court-martial. Persons carrying sword-canes to be arrested
and fined.

Literary Notices.

_Memoirs of William Wordsworth_, Vol. I., by his nephew, CHRISTOPHER
WORDSWORTH, edited by HENRY REED, and published by Ticknor, Reed, and
Fields, will disappoint those who have anticipated an abundance of
interesting personal details in the biography of its illustrious
subject. It is the history of his mind, not of his external life. The
incidents of his peculiar career were the successive births of his
poems. No man ever led a more self-contained, interior, subjective life
than Wordsworth, and hence the development of thought takes the place in
his biography which is usually occupied by the flow of events. Every
object was valued by him in proportion as it furnished the materials of
poetry. The aspects of the glorious mountain region in which he had
established his household gods, the intercourse of society in which,
during the later portion of his life, he took a conspicuous part, on
account of the influx of visitors that besieged his retired,
contemplative haunts, the manifestations of the contemporary literature
of the day in its wonderful, pregnant phases, and the strong current of
political excitements throughout a most eventful period of English
history, never disturbed the deep, placid stream of the poet's
existence, or seduced him from the exclusive communion with the realms
of fancy and reflection, to which he was wedded by ties of indissoluble
fealty. His biographer has been true to this cardinal fact, which
characterizes the identity of Wordsworth. He has aimed only to explain
the genesis of his poems, in a manner to make them the historians of
their author. The critical disquisitions which thus arise often possess
great interest, and furnish suggestive lessons which few living poets
can study without profit. Numerous extracts from the correspondence of
Wordsworth are given in this volume, which are marked by his usual
gravity and intenseness of reflection, but are destitute of the
spontaneous ease which forms the chief beauty of epistolary writing. On
the whole, we regard this biography as eminently instructive, presenting
many noticeable facts in psychology and literary history, and well
rewarding an attentive study, but of so uniformly a didactic cast as to
grow tedious in perusal, and likely to find few readers beyond the
circle of Wordsworth's enthusiastic admirers.

_The Religion of Geology and its Co