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Such was the year of the Proclamation, and its history is marvellous in our eyes.  It stands in striking contrast to the other years of the war, both of which closed badly for us, and left the impression that the enemy’s case was a good one, speaking militarily.  Our improved condition should be attributed to the true cause.  When, in the Parliament of 1601, Mr. Speaker Croke said that the kingdom of England “had been defended by the mighty arm of the Queen,” Elizabeth exclaimed from the throne, “No, Mr. Speaker, but rather by the mighty hand of God!” So with us.  We have been saved “by the mighty hand of God.”  Neither “malice domestic” nor “foreign levy” has prevailed at our expense.  Whether we had the right to expect Heaven’s aid, we cannot undertake to say; but we know that we should not have deserved it, had we continued to link the nation’s cause to that of oppression, and had we shed blood and expended gold in order to restore the system of slavery and the sway of slaveholders.

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REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker, Minister of the Twenty-Eighth Congregational Society, Boston.  By JOHN WEISS.  In Two Volumes. 8vo.  London.

Such a life of Theodore Parker as Mr. Parton has written of Andrew Jackson would be accepted as an American classic.  For such a life, however, it is manifestly unreasonable to look.  Not until the present generation has passed away, not until the perilous questions which vex men’s souls to-day shall rest forever, could any competent biographer regard the “iconoclast of the Music Hall” as a subject for complacent literary speculation or calm judicial discourse.  For us, this life of Parker must be interpreted by one of the family.  He shall best use these precious letters and journals who is spiritually related to their writer, if not bound to him by the feebler tie of blood.  And assuming the necessity of a partisan, or, as it might more gently be expressed, wholly sympathetic biographer, there is little but commendation for Mr. Weiss.  With admirable clearness and strength he rings out the full tone of thought and belief among that earnest school of thinkers and doers of which Theodore Parker was the representative.  Full as are these goodly octavos with the best legacies of him whose life is written, we have returned no less frequently to the deeply reflective arguments and acute criticisms of Mr. Weiss.  Let the keen discrimination of a passage taken almost at random justify us, if it may.

“Some people say that they are not indebted to Mr. Parker for a single thought.  The word ‘thought’ is so loosely used that a definition of terms must precede our estimate of Mr. Parker’s suggestiveness and originality.  Men who are kept by a commonplace-book go about raking everywhere for glittering scraps, which they carry home to be sorted in their aesthetic junk-shop.  Any portable bit