ng, always
successful, always valuable. Her "Juvenile Miscellany" was the delight
of all American childhood, when childish books were few. Her "Hobomok"
was one of the very first attempts to make this country the scene of
historical fiction. In the freshness of literary success, she did not
hesitate to sacrifice all her newly won popularity, for years, by the
publication of her remarkable "Appeal for the Class of Americans called
Africans," a book unsurpassed in ability and comprehensiveness by any of
the innumerable later works on the same subject,--works which would not
even now supersede it, except that its facts and statistics have become
obsolete. Time and the progress of the community at length did her
justice once more, and her charming "Letters from New York" brought all
her popularity back. Turning away, however, from fame won by such light
labors, she devoted years of her life to the compilation of her great
work on the "Progress of Religious Ideas," a book unequalled in the
English language as a magazine of the religious aspirations of the race.
And now, still longing to look in some new direction, she finds that
direction in "Sunset,"--the only region towards which her name and her
nature have alike excused her from turning her gaze before.

This volume is a collection of essays and poems, old and new, original
and selected, but all bearing on the theme of old age. Her authors range
from Cicero to Dickens, from Mrs. Barbauld to Theodore Parker. The book
includes that unequalled essay by Jean Paul, "Recollections of the Best
Hours of Life for the Hour of Death"; and then makes easily the
transition to that delicious scene of humor and pathos from "Cranford,"
where dear Miss Matty meets again the lover of her youth. Some trifling
errors might be noticed here and there, such as occur even in books
looking this side of "Sunset": as when Burns's line, "But now your brow
is beld, John," is needlessly translated into "But now your head's
turned bald, John,"--where the version is balder than the head. It is
singular, too, how long it takes to convince the community that Milton
did not write the verses, "I am old and blind," and that Mrs. Howell of
Philadelphia did. Mrs. Child discreetly cites for them no author at all,
and thus escapes better than the editor of the new series of "Hymns for
the Ages," who boldly appends to the poem, "Milton, 1608-1674." Yet Mrs.
Child's early ventures in the way of writing speeches fo