Aye on! there is yet to come—thank God—a reckoning-day, of motives and of actions, when assumption shall be stript—deceit exposed—the hollow heart laid bare, and when the secret sin of pride and self-complacency, dragged from its hiding-place, shall be thrust, blazing into its face. My dear Jeremy, there is a consolation in this—we shall see one of these times, every man’s motive for the acts he has committed revealed—whether it is only the poor devils cast down, forsaken, down-trodden and despised, that die in the ditch, who are damned; or whether he only is on his way to heaven—the sleek and lucky moralist who dozes over his wine—who thinks he can pave his way to heaven with ingots, however got, that shall be saved. That will be a sight worth seeing, Jeremy, for it will open the eyes of the Universe, and make all things even. We can afford to wait for even this, can we not? It will not be long. G. R. G. * * * * * REVIEW OF NEW BOOKS. _Poems. By Robert Browning, Boston: Ticknor, Reed & Fields. 2 vols. 12mo._ This edition of Browning is almost a facsimile of the beautiful London edition, published by Chapman & Hall, the only real difference between the two being that the American reprint costs less than half as much as the London original. Browning, for the last four or five years, has been steadily advancing to fame; and having overcome by the pure strength of his genius all outward and some inward obstacles, is now widely recognized as a new force in English letters. Next to Tennyson, we know of hardly another English poet of the day who can be compared with him. He possesses striking excellences both of thought and diction, but he is so indisputably an originality, that he is compelled to create the taste which appreciates him. Like almost all the poets of the new school, he is “high contemplative,” scorns rather than courts the means of popularity, and is more pleased by conquering one reader than by enticing many. In his distaste for the stereotyped diction and ideas of English poetry, he is apt to go to the opposite extreme of obscurity. There is a beautiful willfulness, a delicious bit of the devil, in him; accordingly many of his verses seem thrown off in an imaginary boxing match with professors of square-toed rhetoric and critics of the old school. This independence and pugnacity are sometimes carried to that extreme of recklessness, which indicates self-conceit and supercilious arrogance, rather than a wrestling with the difficulties of expression. “Sordello,” a poem which the author has now suppressed, was a tangled mass of half-formed thoughts and half-clutched sentiments, tottering dizzily on the vanishing points of meaning; and the publication of such a piece of elaborate worthlessness was an insult to public intelligence