This widely extended bird is too well known to require any peculiar description; and I shall content myself with observing, in aid of my portraiture of the Ruffed Grouse, that the upper part of its head and hind neck are reddish-brown, the back rich chestnut, mottled with heart-shaped spots of white, edged with black. The tail is bright reddish-yellow, barred and speckled with black, and bordered by a broad, black belt between two narrow white bands, one at the extremity of the tail. The iris of the eye hazel, bill brown, feet brownish gray. Loral band cream color. Throat and fore neck, brownish-yellow. Upper ruff-feathers barred with brown. Wings brownish-red, streaked with black. Breast and abdomen cream colored, closely barred above, and laterally spotted below, with dark chocolate. Length 18 inches, spread of wings 2 feet. The Ruffed Grouse is a capital bird on the table. The breast white meat, back and thighs brown. It should be roasted quickly, eaten with bread sauce and fried crumbs, and washed down with sherry or red wine. * * * * * REVIEW OF NEW BOOKS. _Astræa; The Balance of Delusions. A Poem Delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Yale College, Aug 14, 1850. By Oliver Wendall Holmes. Boston: Ticknor, Reed & Fields. 1 vol. 16mo._ Few college poems have attained, at the period of their delivery, so fluttering a fame as did this last product of Dr. Holmes’s forgetive and flashing brain; and it is now published “by request of the Society,” and demand of the public. Though it has not the geniality of “Urania,” nor its sustained sweetness and subtility of sentiment, it is the greatest of the author’s long poems in decision and depth both of feeling and satire, and exhibits, perhaps, more than his usual command of the powers and delicacies of expression. The verse is a study for all heroic rhymers, being fully equal to all the purposes of wit, fancy, imagination and passion, and combining the utmost finish in separate lines with a bounding movement in the whole. The poem is a succession of beautiful pictures, grave and mirthful, each of which symbolizes some powerful thought or tender feeling, and some of which are hardly matched in our poetry for brilliancy of effect. The satire is less frolicksome than usual; here and there, indeed, its sting draws blood; and the whole poem is conceived and executed in a sterner and more earnest spirit than is common with Dr. Holmes. The opening paragraphs contain a most beautiful and delicate tribute to the author’s father, who was educated at Yale. The following lines refer, we suppose, to Dr. Stiles, the president of the college at the time the elder Holmes was a student, and contain an exquisite picture of the filial relations of master and pupil: