To embody primeval sentiments, to deal with transcendent passions, and to idealize those fatal moods by which not individuals merely, but races, are possessed, those tidal ebbs and flows which, for want of a better name, we call the Spirit of the Age,--this is a gift whose return among us we do not look for with as much certainty as that of shad and salmon, but meanwhile we are not too nice to be pleased with verses that express average thoughts and feelings gracefully and with a dash of sentiment. It is a vast deal wiser and better to express neatly, in language that is not alien to the concerns of every day, feelings we have really had, than to maunder about what we think we ought to have felt in a diction that has no more to do with our ordinary habits of thought and expression than Monmouth with Macedon. The contrast of matter and manner in much of our current verse is such as to remind one of the notes which are sometimes sent to their sweethearts by schoolboys, who cut their fingers (not too deep) that they may asseverate the eternal constancy of the three-weeks'-vacation in that solemn fluid proper to contracts with the Evil One. It is pleasant to meet with one who is able to say a natural thing in a natural way, as Mr. Rice has shown that he can do. There is a very agreeable mingling of feeling and fun in his lighter pieces, rising into real grace and lyric fancy in some of them, such as "New Year's Eve" and "The Revisit." _A Voyage down the Amoor; with a Land Journey through Siberia, and Incidental Notices of Manchooria, Kamschatka, and Japan._ By PERRY McDONOUGH COLLINS, United States Commercial Agent at the Amoor River, New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1860. pp. 390. This is a very amusing book. The introductory part of it, in which the author recounts his adventures in Siberia before setting out on his expedition down the Amoor, is full of bad taste, bad rhetoric, and bad grammar. If we had read no farther, we should have thought that a more unfit personage than this gentleman with the monumental name could not have been chosen for any public service. Mr. Perry McDonough Collins gives us the bill of fare of gentlemen's tables at which he dined, tells us how much and what kinds of wine were "drank," and sometimes winds up his account of the feast with a compliment to the "amiable and interesting" family of his host. Mr. Egouminoff's dinner, he tells us, "was excellent, with several kinds of wine, closing with Champagne. We had _also_ the pleasure of the company of Mrs. E. and her daughter, and several other guests, besides a handsome widow." There is something charmingly _naïf_ in thus throwing in the company as a _succedaneum_ to the dinner, and carefully segregating the widow from the rest of mankind as a distinct species.