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The Land of Sleepy Hollow.

A Series of Photogravure Representations of Scenes about the Home of Washington Irving, with Descriptive Letter-Press and Notes. By J. L. WILLIAMS. Together with a reprint of Irving's "Legend of Sleepy Hollow," and selections from theChronicles of Wolfert's Roost."

The volume has been prepared as a souvenir for those who have visited this charming region, as well as to pre. sent to those who have not been thus fortunate, a realis. tic series of illustrations of such scenes mentioned in the text as can certainly be localized.

LIST OF FULL-PAGE PHOTOGRAVURES.-I. Interior View of Irving's Study at Sunnyside-II. View of Sunny. side-III Porch of Sunnyside-IV. Sunnyside from the River-V. Highlands of the Hudson-VI. Sunnyside Lane-VII. The Brook at Sunnyside-VIII. Cascade near Sunnyside-IX., X., XI., XII. Views on the PocanticoXIII., XIV. The Old Mill and Manor House of Frederick Filipsen-XV. The Old Dutch Church at Sleepy HollowXVI. Sleepy Hollow Cemetery - XVII. Carl's MillXVIII. View in Sleepy Hollow - XIX. "The Bridge Famous in Goblin Story "-XX. Sunset on the Hudson. In addition to the above there are ten text illustra tions, and six full-page illustrations by F. O. C. Darley, originally designed and etched for the folio edition of the "Legend of Sleepy Hollow." The volume is printed in large folio size, 11x14, and the edition is limited to 600 copies. The subscription price is $15.00. Full prospectus sent on receipt of stamp.

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KNOX. Decisive Battles Since Waterloo. A Continuation of Creasy's "Decisive Battles of the World." By Col. THOMAS W. KNOX, author of the "Life of Fulton," "Travels of Marco Polo," etc. 8vo, with 59 plans and illustrations. $2.50. "In 1852 Professor (afterwards Sir Edward) Creasy published a book, which is well described by its title: The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, from Marathon to Waterloo.' Professor Creasy's work has passed through many editions, and has long since become a standard authority among historical students. In the belief that the decisive battles since Waterloo are worthy of record in a similar form, the author has ventured to prepare the volume of which these lines are the preface. The battles here described possess an interest for the student of military tactics and strategy. The book has, how. ever, for its further purpose, the idea of presenting an outline survey of the history of the nineteenth century, considered from the point of view of its chief military events. It is the author's hope that the results of his labors may help to make clear the character and relative importance of these events, and to indicate their influ ence in shaping the history of our own times."-Extract from Author's Preface.

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Famous American Authors.

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OF

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EDITED BY

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"APPLETONS' CYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN BIOGRAPHY," now in course of publication, will contain a biographical sketch of every person eminent in American civil and military history, in law and politics, in divinity, literature, and art, in science, and in invention. Its plan includes distinguished persons born abroad that are related to our national history, and embraces all the countries of North and South America. While the biographies, in depicting the lives of the great actors in American annals, include a record of events, the work affords in addition an account of what has been accomplished in the walks of literature, science, art, and industry.

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This great work will be completed in six volumes, 8vo, each containing between seven and eight hundred pages. Each volume will be illustrated with ten fine steel portraits and several hundred smaller vignette portraits and views of the birthplaces, residences, monuments, and tombs of distinguished Americans. The volumes will appear at intervals of four to six months. Price, $5.00 per volume. VOLUMES ONE AND TWO ARE NOW READY; VOLUME THREE WILL BE READY EARLY IN OCTOBER.

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Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

By JAMES ELLIOT CABOT. With a fine new steel Portrait. 2 vols. 12mo, gilt top, $3.50; half calf, $6.00.

Mr. Cabot, who is Mr. Emerson's literary executor, is admirably equipped in every respect to write his biogra. phy. He has incorporated in it many letters and copious extracts from Mr. Emerson's journal, bringing out dis. tinctly the nobility of Mr. Emerson's character, the depth and purity of his thought, the admiring loyalty of his friends, and the profound and gracious influence of his writings and of his life.

Our Hundred Days in Europe.

"The

BY OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, author of Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, "etc. 1 vol. 12mo, gilt top, $1.50.

Dr. Holmes's account of his hundred memorable days in England last year is full of interest, not only for the graceful and impressive incidents it recalls, but for its abundant felicities of thought and expression.

