them as I often before had done when snug in bed - howling their midnight serenades under my windows.

As we hastened on, after Alek and I were able to speak, and congratulate ourselves upon our escape from the neighborhood of the "gulch" before the wolves neared us, it struck me rather oddly that Maggie had not vouchsafed a word in common with us, in gratitude to Him who had rescued us from death in a horrible form; for her spirit was one of those devotional ones, always overflowing with benedictions, even in positions most adverse to their utterance. I spoke to her, but no reply. "Maggie," Alek called, "why don't you answer? Are you faint? Are you very cold?" He instantly checked Joe, while I found her hand and arm beneath the wrappings, all in listless disorder, and she was indeed very cold. Was it the chill of death? No word or stir to persuade us to the contrary. "Good God!" Alek almost groaned aloud, "can it be?"

Yonder, away from the road, was a log-house that we had forgotten in calculating the uninhabited distance, and there a small light was throwing its feeble rays from the four small panes in the window,—more welcome to us now than ever before was the light even of our own dear homes.

As we dragged heavily up to the door, the occupant of the log-cabin, a French Indian, all in a quiver with the spring of the half-breed, bounded from the step, darted by us in the sleigh, to Joe's head, and, seizing the snaffle before he had fairly stopped, said, with that scintillation of words which expresses a dozen different emotions at once, and which always characterizes the hybrid, "Wild, and cold, and late, and sorry for baby and woman, the door is open, the fire is bright, go quick!"

Again, in another direction which the wolves had taken, their hungry howling rent the silence of midnight. Alek, almost stiffened with exposure to the cold, caught poor little Maggie in his arms, bore her into the shelter, and

with a brotherly gentleness laid her on the husk pallet in one corner of the room. More than brotherly we thought, as far as we understood discrete degrees in this kind of thing,- for all-the-worldover women as we were, though freezing to death, we could not suffer to pass unnoticed how tenderly he pressed Maggie's cold cheek to his. The sight warmed us vicariously; and, impelled by a fresh pulsation about my heart, I rushed back to the sleigh, caught up the one soapstone that had survived our wreck, and throwing it upon the black-walnut coals, all alive upon the hearth, set about loosening Maggie's raiment, leaving her stagnant blood no possible excuse for not doing its duty. By the ruddy firelight sat a stranger, sipping a balmy potation from the old family tin dipper. Without a word he finished his tea-drinking, then, rising and pouring a quantity of water from the singing kettle over the fire - dear old tea-kettle! it is always home where thou art into the dipper, gave it a rinse like a well-bred man, and, emptying it into the corner, poured in a fresh supply; then tipping it toward the blaze of the fire, and peering into it with a scowl, to be sure of the right quantity, he took from his pocket a flask of whiskey, and a bottle of some kind of tincture, and, dropping a few drops of each into the water, filled a small iron spoon with the mixture, and, walking up to Maggie with a very unconscious manner, said, "She had better take this."

Alek for the first time looked the stranger fairly in the face. "Why, Stevenson, where did you come from?"

"From Dakotah; over the same road you have probably just travelled."

During the salutation he had taken Maggie's cold hand, and was making the examination of her pulse with the self-possession of one, I thought, professionally used to the sick-room.

"Is there any pulse?" I dared to ask. "Faint."

"Is she faint, or is her pulse faint from the chill?"

"She has narrowly escaped freezing, if an escape it shall prove."

We recommenced the appliances of heated shawls, hot irons, and the solitary soapstone, rubbing, &c. We saw no evidences of her swallowing, and, as she still remained cold, none of her resuscitation.

At last, to our unbounded joy, Maggie swallowed the draught, and the stranger followed it with others, until she really began to show unmistakable signs of a returning glow. Encouraged, we plied our hands with a life-and-death vigor that quickened our own circulation, and made us feel the blessedness of doing good.

It was near dawn when Maggie first essayed to open her eyes; and the weary stranger, assured of her final safety, left her in our care, and, winding himself up in his heavy buffalo, lay down before the fire, where Laselle, his Indian woman, child, and scrubby dog, were sleeping soundly.

"Who is that, Alek?" I asked, as soon as I felt that the man was beyond the reach of an undertone.

"That? Why, it 's Stevenson, Dr. Ben Stevenson."

