f Act IV. has the dramatic form, but it is interfused
with mere civil commotion instead of color, and the motive is a
transient one, important only to the historian. But we need not multiply
words over that one of all his compositions which Mr. Browning probably
now respects the least.

"Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day" is a beautiful poem, filled with thought,
humor, and imagination. The mythical theory of Strauss was never so well
analyzed as in the tilting lines from page 353 to 361. And there is good
theology in this:--

"Take all in a word: the truth in God's breast
Lies trace for trace upon ours impressed;
Though He is so bright and we so dim,
We are made in His image to witness Him;
And were no eye in us to tell,
Instructed by no inner sense,
The light of heaven from the dark of hell,
That light would want its evidence," etc.

Naddo will doubtless tell us that this poem is not built broadly on the
human heart; there is too much discussion about the difficulty of
becoming a Christian, and the subtile genius flits so quickly through
the lines that an ordinary butterfly-net does not catch it. That is well
for the genius. But we are of opinion that the human heart will always
find in this great poem the solemn and glorious things that belong to
it, and more and more so as new and clearer thought is born into the
world to read it. It is no more difficult to read than "Paradise Lost,"
while its scenery is less conventional, and the longings of a religious
heart are taken by a bold imagination into serene and starry skies.

_A History of the Intellectual Development of Europe._ By JOHN WILLIAM
DRAPER, M.D., LL.D. New York: Harper & Brothers.

Water and the science of Physiology are both good things. But water is
one thing to drink, and another to be drowned in. In like manner,
though Physiology is a large and noble science and a yet larger symbol,
furnishing analogies to the thinker quite as often as uses to the
medical doctor, nevertheless, Physiology in the form of a deluge,
overflowing, swamping, drowning almost everything else, and leaving only
Body, the sole ark, afloat,--this is a gift which we are able to receive
with a gratitude not by any means unspeakable. And such, very nearly, is
the contribution to modern thought which the author of the above work
endeavors to make. He holds Physiology to be coextensive with Man, and
would prove the fact by including History in its laws