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Like the two other stories named here, this relates to the Unseen. It is not a common "ghost" story, or a tale of the supernatural told merely to excite interest; but an exceedingly interesting narrative of the inevitable, giving the possible experience and remedial discipline of a hard and selfish nature in the life after death. Patrick Henry.

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This little book presents in attractive form one of Miss Phelps' most powerful and pathetic stories, describ. ing the life, labors, and temptations of a fisherman; the love and constancy of woman; and the pitiful desolation wrought by intemperance.

Works of Edward Fitzgerald,

The Translator of Omar Khayyám, with some Corrections derived from his own Annotated Copies. With a Portrait of Mr. Fitzgerald, a Sketch of Omar Khayyam's tomb, by WM. SIMPSON, and a Frontispiece to "Salaman and Absal." A limited letter-press edition. 2 vols. Octavo, cloth, $10. Well-Worn Roads in Spain, Holland and Italy. Or, The Travels of a Painter in Search of the Picturesque. By F. HOPKINSON SMITH. 16mo, gilt top, $1.25.

The descriptive chapters in Mr. Smith's striking holiday volume published last year are now reprinted in a tasteful little book. At the head of each chapter is an illustration reduced from the holiday volume.

Wit, Wisdom, and Beauty of Shakespeare. Selected by C. S. WARD. 16mo, full gilt, $1.25. These selections have been made with excellent judg. ment and taste, and contain complete passages embrac ing many of the wise, pungent, beautiful thoughts which abound in Shakespeare.

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The only fault that the reader is likely to find with these two handsomely bound and printed volumes is their brevity. Mr. Cabot disclaims, in the preface, any intention of attempting an adequate summary of Emerson's life and doctrines, merely aiming, in his function of literary executor, to offer to the public additional details and illustrations "that may fill out and define more closely the image of him they already have." In view of the fact that this image is to many of us extremely vague, and in some cases distorted, it is to be regretted that Mr. Cabot has not undertaken the more difficult and important task for which, as an occasional deviation from his path of simple narration shows, he is eminently qualified. However, we are indebted to him for an exceptionally interesting book, one that every American should procure and read without delay; and we trust that he may see fit to place us under increased obligation in the future.

Starting with a review of Emerson's ancestry, the author follows him through the progressive stages of his life, dwelling occa

* A MEMOIR OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON. By James Elliot Cabot. In two volumes. Boston: Houghton, Mif. flin & Co.

sionally upon the more salient points, -as his resignation of office at the Second Church, his connection with the New England Transcendentalism, his position with regard to the antislavery conflict, his final desertion of the pulpit for the lyceum, his visits to Europe, and his relations with eminent contemporaries. The narrative is interspersed with characteristic anecdotes, bits of journal extract and correspondence, and many flashes of the true Emersonian thought,-"news from the Empyrean," as Carlyle says.

Emerson's intense spirituality was largely inherited. His forefathers were Calvinistic clergymen, men who devoted themselves to the contemplation of a future life and the intricate problems of their logic-born system of theology with a zeal of which we of this age can form only a feeble conception. To them this world was but a halting-place; its affairs transitory-almost unworthy of attention; and in a calm certainty as to the future, they passed through life scarce coming in contact with what we are wont to term its realities. To his ancestors, as I have said, Emerson owed his intense spirituality; his remaining characteristic trait was certainly not due to heredity. We reflect that these spiritual-minded forefathers of his were preëminently men of creed and dogma. them, the traditions of the church and the writings of the fathers were indisputable. All their criteria of truth were of the past; in their eyes the black-letter tomes setting forth the relentless deductions of

To

Athanasius and Calvin were oracles whose sanctity it was lawful to vindicate by stake and faggot. What hidden forces, then, conjoined with them in producing Emerson as a resultant-Emerson the arch heretic, to whom the voices of the past were feebler than the faintest whisper of the present; whose religion was not of yesterday, but of to-day? His early training, moreover, was strictly within the lines of orthodoxy; although we are somewhat relieved to learn that the Puritan rigor of the household did not exclude Addison, Shakespeare, Pope, and other flesh and blood authors.

