Yet, notwithstanding the lofty reason, the fine intuition, the philanthropy and hope, which inspire its pages, we close the book with a sense of something wanting. The author points out the danger there always is of a faith which is intellectually demonstrable becoming, with many, a faith of the intellect merely,--and frankly avows that "there is a cause why Theism, even in warmer and better natures, too often fails to draw out that fervent piety" which is characteristic of narrower and intenser beliefs. This cause she traces to the neglect of prayer, and the consequent removal afar off, to vague confines of consciousness, of the Personality and Fatherhood of God. Her observations on this important subject are worthy of serious consideration, from those rationalists especially whose cold theories do not admit anything so "unphilosophical" as prayer. Yet we find in the book itself a want. The author--like nearly all writers from her point of view--ignores the power of miracle. Because physical impossibilities, or what seem such, have been so readily accepted as facts owing their origin to divine interposition, they fall to the opposite extreme of denying the occurrence of any events out of the common course of Nature's operations. Of the positive and powerful ministration of angels in human affairs they make no account whatever, or accept it as a pleasing dream; and they forget that what we call a miracle may be as truly an offspring of immutable law as the dew and the sunshine,--failing to learn of the loadstone, which attracts to itself splinters of steel contrary to all the commonly observed laws of gravitation, the simple truth that man also may become a magnet, and, by the power of the divine currents passing through him, do many things astonishing to every-day experience. The feats of a vulgar thaumaturgy, designed to make the ignorant stare, may well be dispensed with. But the fact that "spiritualism," with all its crudities of doctrine and errors of practice, has spread over Christendom with a rapidity to which the history of religious beliefs affords no parallel, shows that the realization of supernatural influences is an absolute need of the human heart. The soul of the earlier forms of worship dies out of them, as this faith dies out, or becomes merely traditional; and no new system can look to fill their places without it. _Letters of_ FELIX MENDELSSOHN BARTHOLDY _from 1833 to 1847._ Two Volumes. Philadelphia: F. Leypoldt.