There are few volumes more calculated to relax the rigidity of criticism than this elegant octo-duodecimo, gilded without and golden within. Sisters in song as in blood, the authoresses awaken the chivalric rather than the critical sentiment, although they are abundantly capable of bearing some of the most tormenting acquirements of the latter. There is a family likeness in their minds, but in Alice the imaginative element is predominant, while her sister displays more of the reflective. Both are poets as distinguished from fluent versifers of accredited commonplaces, and both manifest originality in their imagery and music, but the mind of Alice is remarkably sensitive and imaginative, melting at once into melody the moment her heart is filled with a poetical object, and absolutely gushing out in song. A fine poetical instinct of the most subtle and elusive character, seems to dwell at the very life-spring of her nature, so that poetry seems the necessity of her being, the inevitable mode in which her nature must be expressed, if expressed at all. The poem entitled “Pictures of Memory,” is one of the simplest and subtlest expressions of ethereal sentiment and refined imagination we ever read: it being an exquisite embodiment of a mood of mind rarely experienced in its purity by any intellect, and certainly never pictured forth with more truth to the spirit of the subject. Phœbe Carey hardly has this instinctive and unconscious certainty in the action of her mind, but excels in thoughtfulness, tenderness, and fancy, “leaning her ear” to catch “the still, sad music of humanity,” and conscious of a moral purpose in her singing. Both deserve a hearty recognition equally from their countrywomen and countrymen. * * * * * _The Boston Book. Being Specimens of Metropolitan Literature. Boston: Ticknor, Reed & Fields. 1 vol. 12mo._