The bent of his mind at this period was largely influenced by an aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, an unbending Puritan in theory, with a lovable though sternly repressed tendency to philanthropy, of whom Emerson wrote, in words that suggest an odd flavor of Charles Lamb: "She tramples on the common humanities all day, and they rise as ghosts and torment her at night.' To this aunt he undoubtedly owed a large share of the pro

found respect he always accorded to established religious observances, even when at variance with his own views. A letter to her when he was about ten years old gives us an idea of their household régime. He writes:

We

I

"In the morning I rose, as I commonly do, about five minutes before six. I then help Wm. in making the fire, after which I set the table for Prayers. I then call Mamma about quarter after six. spell as we did before you went away. then go to school, where I hope I can say I study more than I did a little while ago. I am in another book called Virgil, and our class are even with another which came to the Latin School one year before us. After attending this school I go to Mr. Webb's private school, where I write and cipher. I go to this place at eleven and stay till one o'clock. After this, when I come home, I eat my dinner, and at two o'clock I resume my sudies at the Latin School, where I do the same except in studying grammar. After I come home I do mamma her little errands if she has any; then I bring in my wood to supply the breakfast room. I then have some time to play and eat my supper. After that we say our hymns or chapters, and then take our turns in reading Rollin, as we did before you went. We retire to bed at different times. I go at a little after eight, and retire to my private devotions, and then close my eyes in sleep, and there ends the toil of the day.

Evidently, this was a simple, practical, Godfearing family, not without a tinge of Puritan austerity.

Emerson's mother seems to have been a serene, kindly spirit, undemonstrative, but with a depth of real feeling flashing out at times in marked relief to her usual tranquillity. On one occasion, as he relates, when he and his brother William had wandered off upon a holiday, and spent the day from home, they were surprised, on their return, at her exclaiming: "My sons, I have been in an agony for you! "I went to bed," he says, "in bliss at the interest she showed." The means of the family were extremely narrow, and indeed it was chiefly through the assistance of kind friends that they were enabled to maintain themselves suitably, and afford to the sons a school and college education. It is stated that Ralph (as he was then called) and his brother Edward had but one great-coat between them, and were taunted in consequence by vulgarminded school-fellows, who, with the amiability peculiar to the male animal of their time of life, delighted to inquire: "Whose turn is it to wear the coat to-day?"

In 1813 Emerson entered the Boston Latin School, where he was prepared for college. The head master was Mr. Benjamin Apthorp Gould, "an excellent master, who loved a good scholar, and waked his ambition."

He was

evidently not without patriotism, as Emerson records that, upon a rumored invasion of the British in 1814, Mr. Gould dismissed his pupils that they might assist in throwing up the

defences on Noddle's Island. The whole school went, but he confesses that he "cannot remember a stroke of work that I or my school-fellows accomplished." A school-mate-now Judge Loring of Washington-relates that Emerson was a good scholar, but not eminent; and that while he was liked by his fellows for his equable temper and fairness, his undemonstrativeness and distaste for athletic sports prevented him from being notably popular. He was known as an impressive declaimer, and particularly delighted in highly rhetorical passages. He once quoted for the delectation of a school-fellow a passage from one of Mr. N. L. Frothingham's sermons, representing man as "coming into the world girt in the poison robes of hereditary depravity, and with the curses of his Maker upon his head." It is scarce necessary to add that the Emerson of later days would hardly have approved of either the rhetoric or the sentiment of this sulphurous blast of Calvinism.

In 1817, having finished his course at the Latin School, he entered Harvard, and, upon Mr. Gould's recommendation, was appointed President's Freshman,-an office that entitled him to free lodging in the President's house,and he afterwards obtained the position of waiter at commons, which relieved him of the cost of three-fourths of his board. He also received something from one of the scholarship funds.

During Emerson's stay at Harvard he began to manifest the strong individuality, the determination to follow his own bent in matters which lesser men are willing to leave to usage or authority, which distinguished him through life, and is the key-note to his philosophy. We are not surprised, then, to learn that he delighted in out-of-the-way books, especially poetry, Ben. Jonson, Otway, Massinger, and even Byron and Moore, somewhat to the detriment of his knowledge of Locke, Paley, and Stewart, and decidedly so of the "impossible Analytical Geometry." In his own way, he was industrious, taking copious notes from his general reading, his note-books containing evidence of a wide acquaintance with history, poetry, memoirs, and the English reviews. With the more studious members of the class he was popular, and that he was not deficient in student-spirit, the following anecdote shows. In his sophomore year, owing to a hazing scrape, some of his classmates were expelled. The remaining members, Emerson with them, thereupon indignantly withdrew, and remained at home until they came to terms with the authorities.

