Whittier is a positive force in the community, and has popularity as well as reputation. As a poet of sentiment and imagination he is known wherever American literature is read, and has been recognized as an originality by criticism. But even if the critics had denounced, it would have made little difference with his popularity, for his burning lyrics have been sung and declaimed by thousands who know nothing and care nothing for questions relating to style and rhythm. A man with so grand and large a heart—a heart that instinctively runs out in sympathy with his fellow men, must necessarily exercise influence. But this sensibility, though an important and noble element in Whittier’s genius, occasionally does more than its portion of the work of production. Passion, of itself, is not a high peculiarity of a poet, but impassioned imagination is, perhaps, the highest. Now Whittier has passion and has imagination, but they are not always combined. Sensibility is only valuable as it gives force and fire to thought, and the grandest poems in the present collection are those in which conceptions are penetrated with emotions, and the least valuable are those in which emotions get the start of conceptions and roll out on their own account. The reader of the present volume, however, will find a class of poems in it essentially different from those which are intellectually vehement or passionately vehement—a class which are pure utterances of the author’s soul in its most contemplative moods. These are exquisitely tender and beautiful, giving evidence of a mind which to all lovely objects in the material world can “——Add the gleam, The light that never was on sea or land. The consecration and the poet’s dream.” No one can read the present volume without being struck with the vigor and variety of the author’s mind, the breadth and intensity of his sympathies, and the true manliness of his character. The success of such a work is certain. * * * * * _Remarks on the Science of History; Followed by an A Priori Autobiography. Boston: Crosby & Nichols. 1 vol. 12mo._