To him who sang of Venice, and revealed How Wealth and Glory clustered in her streets, And poised her marble domes with wondrous skill, We send these tributes, plundered from the sea. These many-colored, variegated forms Sail to our rougher shores, and rise and fall To the deep music of the Atlantic wave. Such spoils we capture where the rainbows drop, Melting in ocean. Here are broideries strange, Wrought by the sea-nymphs from their golden hair, And wove by moonlight. Gently turn the leaf. From narrow cells, scooped in the rocks, we take These fairy textures, lightly moored at morn. Down sunny slopes, outstretching to the deep, We roam at noon, and gather shapes like these. Note now the painted webs from verdurous isles, Festooned and spangled in sea-caves, and say What hues of land can rival tints like those, Torn from the scarfs and gonfalons of kings Who dwell beneath the waters. Such our gift, Culled from a margin of the western world, And offered unto Genius in the old. * * * * * _Raphael; or Pages from the Book of Life at Twenty. By Alphonse de Lamartine. New York: Harper & Brothers._ Lamartine, with many of the high qualities of genius, is deficient in one of the most important—Common Sense. He is a fine and eloquent singer of his own idealized and idolized self, but is gifted with very imperfect powers of objective perception. He sees nothing as it is, but every object is more or less a mirror of self. This is equally true whether the object be Mont Blanc or a Paris mob. All his descriptions of scenery, though often rising to a strain of rapturous eloquence and beauty, are never accurate, even in an elevated poetical signification of accuracy. Different scenes, in different climes, are all enveloped in one atmosphere, and all stand for one tyrannizing class of emotions. Lamartine is a sentimentalist, and no sentimentalist can celebrate any nature but his own, or consider the universe as worth any thing in itself. The excellence of the present volume consists in its subject admitting of a strictly lyrical treatment, and it accordingly is full to running over of Lamartine’s strong but narrow genius, and is resplendent with glittering sentiment and decorative imagery. The work is not long enough to tire by its egotism and fine writing, and is closed before admiration has subsided from the interjection into the yawn of satisfaction. A nature so rich as Lamartine’s might fill even a larger book without exhausting its wealth of sentiment or thought. * * * * * _The Moral, Social, and Professional Duties of Attorneys and Solicitors. By Samuel Warren, F. R. S. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1 vol. 16mo._