He graduated in 1821, and became his brother William's assistant in a school for young ladies in Boston, remaining three years, two as assistant, and one, in the absence of his brother, as principal. I pass over the

interesting account of his school-keeping, his preparation for the ministry, and his enforced trip to the South, to his installment as pastor of the Second Church in Boston.

At

Upon the resignation of Mr. Ware in the spring of 1829, Emerson became sole incumbent. In September of the same year he married Miss Ellen Louisa Tucker, daughter of Beza Tucker, a merchant of Boston. this time, when life should have worn its brightest aspect, when his own future and that of those nearest him was assured, he seems to have been troubled with some vague forecast of evil. A letter to Miss Mary Emerson, although it sums up with assumed cheerfulness the improved prospects of the family, is overclouded with a tinge of despondency foreign to his self-reliant nature. A careful analysis of his opinions, at this time, as shown through the medium of correspondence, and recorded conversations with intimate friends, leaves little doubt as to the cause of the tone of this letter. An appeal to that inward consciousness which was to him an unerring monitor in questions of duty, revealed to him, doubtingly at first, but more forcibly each time he faced his congregation, that his position was a false one. Out of regard to the prejudices of his hearers and the established usages of the church, he felt that he could not express his convictions with that freedom that was to him as the breath of life. He was not free to speak and act the truth. He had outgrown the error of man's age of faith that classes theology with the exact sciences. Forms and ceremonies, the symbolism of what Carlyle has quaintly termed the "religion of the rotatory calabash," were to him trivial, if not odious. With a unique contempt for the virtue of consistency, he desired to be free to contradict to-day what he had preached yesterday. Naturally, this did not suit the good people of the Second Church, and was rank heresy in the sight of his colleagues in the ministry. They were willing that he should tear away somewhat of the trimming added to the garment of Christian truth by Peter and Martin, but with the shoulder-knots and silver lace fancied by John he was not to interfere. His liberal views were made manifest in his sermons, which shocked the orthodox, although they charmed the younger and more advanced hearers. Indeed the earnest, unconventional tone of his discourse augmented his general popularity, and people from remote churches, -among them Margaret Fuller, were drawn by him to "the unfashionable precincts of the Old North." The peculiar charm of Emerson's presence is thus described by Mr. Congdon: "One day there came into our pulpit the most gracious of mortals, with a face all benignity, who gave out the first

hymn and made the first prayer as an angel might have read and prayed." The congregational dissensions arising from his unorthodox views finally came to a crisis, and he resigned his office, ostensibly on account of a difference of opinion relating to the Communion Service, although the real cause lay far deeper. After much discussion, his resignation was accepted, although his salary was continued for a time.

I have dwelt somewhat at length upon this period of Emerson's life, as it seems to me to be his real point of departure from the career for which his early training and predilections had destined him. He continued to preach occasionally, however, not devoting himself wholly to the lyceum until some years afterwards.

One of the most interesting chapters in Mr. Cabot's book is that headed "Transcendentalism." He describes the origin of the term, as connected with a series of informal meetings of a number of Emerson's friends, among them Mr. Alcott, Margaret Fuller, James Freeman Clarke, and Thoreau; and a subsequent chapter analyzes Emerson's transcendentalism in a manner that divests one of the idea, which is too often entertained, that the views embodied in the term transcend common sense as well as common experience.

The somewhat unpleasant impression of Emerson conveyed by the portion of Mr. Whipple's essay relating to his capacity for business, is happily dispelled by this book. A perusal of the essay gives one the idea that, although theoretically a man of lofty ideals, bidding us "hitch our wagon to a star," Emerson was wont to descend from his lofty pedestal when fairly confronted with a question of dollars. and cents, and transform himself into the typical Yankee, keen at a bargain and an admirable judge of investments. Mr. Cabot, on the contrary, assures us that, although careful in his expenditures; and having nothing of the philosopher's contempt for money, "he had no skill to earn it." The only matters of bargaining in which he showed any approach to shrewdness were those in connection with Carlyle's American booksellers. Lovers of Emerson will not be displeased to learn that "in bargaining for himself he was easily led to undervalue his own claims, and take an exaggerated view of those of the other party."

In his enthusiasm for reform he at one time thought of becoming a party to the Brook Farm community, and did introduce certain ideal methods into his own household, inviting the servants to the family table, and working manfully over the corn and potatoes in his garden. That his agricultural skill was limited is evident from his confession to Miss Fuller that "this day-labor of mine has hitherto a certain emblematic air, like the plough