But in his stern realism, the author employs what he himself calls "Panurgic" plainness of speech, and deals with the horrors of the sea-shore as composedly as with its pearls. His descriptions of the memorials of shipwrecks, for instance, would be simply repulsive, but that his very dryness has a sort of disinfectant quality, like the air of California, where things the most loathsome may lie around us without making the air impure. He shows his wonted formidable accuracy all through these pages, and the critic feels a sense of bewildered exultation in detecting him even in a slip of the pen,--as when in the note on page 228 he gives to the town of Rockport, on Cape Ann, the erroneous name of Rockland. After this discovery, one may dare to wonder at his finding a novelty in the "Upland Plover," and naming it among the birds not heard in the interior of the State, when he might be supposed to have observed it, in summer, near Mount Wachusett, where its wail adds so much, by day or night, to the wildness of the scenery. Yet by the triviality of these our criticisms one may measure the astonishing excellence of his books. This wondrous eye and hand have passed away, and left no equal and no second. Everything which Thoreau wrote has this peculiar value, that no other observing powers were like his; no one else so laboriously verified and exhausted the facts; and no other mind rose from them, at will, into so subtile an air of meditation,--meditation too daring to be called devout, by church or world, yet too pure and lofty to merit any lower name. Lycidas has died once more, and has not left his peer. Cape Cod does not change in its traits, but only in its boundaries, and this book will stand for it, a century hence, as it now does. It is the Cape Odyssey. Near the end, moreover, there is a remarkable chapter on previous explorers, which shows, by its patient thoroughness, and by the fearless way in which the author establishes facts which had eluded Hildreth and Bancroft, that, had he chosen history for his vocation, he could have extracted its marrow as faithfully as that of his more customary themes. Yet the grand ocean-pictures which this book contains remind us that it was the domain of external Nature which was his peculiar province; and this sublime monotone of the surges seems his fitting dirge, now that--to use the fine symbol of one who was his comrade on this very excursion--his bark has "sunk to another sea." RECENT AMERICAN PUBLICATIONS. Christus Judex. A Traveller's Tale. By Edward Roth. Philadelphia. F. Leypoldt. 16mo. pp. 78. 90 cts. Essays on Social Subjects. From the "Saturday Review." Boston. Ticknor & Fields. 16mo. pp. 351. $1.75. History of the Anti-Slavery Measures of the Thirty-Seventh and Thirty-Eighth United States Congresses, 1861-1864. By Henry Wilson. Boston. Walker, Wise, & Co. 12mo. pp. 384. $1.75.