Down on the strand he is plying his hand, His shouting is heard again; The clouds are dark, but he springs to his bark, With the same light hearted strain. Chorus: Merrily, oh! Merrily, oh! This is the burden he gives, Cheerily, oh! Though the blast may blow, The Fisher boy jollily lives, The Fisher boy jollily lives! * * * * * REVIEW OF NEW BOOKS. _Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey. By Joseph Cottle. New York: Wiley & Putnam. 1 vol. 12mo._ This is quite an important contribution to the literary history of the nineteenth century. To be sure, it is confined to a small space, and a few individuals, but it is full of original and important matter as far as it goes. Cottle, the author, was a bookseller at Bristol, was the early friend of Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth, and carried his friendship so far as to publish their first unsalable books. Throughout the lives of Coleridge and Southey, he appears to have been their associate or correspondent. He now publishes the letters of both, and his recollections of their character, conduct, and conversation. No lover of Coleridge can read the book without deep pain. It presents him as given over to sloth and self-indulgence, as careless of his word, as indifferent to the happiness and comfort of his wife and children, as a deceitful and unsafe friend, as a kind of sublime charlatan and vagabond. The revelations regarding his use of opium are astounding. About the year 1814 he consumed a pint of laudanum a day. He spent upwards of _£_2 10_s._ a week for opium, at the very time his family were suffering, and he himself was living on the charity of a friend. He borrowed money freely of his friends, ostensibly for the necessaries of life, but really to obtain the means of gratifying his debasing habit. He lost all control over himself. The champion of free will was himself the prey of a passion which swayed his volitions. The philosopher who was to reconcile philosophy with Christianity, was daily in the habit of violating both. The poet who celebrated in such exquisite verse the affections, abandoned his own family. Since Rousseau, there has not been his like among men of letters. In a letter to Josiah Wade, in 1814, a letter which he desires to have published after his death, he acknowledges all that his worst enemies could impute to him. “In the one crime of OPIUM,” he says, “what crime have I not made myself guilty of? Ingratitude to my Maker! and to my benefactors—injustice! and _unnatural cruelty to my poor children_! self-contempt for my repeated promise—breach, nay, too often, actual falsehood!” In the same letter he remarks—“Conceive a poor, miserable wretch, who, for many years, has been attempting to beat off pain by a constant recurrence to the vice that produces it. Conceive a spirit in hell, employed in tracing out for