And since the unsocial character of Thoreau's theory of life has been one of the most serious charges against it, his fine series of thoughts on love and marriage in this volume become peculiarly interesting. "Love must be as much a light as a flame." "Love is a severe critic. Hate can pardon more than love." "A man of fine perceptions is more truly feminine than a merely sentimental woman." "It is not enough that we are truthful; we must cherish and carry out high purposes to be truthful about." These are sentences on which one might spin commentaries and scholia to the end of life; and there are many others as admirable. His few verses close the volume,--few and choice, with a rare flavor of the seventeenth century in them. The best poem of all, "My life is like a stroll upon the beach," is not improved by its new and inadequate title, "The Fisher's Boy." The three poems near the end, "Smoke," "Mist," and "Haze," are marvellous triumphs of language; the thoughts and fancies are as subtile as the themes, and yet are embodied as delicately and accurately as if uttered in Greek. _France and England in North America._ A Series of Historical Narratives. By FRANCIS PARKMAN, Author of "History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac," "Prairie and Rocky Mountain Life," etc. Part First. Pioneers of France in the New World. Boston: Little, Brown, & Co. It has been known for nearly a score of years within our literary circles, that one of the richest and least wrought themes of our American history had been appropriated by the zeal and research of a student eminently qualified by nature, culture, and personal experience to develop its wealth of interest. While very many among us may have been aware that Mr. Parkman had devoted himself to the task of which we have before us some of the results, only a narrower circle of friends have known under what severe physical embarrassments and disabilities he has been restrained from maturing those results. He has fully and sadly realized, within his own different range, the experience which he so aptly phrases as endured by his hero, the adventurous and dauntless Champlain. When that great pioneer, midway in his splendid career, was planning one of his almost annual voyages hitherward, at one of the most emergent periods of his enterprise, he was seized on board his vessel in France with a violent illness, and reduced, as Mr. Parkman says, to that "most miserable of all conflicts, the battle of the eager spirit against the treacherous and failing flesh." Mr. Parkman has known well what these words mean. In his case, as in that of Champlain, it was not from the burden of years and natural decay, but from the touch of disease in the period of life's full vigor in its midway course, that mental activity was restrained. When, besides the inflictions of a racked nervous system, the author suffered in addition a malady of the eyes, which limited him, as he says, to intervals of five minutes for reading