corrupting youth cannot be preferred against this newest of philosophers. For as error is dangerous only in proportion to its plausibility, the risk encountered by the reader is infinitesimal. _Looking toward Sunset._ By L. MARIA CHILD. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. For forty years it has been the good fortune of Mrs. Child to achieve a series of separate literary successes, whose accumulated value justly gives her a high claim to gratitude. Every one of her chief works has been a separate venture in some new field, always daring, always successful, always valuable. Her "Juvenile Miscellany" was the delight of all American childhood, when childish books were few. Her "Hobomok" was one of the very first attempts to make this country the scene of historical fiction. In the freshness of literary success, she did not hesitate to sacrifice all her newly won popularity, for years, by the publication of her remarkable "Appeal for the Class of Americans called Africans," a book unsurpassed in ability and comprehensiveness by any of the innumerable later works on the same subject,--works which would not even now supersede it, except that its facts and statistics have become obsolete. Time and the progress of the community at length did her justice once more, and her charming "Letters from New York" brought all her popularity back. Turning away, however, from fame won by such light labors, she devoted years of her life to the compilation of her great work on the "Progress of Religious Ideas," a book unequalled in the English language as a magazine of the religious aspirations of the race. And now, still longing to look in some new direction, she finds that direction in "Sunset,"--the only region towards which her name and her nature have alike excused her from turning her gaze before.