This handsome volume is composed of letters, running over a period of sixteen years, and recording impressions of travel in Europe and America. The heart and imagination of Bryant consecrate and color the whole series: and though the scenes he describes have often been described by others, they appear new and fresh as mirrored in his pages. The serene but searching, the tolerant but earnest, mind of the author, gives the same life and charm to his prose as to his verse. The style is characterised by the grace, delicacy and thoughtfulness, the sober beauty, and “superb propriety,” native to his mind; and the cadence of his sentences leaves a lingering music in the reader’s brain, long after the book has been closed. The scenes and incidents of the volume are of exceeding variety. Paris, Florence, Pisa, Venice, London, Edinburgh,—Richmond, Charleston, St. Augustine, Mackinaw, Savannah, Havana, Boston, Portland,—the Peaks of Derbyshire and the White Mountains,—these widely distant places are but points to indicate the number and dissimilarity of the topics which come under the author’s view. Every lover of Bryant should possess this volume. * * * * * _Essays Upon Authors and Books. By W. Alfred Jones. New York: Stanford & Swords. 1 vol. 12mo._ The writer of this valuable little volume is favorably known among all who favor independent thought, exercised in the domain of literary criticism and characterization, as the author of “The Analyst” and “Literary Studies.” The “Essays” are thirty in number, covering a wide variety of topics, and indicating that kind of literary knowledge which looks through books into the spiritual constitution of their authors. Mr. Jones is a professor of the condensed in composition, and seems ever ambitious to cram his matter into a small space, and short, sharp, curt sentences. Perhaps he sacrifices mellowness in thus aiming after the laconic, but his fault is of so rare a nature in these days of verbose expansiveness, that to blame him for it were to fall into a worse one. Among the many essays which induce us heartily to recommend this volume to the reader, are those entitled “Traits of American Authorship,” “Home Criticism,” “The Two Everetts,” “Hoyt’s Poems,” “Hugh Latimer,” “Sir Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poesy,” “R. H. Dana,” “Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy,” “The Literature of Quakerism,” “Æsthetical Fragments,” “Thomas Moore,” and “Lord Bolingbroke.” Mr. Jones’s culture sweeps over the field of English literature, and some of his most interesting essays relate to quaint authors, whose names are in few mouths, but who are capable, in capable hands, of being made interesting even in this age. We need not say that the moral character of Mr. Jones’s criticism is as high as it’s mental, and that his book may be safely taken as a guide to young as well as to experienced readers. * * * * *