The LORGNETTE, the cleverest book of its kind (we were about to write, since the days of Addison, but to avoid possible disagreement say)—since IRVING and PAULDING gave us Salmagundi, is still coming before us at agreeable intervals, and will soon be issued in a brace of volumes illustrated by DARLEY. The Author keeps his promises, given in the following paragraphs some time ago:

"It would be very idle to pretend, my dear Fritz, that in printing my letters, I had not some hope of doing the public a trifling service. There are errors which need only to be mentioned, to be frowned upon; and there are virtues, which an approving word, even of a stranger, will encourage. Both of these objects belong to my plan; yet my strictures shall not be personal, or invidious. It will be easy, surely, to carry with me the sympathies of all sensible people, in a little harmless ridicule of the foibles of the day, without citing personal instance; and it will be vastly easier, in such Babylon as ours, to designate a virtue, without naming its possessor! Still, you know me too well, to believe that I shall be frightened out of free, or even caustic remark, by any critique of the papers, or by any dignified frown of the literary coteries of the city.... This LORGNETTE of mine will range very much as my whim directs. In morals, it will aim to be correct; in religion, to be respectful; in literature, modest; in the arts, attentive; in fashion, observing; in society, free; in narrative, to be honest; in advice, to be sound; in satire, to be hearty; and in general character, whatever may be the critical opinions of the small littérateurs, or the hints of fashionable patrons, to be only—itself."

TENNYSON'S NEW POEM. ¹

The popularity of TENNYSON, in this country as well as in England, is greater than that of any other contemporary who writes verses in our language. We by no means agree to the justness of the common apprehension in this case. We think Bryant is a greater poet, and we might refer to others, at home and abroad, whom it delights us more to read. But it is unquestionable that Tennyson is the favorite of the hour, and every new composition of his will therefore be looked for with the most lively interest. His last work, just reprinted by TICKNOR, REED & FIELDS, of Boston, is thus described in the London Spectator of June 8th:

"'IN MEMORIAM.'

"Although only these words appear on the title-page of this volume of poetry, it is well known to be from the pen of Alfred Tennyson. It is also known that the inscription

'IN MEMORIAM

A.H.H

OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII.'

refers to Mr. Arthur Hallam, a son of the historian. It may be gleaned from the book, that the deceased was betrothed to a sister of Tennyson, while the friendship on the poet's part has 'passed the love of women.' Feeling, especially in one whose vocation it is to express sentiments, is not, indeed, always to be measured by composition; since the earnest artist turns everything to account, and when his theme is mournful it is his cue to make it as mournful as he can: but when a thought continually mingles with casual observation, or incident of daily life, or larger event that strikes attention, as though the memory of the past were ever coloring the present, and that over a period of seventeen years, it must be regarded as a singular instance of enduring friendship, as it has shown itself in a very singular literary form. There is nothing like it that we remember, except the sonnets of Petrarch; for books of sportive and ludicrous conceits are not to be received into the same category.

"The volume consists of one hundred and twenty-nine separate poems, numbered but not named, and which in the absence of a more specific designation may be called occasional; for though they generally bear a reference to the leading subject, In Memoriam, yet they are not connected with sufficient closeness to form a continuous piece. There is also an invocatory introduction, and a closing marriage poem, written on the wedding of one of the writer's sisters, which, strange as it may seem, serves again to introduce the memory of the departed. The intervening poems are as various as a miscellaneous collection; but the remembrance of the dead ever mingles with the thought of the living. His birth-day, his death-day, the festive rejoicings of Christmastide and the New Year, recall him; the scenes in which he was a companion, the house where he was a welcome guest, the season when the lawyer's vacation gave him leisure for a long visit, revive him to the mind. The Danube, on whose banks he died—the Severn, by whose banks he appears to have been buried—nay, the points of the compass—are associated with him. Sometimes the association is slighter still; and in a few pieces the allusion is so distant that it would not have been perceived without the clew. Such is the following (one of several poems) on the New Year.