"Stevenson! I thought he was dead." "So he was. But you never need be surprised at meeting anybody on these prairies, even if you yourself have attended the man's funeral. I always expect to meet some one of my departed ancestors in every new strike across country, and this is a part of the romance of the prairies. Why, Mrs. B-," Alek continued, "the Indians have good reason for expecting to find their hunting-grounds in the land of the Great Spirit, for they doubtless meet, just as I have met Stevenson, many an old chief on these prairies that they have before buried sky-high in some isolated tree-top, or on some upreaching bluff whose altitude the theodolite of civilization has never scanned."

"I believe it all, Alek, and more too, and have no doubt that we are in the same condition, and that we are leaving purgatory behind, and are approaching at last our home; only I am surprised

at the time it has taken, seeing your bays are so fast, especially Toots." "H-m!"

At a moan from poor Bessie, who was doubtless dreaming in uneasy wonder what the dear young husband, far away from home, would say, could he know of the perils we had passed, I turned my head, and found she had Imade a bed of cloaks and shawls in an uninviting corner, and, with baby in her arms and a buffalo-robe over her, was sleeping her troublous sleep. As Maggie was by this time slumbering quietly, though lightly, at Alek's suggestion I threw one of our sleigh-robes on the floor beside Bessie, and, folding my water-proof for a pillow, utterly exhausted from excitement, I too went to sleep.

A wonderful neigh from Joe, in the little thatched shed near the window, awakened me, after a few hours of nervous dreaming, to a consciousness that day was breaking. Leaving baby cooing as contentedly as if he were in the nest at home, and Bessie trying to rub her eyes open to a full comprehension of the situation, I staggered diagonally to Maggie, whom I found conscious and comfortable. After, literally, a hasty "dish" of tea and an Indian crust, preparations were immediately made for a conveyance homeward. We borrowed of our half-breed host a rickety, shiftless-looking cart, and an Indian pony, and made a comfortable reclining place in the centre of the cart for Maggie and the rest of us, Alek, remembering the style in which we had jingled out of town on the previous morning, could not bear to drive, and gave the reins to Laselle, -squatted, savage fashion, around her, as if she were the light of our council fire. Though Joe wore a very injured expression at being forced into ignoble companionship with the pony, he seemed to bear it with a Christian resignation to the " course of human events," and into town we rode, everybody turning out to behold our return.

The Book of the Sonnet. Edited by LEIGH HUNT and S. ADAMS LEE. Boston: Roberts Brothers.

WHETHER Leigh Hunt was a man of genius, or only of surpassing talent, is a question which we willingly leave to the critics who find tweedledee different from tweedledum in kind as well as degree. We are content with the fact that he has some virtue which makes us read every book of his we open, and which leaves us more his friend at the end than we were before. Indeed, it would be hard not to love so cheerful and kindly a soul, even if his art were ever less than charming. But literature seems to have always been a gay science with him. We never see his Muse as the harsh step-mother she really was: we are made to think her a gentle liege-lady, served in the airiest spirit of chivalric devotion; and in the Essay in this "Book of the Sonnet" her aspect is as sunny as any the poet has ever shown us.

The Essay is printed for the first time, and it was written in Hunt's old age; but it is full of light-heartedness, and belongs in feeling to a period at least as early as that which produced the "Stories from the Italian Poets." It is one of those studies in which he was always happy, for it keeps him chiefly in Italy; and when it takes him from Italy, it only brings him into the Italian air of English sonnetry, - a sort of soft Devonshire coast, bordering the ruggeder native poetry on the south.

The essayist seems to renew himself in the draughts he makes from the immortal youth of the Italian sonneteers, — he has so fresh and unalloyed a pleasure in them and their art, he is so generously tender of their artifice, and so quick to all their excellence. He traces the history of the sonnet in its native country, from the time it first received "its right workmanlike treatment" at the hands of Fra Guittone d' Arezzo, through those of Dante, who might have "set the pattern of the sonnet to succeeding ages, and elevated the nature of its demands besides," but preferred to fritter his powers away in the Divina Commedia, through those of Petrarch, who did perfect the sonnet, and set the pattern of it, through those of Giusti

de Conti, the first imitator of Petrarch, through those of Ariosto and of Giovanni della Casa, who varied it from the Petrarchan pattern, through those of Marini, the Neapolitan poet, who corrupted it and everything else in Italian literature for a time, - through those of the many-piping shepherds of the famous poetic Arcadia, who restored the sonnet and the rest of Italian poetry with milk from their own pastures and water carefully bottled at Castaly, down to those of Alfieri, who seems to have been the first in latter days to turn it to political account. In a tone equally joyous and affectionate the author gives the sonnet's English history, from the time of its introduction by Wyatt up to our own day. The rules which govern this species of composition are lightly but distinctly suggested before its history begins ; and throughout it is championed with graceful earnestness.

