We have not yet had time to read this 'Pastoral' for ourselves, but it is highly commended by Marion Harland, author of 'Alone.' 'The story is confined within the limits of a country neighborhood, but there is variety of character, motive, and action. You are reminded that the authoress writes with a purpose, as well as a power, that the earnest, God-fearing soul of the philanthropist has travailed here for the good of her kind, not the mere 'sensation' romancist writer for the entertainment of an idle hour.' We quote from Marion Harland. EXCURSIONS. By HENRY D. THOREAU, Author of 'Walden,' and 'A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.' Boston: Ticknor & Fields. For sale by D. Appleton & Co., New York. Henry David Thoreau was a man of decided genius, and an ardent lover of nature. His eye was open to beauty, and his ear to music. He found these, not in rare conditions, but wheresoever he went. He was sincerity itself, and no cant or affectation is to be found in his writings. He was religious in his own way; incapable of any profanation, by act or thought, although his original living and thinking detached him from the social religious forms. He thought that without religion no great deed had ever been accomplished. He was disgusted with crime, and no worldly success could cover it. He loved nature so well, and was so happy in her solitude, that he became very jealous of cities and the sad work which their refinements and artifices made with man and his dwelling. The axe was always destroying his forest. 'Thank God,' he said, 'they cannot cut down the clouds.' We have taken the above traits from the exceedingly interesting biographical sketch introducing this book, from the masterly hand of R. W. Emerson. The writings of Thoreau are the result of his character, modelled from and colored by the tastes and habits of his daily life. Nature lives in his pages. We know of no more delightful reading. He says: 'A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East. Where is the literature which gives expression to nature? He would be a poet who could impress the winds and streams into his service, to speak for him; who nailed words to their primitive senses, as farmers drive down stakes in the spring, which the frost has heaved; who derived his words as often as he used them--transplanted them to his page with earth adhering to their roots; whose words were so true, and fresh, and natural that they would appear to expand like buds at the approach of spring, though they lay half-smothered between two musty leaves in a library--aye to bloom and bear fruit there, after their kind, annually, for the faithful reader, in sympathy with surrounding nature.'