by an apparently concealed auditress, and eliciting many a cunning bit of infantine wisdom, besides the following finer rhapsody, which Mr. Alcott succeeded in charming out of the lips of a boy six years of age: "Mr. Alcott! you know Mrs. Barbauld says in her hymns, everything is prayer; every action is prayer; all nature prays; the bird prays in singing; the tree prays in growing; men pray--men can pray _more_; we feel; we have more, more than Nature; we can know, and do right: _Conscience prays_; all our powers pray; action prays. Once we said, here, that there was a Christ in the bottom of our spirits, when we try to be good. Then we pray in Christ; and that is the whole!" To think that the lips of this ingenuous and golden-mouthed lad may be now pouring out patriotism in Congress is rather sad; but the author's own career tells us that there are some of the Chrysostoms of 1830 who have had the courage to keep quiet, and sweeten their own lives for family use. Mr. Alcott betrays in every line the kindest, sanest and humanest spirit; and we wish he could feel how grateful some of us are for his example of a thinker who can keep quiet, and a writer who can show the power of reticence. * * * * * Thirty Years in the Harem; or, The Autobiography of Melek-Hanum, wife of H.H. Kibrizli-Mehemet-Pasha. New York: Harper & Brothers. We have had many revelations from the interior, but nothing quite like this. Most histories are valuable in proportion to the truthfulness of the narrator, but Mrs. Melek's story owes a large show of its interest to her obvious tension of the long-bow. It is, in fact, a self-revelation--the vain and audacious betrayal by an Oriental woman of the narrowness, the shallowness, the dishonesty which ages of false education have fastened upon her race. The lady in question is--and evidently knows herself to be--an exception among her countrywomen for ability and acumen: an extreme self-satisfaction and vanity are revealed in the recital of her most disreputable tricks. She passes for a white blackbird, a woman of intellect caught in the harem; and it needs but little ingenuity to guess the torment she must have been to her protectors--first to the excellent Dr. Millingen, with whom she formed a love-match, and whom she abuses--and then to her second husband, Kibrizli, ambassador in 1848 to the court of England, upon whom she attempted to palm off an heir by the ruse practiced by our own revered Mrs. Cunningham. Whatever the clever Melek does, or whatever treatment she receives, it is always she who is in the right, and her eternal "enemies" who are unjust, barbarous and stingy. The ferocious blackmailing of natives in the Holy Land which she practiced when her husband represented the sultan there, is represented as cleverness; but her divorce after the infamous false accouchement is a piece of persecution. The marriage and adventures of her daughter form a tangled