleasure without any of the responsibilities of yachting, and, reversing the method of our summer migration, shows us the shore from the sea.

Hakluyt and Purchas have made us familiar with, the landscape of our coast to the early voyagers,—­with its fringe of forest to the water’s edge, its fair havens, its swarms of wild fowl, its wooded islets tangled with grape-vines, its unknown mountains looming inland, and its great rivers flowing out of the realm of dream; but its present aspect is nearly as unfamiliar to us as to them.  We know almost as little of the natives as Gosnold.  Mr. Carter’s voyage extends from Plymouth to Mount Desert, and he lands here and there to explore a fishing-village or seaport town, with all the interest of an outlandish man.  He describes scenery with the warmth of a lover of Nature and the accuracy of a geographer.  Acting as a kind of volunteer aide-de-camp to a naturalist, he dredges and fishes both as man of science and amateur, and makes us more familiarly acquainted with many queer denizens of fin-land.  He mingles with our fishermen, and finds that the schoolmaster has been among them also.  His book is lively without being flippant, and full of information without that dulness which is apt to be the evil demon of statistics.  The moral of it is, that, as one may travel from Dan to Beersheba and see nothing, so one needs but to open his eyes to the life and Nature around him to find plenty of entertainment and knowledge.