For this she longed and hoped and waited in the Desert! for this she envied the red fox and the ostrich! for this her dumb lips parted, in their struggle after speech, to ask of earth and air some solace to her solitude! for this, for these, she poured out her dim life in one strong, wilful aspiration! Happy Sphinx, to be left even of that dull existence! blessedly unconscious of that granted desire! mouldering away in the curling sand-hills, the prey of hostile elements, the mysterious symbol of a secret yearning and a vain desire! Not for thee the bitterness of success! not for thee the conscious agony of penitence,--the falling temple of the will crushing its idolater! No wild voices in the wind reproach the wilder pulses of a slow-breaking heart; no keen words of taunt sting thee into madness; Memory hurls at thee no flying javelins; broken-winged Hope flutters about thee no more! Thy day is over, thine hour is past! _"Wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead, more than the living which are yet alive!"_ * * * * * REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES. _Dies Irae:_ in Thirteen Original Versions. By Abraham Coles, M.D. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1859. pp. xxxiv., 70. It is pleasant to see how many wiles Nature employs to draw off into side channels the enthusiasm which is always secreting itself and gathering in the human brain. She knows what a dangerous clement it may become, if the individual rills of it run together, and, with united forces, take for a time a single direction. So she taps it at its sources, and leads it away to various ends, useful because they are harmless. Bibliomania, tulipomania, potichomania, squaring the circle, perpetual motion, a religious epic, the northwest passage,--anything will serve the purpose. _Divide et impera_ is her motto. The hobby is the safeguard of society. Once mounted, every enthusiast ambles quietly off on some errand of his own, caring little what direction he takes, provided only it be _the other_. The Fifth-Monarchy men might have been troublesome, but for the Beast in Revelation;--each insisted on a Beast to himself. Protestantism might have become Democracy, had either Luther or Calvin been willing to ride behind. The five points of the Charter are blunted to a Lancashire weaver who is fattening a prize-gooseberry.