The Essay, in fine, is one well fitted to convince the lovers of the sonnet of its excellence, and to leave the mass of mankind as incapable of enjoying it as ever. In no language but Italian has any great poet done his best within the sonnet's narrow bounds, and in Italian the greatest of the sonneteers was not the first of the poets. We are far from scorning the sonnet; we suspect it is a difficult thing to make, and we know it is not easy to read, and we honor it, though we cannot love it. We would not have Poesy to be greatly millinered, whatever fashions other ladies may adopt ; and when we meet her corseted in the iron framework of the sonnet's rhymes, and crinolined about with the unyielding drapery of its fourteen lines, we feel that she is no doubt elegantly dressed, but we long to see her in any other attire she is wont to put on.

We are unable, therefore, to lament, with Mr. S. Adams Lee, the surviving editor (as, with a curious misconception of the facts, he calls himself) of "The Book of the Sonnet," that American poets have so little practised the art of sonnetry; and we should not think at all ill of them on this account, but for the surviving editor's opinion, that our poets generally have neglected the sonnet, because it cannot be "dashed off at a heat." The idle rogues, it seems, prefer to "embody their conceptions in

more obvious and popular forms,” - - a very gross piece of literary truckling; for though a man may be forgiven a desire to make his conceptions popular, the design of making them obvious is but a covert purpose of rendering them intelligible. From the comparatively few American poets who have not been so unmindful of the claims of industry, Mr. Lee quotes in his essay, and selects in his half of "The Book of the Sonnet," though as to the selections we are given to know that some of the sonneteers, and nearly all of the sonnetresses, are put in for a kind of ballast to keep the other half of the book trim. Mr. Lee's good sonneteers are not always popular; and if they are ever obvious, he does what he can to conceal their defective art by printing in Italics any obscure or opaque line he finds in them, and praising it with a luxury of self-satisfaction rare enough in these days of doubting and hesitation. It is plain from the beginning, that he has nothing to say, and we cannot withhold our admiration of his prolonged success in saying it in such neatly rounded periods and elegant language. In fact, Mr. Lee may be declared to have brought the critical platitude to perfection in his essay. He makes "the sense of satisfaction ache" with the faultless flatness of the surfaces presented; and we can in no way give so just an idea of his powers in this respect, and of the character of his essay throughout, as by supposing him to apply, with a slight change of epithet, to himself as a critic, his praise of Mr. Boker as a sonneteer:

"Mr. Lee has not pursued a conventional system of finding dead levels from any blind reverence for authority, but because of the evident sincerity of his faith in the ponderosity, insipidity, and impotence of the English dictionary. With those, indeed, who are accustomed to the more prominent absurdities and the more marked forms of twaddle, the monotony of these platitudes may fall as on a dull ear. But to the cultivated taste, and to the secret sense of dulness, apt for the delight of vacuity, we would cheerfully commit almost any one of Mr. Lee's platitudes, without an apprehension that the vastness and equality of its extent would pass unheeded."

The Open Polar Sea: a Narrative of Voyage and Discovery towards the North Pole, in the Schooner United States. By

DR. I. I. HAYES. New York: Hurd and Houghton.

THIS book would have been greater if it had been half as big. Nevertheless, it is extremely interesting, and holds one with a charm that in the end summons all the Polar world about the reader, and makes him sharer in the author's adventures, fears, hopes, and exultations. It is impossible not to admire the enthusiasm and courage which carry him through so many dangers and difficulties, even if one lacks perfect sympathy with the scientific purpose, and doubts if a geographical fact, as yet barren and without apparent promise of fruitfulness, be worth the sacrifices made to ascertain it. Dr. Hayes himself has a sense of what his unscientific reader's conclusion may be in regard to the advantages of further Arctic exploration, and bids him consider how all the benefits of invention and discovery have at first appeared to men as sterile abstractions.