CIV

 
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.
 
 
Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
 
 
Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.
 
 
Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.
 
 
Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.
 
 
Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.
 
 
Ring out old shapes of foul disease,
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.
 
 
Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.
 

"The following is of more direct bearing on the theme, and is moreover one of those charming pieces of domestic painting in which Tennyson excels.

LXXXVII

 
Witch-elms that counterchange the floor
Of this flat lawn with dusk and bright;
And thou, with all thy breadth and height
Of foliage, towering sycamore;
 
 
How often, hither wandering down,
My Arthur found your shadows fair.
And shook to all the liberal air
The dust and din and steam of town:
 
 
He brought an eye for all he saw;
He mixt in all our simple sports;
They pleased him, fresh from brawling courts
And dusky purlieus of the law.
 
 
O joy to him in this retreat,
Immantled in ambrosial dark,
To drink the cooler air, and mark
The landscape winking through the heat:
 
 
O sound to rout the brood of cares,
The sweep of scythe in morning dew,
The gust that round the garden flew,
And tumbled half the mellowing pears!
 
 
O bliss, when all in circle drawn
About him, heart and ear were fed
To hear him, as he lay and read
The Tuscan poets on the lawn:
 
 
Or in the all-golden afternoon
A guest, or happy sister, sung,
Or here she brought the harp and flung
A ballad to the brightening moon:
 
 
Nor less it pleased in livelier moods,
Beyond the bounding hill to stray.
And break the livelong summer day
With banquet in the distant woods;
 
 
Whereat we glanced from theme to theme,
Discuss'd the books to love or hate,
Or touch'd the changes of the state,
Or threaded some Socratic dream;
 
 
But if I praised the busy town,
He loved to rail against it still,
For 'ground' in yonder social mill
We rub each other's angles down.
 
 
'And merge,' he said, 'in form and loss
The picturesque of man and man.'
We talk'd: the stream beneath us ran,
The wine-flask lying couch'd in moss,
 
 
Or cool'd within the glooming wave;
And last, returning from afar,
Before the crimson-circled star
Had fallen into her father's grave.
 
 
And brushing ankle-deep in flowers,
We heard behind the woodbine vail
The milk that bubbled in the pail,
And buzzings of the honeyed hours.
 

"The volume is pervaded by a religious feeling, and an ardent aspiration for the advancement of society,—as may be gathered from our first quotation. These two sentiments impart elevation, faith, and resignation; so that memory, thought, and a chastened tenderness, generally predominate over deep grief. The grave character of the theme forbids much indulgence in conceits such as Tennyson sometimes falls into, and the execution is more finished than his volumes always are: there are very few prosaic lines, and few instances of that excess of naturalness which degenerates into the mawkish. The nature of the plan—which, after all, is substantially though not in form a set of sonnets on a single theme—is favorable to those pictures of common landscape and of daily life, redeemed from triviality by genial feeling and a perception of the lurking beautiful, which are the author's distinguishing characteristic. The scheme, too, enables him appropriately to indulge in theological and metaphysical reflections; where he is not quite so excellent. Many of the pieces taken singly are happy examples of Tennyson, though not perhaps the very happiest. As a whole, there is inevitably something of sameness in the work, and the subject is unequal to its long expansion; yet its nature is such, there is so much of looseness in the plan, that it might have been doubled or trebled without incongruity. It is one of those books which depend upon individual will and feeling, rather than upon a broad subject founded in nature and tractable by the largest laws of art. Hence, though not irrespective of laws, such works depend upon instinctive felicity—felicity in the choice of topics and the mode of execution, felicity both in doing and in leaving undone: this high and perfect excellence, perhaps, In Memoriam has not reached, though omission and revision might lead very close to it."

ETHERIZATION.—A writer in the Medical Times says, "The day, perhaps, may not be far off, when we shall be able to suspend the sensibility of the nervous chords, without acting on the center of the nervous system, just as we are enabled to suspend circulation in an artery without acting on the heart."