ral? Are we
not acquainted with a certain volume of poems that shall be nameless,
the whole edition of which lies untouched and unclaimed on the
publisher's shelves? And are we not perfectly well aware that those
poems--well, we can wait. If Mr. Saxe would only put forth a volume that
should prove, in a mercantile sense, a failure, we think he would be
surprised to find how happily he would hit certain critics who can now
see little in his writings to justify their success. Let him once join
the fraternity of unappreciated geniuses, and he will find
compensation,--though not, perhaps, in the form of what some vulgar
fellow has called "solid pudding."

_The Giant Cities of Bashan; and Syria's Holy Places._ By the Rev. J. L.
PORTER, A. M., Author of "Murray's Hand-Book for Syria and Palestine,"
etc., etc. New York: T. Nelson and Sons.

Travellers who have merely visited the classic scenes of Greece and
Italy, or at the best have "browsed about" the ruinous sites of Tyre and
Carthage, must have a mortifying sense of the newness of such recent
settlements, in reading of Mr. Porter's journey through Bashan, and
sojourn in Bozrah, Salcah, Edrei, and the other cities of the Rephaim.
As Chicago is to Athens, so is Athens to these mighty and wonderful
cities of doom and eld, which are marvellous, not alone for their
antiquity, (so remote that one looks into it dizzily and doubtfully, as
a depth into which it is not wholly safe to peer,) but also for the
perfection in which they stand and have stood amid the desolation of
unnumbered ages. A Cockney clergyman travelling through Eastern Syria,
with his Ezekiel in his hand, arrives at nightfall before the gates of a
town which was a flourishing metropolis in the days of Moses, and takes
up his lodging in a house built by some newly-married giant, say five or
six thousand years ago. It is in perfect repair, "the walls are sound,
the roofs unbroken, the doors and even window-shutters"--being of solid
basalt monoliths, incapable of decay or destruction--"are in their
places." In the town whose dumb streets no foot but the Bedouin's has
trodden for centuries and centuries, there are hundreds of such houses
as this; and in a province not larger than Rhode Island there are a
hundred such towns. According to Mr. Porter, the language of Scripture,
which the strongest powers of deglutition have sometimes rejected as
that of Eastern hyperbole, is literally verified at every step in the
la