The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 341 pages of information about The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864.

The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 341 pages of information about The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864.
trusted her lover thoroughly, she would intrust all risks to love.  She would know with her head and feel with her heart, that, with the chivalry, the intensity, the reverence, the elevation of such a sentiment as she imagined, there could be neither bondage nor freedom, neither mine nor thine, but a oneness that would bring all relations into harmony with itself.  The very essence of love is humility, and at the same time its glory is that it abolishes all laws, all rights, all powers, and is to itself alone law, right, and power.  By the completeness of self-abnegation may the footsteps of love be traced.  This partially the author recognizes, choosing it for the conclusion of the whole matter, but erring in that he makes it come with resistance and reluctance, the conquest of love, instead of spontaneously and unconsciously, its necessary concomitant.

In the hero of the story and his relations to the heroine, with occasional questionable traits, we find often a generosity, delicacy, and devotion which give promise of good.  A man who can conceive a character so much above the common level, where the common level has always been low, cannot fail by continued observation and candid thinking to rise still higher.  Frequently already, seeming hardly to be conscious of it, he impinges upon a far-reaching, deep-lying, but generally unrecognized truth.  When men shall have come to study the nature of woman, instead of haranguing about her duties, a great point will have been gained.

The blemishes which we have pointed out, and others which we have not pointed out, are only blemishes, and chiefly upon the surface.  They mar, but they do not vitiate.

The limits of a magazine will not admit that adequate analysis and criticism which the ability of the book, both in point of subject and treatment, deserves.  We have only space to say, that, making every allowance for every fault, it has the merit of being a pioneer, and an able pioneer, in a tract which has been hitherto, so far as we know, unbroken wilderness.  Its author has not solved the problem,—­he does not even understand all its conditions; but he is travelling in the direction of the true solution:  and he offers us the rare, we had almost said the solitary, spectacle of a man and an opponent bringing to the discussion of the “Woman’s-Rights question” an appreciable degree of sense, justice, and moral dignity.

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RECENT AMERICAN PUBLICATIONS

RECEIVED BY THE EDITORS OF THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

Manual of Instructions for Military Surgeons, on the Examination of Recruits and Discharge of Soldiers.  With an Appendix, containing the Official Regulations of the Provost-Marshal-General’s Bureau, and those for the Formation of the Invalid Corps, etc.  Prepared at the Request of the U.S.  Sanitary Commission.  By John Ordronaux, M.D., Professor of Medical Jurisprudence in Columbia College, New York.  New York.  D. Van Nostrand. 12mo. pp. 238. $1.50.

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The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.