brain, then he is all sweetness, melody and
harmony, and gives us not only the delight of his exquisite verses, but
that other joy that comes from the sense of breathing an atmosphere of
devotion, purity, and genial sweetness.

Les Pleiades. Par le comte de Gobineau. Stockholm and Paris.

The author of this book has traveled extensively, and has been a keen
observer of men and manners, as well as a diligent student of history
and ethnography. He has represented his government in countries so
remote and contrasted as Persia and Sweden, has made antiquarian
researches in the islands of the Mediterranean, has visited parts of
America, and has won reputation as a scholar and writer by a number of
works on such abstruse questions as Oriental philosophy and religion,
the cuneiform inscriptions and the distinctions of race. The present
book is merely a novel, yet it was clearly intended to embody the
deepest and maturest thoughts of the author in regard to "the proper
study of mankind," both individually and collectively. The nature of
man, how it is affected by diversity of circumstances, by nationality,
descent, rank and occupation, by the relations of class to class, of
society to the individual, of personal will to a controlling
destiny,--this may be said to form the _motive_ of the volume; and
though such action as there is in it takes place chiefly at the court of
one of the minor states of Germany, this narrow field was evidently
selected on a similar principle to that of the Greek drama, with its
"unities" of time and place and the narratives and explanations of the
Chorus. The discussions in the book embrace all the problems of
history, the characters are of different nationalities, and are all
enriched by the fruits of culture and travel, and the story is a series
of crucial tests by which, as we are to infer, the author's theories are
verified. This plan is not absolutely novel. Goethe had adopted a still
slighter though far happier framework for his ripest thoughts and
profoundest observations. Yet even Goethe's exquisite art was at fault
when he sought to extend the original design; and if the first part of
_Wilhelm Meister_ is the most perfectly constructed work in the whole
range of literature, the second is merely a heap of precious materials,
with here and there such groupings and dispositions as indicate how
details had been conceived, while the general plan refused to shape
itself in the master's min