The story of Dr. Hayes's expedition is briefly this. He sailed in the little schooner United States from Boston, on the 6th of July, 1860, and after touching at Pröven, in Greenland, proceeded northward to Port Foulke, where he was frozen up, and wintered until July 14, 1861, when he set sail for Boston. In the mean time he made his discovery of the Open Polar Sea by journeying across the ice with sledges and dogs, leaving his ship on the 4th of April, and returning two months later. The interest culminates, of course, in the arrival of Dr. Hayes, with a single companion and one sledge, on the icy shores of the far-sought waters; but, throughout, the narrative is one of wild and peculiar fascination. Sixty days they journeyed through solitudes where men and beasts and birds failed them in succession; and they were not warmed by fire, or sheltered, except by huts of snow, during the whole period of their absence from the ship. Going, they carried their provision with them, and hid in the snow a day's rations at the end of each day's journey, that they might rid their sledges of its burden; and, returning empty, they subsisted on these deposits, as they reached them and dug them out of the drifts. Such was their slender security against starvation; and with only their activity and determination to save them from freezing, they traversed thirteen hundred miles of utter waste, which opposed every obstacle of drifted snow and broken ice to their course. They

had been stopped in their advance by the rotten ice in the region of the Open Sea at the farthest point northward ever reached, and now, prevented from further explorations by the unseaworthy state of his ship, Dr. Hayes was reluctantly compelled to come home, without revisiting those waters. He had, however, accomplished one great object of his expedition in its discovery, and his winter at Port Foulke had convinced him that it could be colonized and made a centre for indefinite Polar exploration. Game is endlessly abundant, and the Port can be readily reached and provisioned in every way, and easily fitted as a depot for the steamers which should be employed in future Arctic voyages.

We can give here no true idea of the interest inspired by Dr. Hayes's book,- -an interest almost entirely personal, for, after all, the sameness of the Polar world and Polar life wearies a little. The icebergs, the wastes of snow, the pallid day, the brilliant night, form this world; the teeming seas, and the myriad sea-birds and seals and walruses of summer, the herds of reindeer and the white hares and foxes of winter, and the squalid Esquimaux of either season, form its life. This world Dr. Hayes brings vividly before us, with a true feeling for its grandeur and splendor; and he has a deep sympathy for the torpid and vanishing race who will within half a century leave it without a human inhabitant. Nothing, we think, could so well convey an idea of the entirely negative character of man's existence in the Arctic world as that fact of Esquimau life which we believe Dr. Hayes is the first to note. These poor savages know neither hospitality nor its opposite in their relations with each other. They would see one another perish of hunger, cold, or any calamity unmoved; but they never deny any succor that is asked, and rescue with as little emotion as they would abandon. To exist is their utmost life.

Lectures and Annual Reports on Education. By HORACE MANN. Cambridge: Published for the Editor. 1867.

THIS volume virtually records one of the great historic events of America, the reconstruction of popular education by Horace Mann. Never did a man bring to bear

upon any task more matured and disciplined powers, or pour a greater wealth of resources into one restricted channel. That which he organized in his office, he also proclaimed and expounded before the eyes and ears of all. Upon audiences of country farmers and school-girls he lavished wit, wisdom, and magnetic power, such as listening senates rarely receive; and the end which he sought he invariably gained.

Working in this limited sphere, he doubtless felt its limitations reacting on himself; and Goethe's fatal axiom, that “action animates, but narrows," was exemplified in him. He almost re-created for us the Common School, but to the higher problem of University education he contributed almost nothing; his mind was fixed on the needs of the many, not of the few. It was his mission to work for elementary culture, in the hope that anything beyond that, if really needed, would come in time. This temporary ignoring of higher culture cost him no sacrifice. There was little place in his philosophy for poetry or art. He had chosen his vocation, and was a little impatient of anything that could not be popularized or made practical. His own stern method of thought must be imposed on every one, and he was as unfit to train any boy or girl of an ideal genius, as would be a beaver to educate an oriole. But in the common school he was a king.

This volume contains the record of the very best epoch of his heroic life. Written nearly thirty years ago, these pages are today as fresh as this year's almanac, and quite as much needed. Compared with them, the contemporary statements of others appear a little out of date. In the recent discussions on corporal punishment, for instance, there has been hardly a good point made on either side if one may judge from the newspapers-which may not be found, better stated, in this book. It seems to show that we do not yet employ our very ablest men to educate our children, if, after a quarter of a century, we are still treading in the same circle. There is needed at every post that which Horace Mann had,-a slight overplus of power and resources. In the multiplicity of work to be done in America, almost everything is intrusted to half-trained men. But if a man is not a little too good for his work, he is really not good enough for it.