This is an elegant and tasteful edition of an exquisite book. It has been deservedly the most successful of the author’s prose compositions. Indeed, as a proof of the fertility of Longfellow’s imagination, the delicacy and sweetness of his sentiment, and his general poetic view of nature and life, we should appeal to this romance as readily as to his poems. It is full of delicious imagery, beautiful description, and striking thoughts, and the style is richly sensuous and musical. The strain of sentiment running through the book, however, is not strong and bracing enough for our climate. Its general tone is too much that of a sad sweetness, though passages are replete with a firmer and sterner feeling. It reminds one more of Fletcher than Milton; of the “Faithful Shepherdess” than of “Comus.” The leading characteristic of Longfellow’s mind is that peculiar blending of sensation with imagination, commonly called sensuousness—a characteristic of all poetic genius, but which is apt to bewitch the soul with a sense of the beauty of things, to the forgetfulness of their other qualities and relations, and by this forgetfulness to lead the mind away from the contemplation of the highest intellectual and moral beauty. “Hyperion,” however, ranks among the first books of its kind in English letters, and might be appropriately entitled, “Prose, by a Poet.” * * * * * _Chefs-d’Œuvre Dramatiques de la Langue Française. Par A. G. Collot. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1 vol. 12mo._ This is an excellent French Reader, worth a thousand of the common collections going under the name. It contains whole dramas by Corneille, Racine, Voltaire, Molière, Piron, Scribe, and Berquin, carefully edited, with explanations to facilitate the progress of the student. Such a work has long been wanted. It enables the student to study the French language as used by some of the master-spirits among Frenchmen. As a collection of five dramas, also, it will be interesting to many who understand the language, but are unable to purchase the whole works of the authors from whom the plays are selected. * * * * * _Probabilities: An Aid to Faith. By the Author of “Proverbial Philosophy.” New York: Wiley & Putnam._