Lectures on the English Poets, The Sketch Book, Pollock’s Course of Time, Henry Martyn, not to mention others, are replete with sound and searching judgment as well as imaginative beauty. In a short notice of a work of such literary pretensions as the present, it is more appropriate to indicate its positive merits than to allude to its defects. A mind so vital, powerful and individual as Mr. Dana’s can claim the privilege of being judged by its own laws of thought and production, and an application to it of external rules, which it does not profess to regard, would be little better than an impertinence. Still there are some peculiarities in the volumes which are slightly unpleasing, not because they are peculiar expressions of the author’s nature, but because they occasionally manifest an ungenial development of it. It is said that Mr. Carlyle’s opinion on any social reform can be accurately calculated from the speeches of the Exeter Hall reformers—he being sure to contradict them, whatever they may say. Accordingly, he defends slavery when they denounce it, and is in favor of dealing powder and shot to Ireland, when they are in ecstasies of philanthropic horror at its misgovernment. Something of this reactionary disgust we discern in a few of Mr. Dana’s compositions, and it gives to them as much willfulness as can possibly have its seat in a mind so gentle and just as his. His poems often have a roughness which is evidently intentional, and which indicates not so much a desire to produce new musical tones as to express contempt for old ones. Some of his speculations on society and government appear to us not fair expressions of his really large and solid intellect, but to spring from a morbid dislike, rather than from a calm objective vision, of the present. With these slight drawbacks, we hardly know of a recent work which contains so much to nourish the mind, to develop its finer tastes and affections, and give breadth to its thinking, than this collection of Mr. Dana’s poems and prose writings. * * * * * _Agnes Grey, an Autobiography. By the Author of “Jane Eyre,” “Shirley,” etc. Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson._