Niebuhr was born pre-eminently gifted, was trained by intellectual and tender parents, and his whole career is one story of the progress made by a mind which united extraordinary powers with untiring industry. But Niebuhr was not only born to achieve greatness. He achieved love and friendship in every relation of his life, he was a high-minded and in the purest sense of the word an earnest man. In intellect he was a giant among us; but in him the intellect was not a statue raised above the moral life, on which it trod as on a pedestal, a block of mere stone-mason's work; his heart had not been used up in the making of his brains, or his soul cleared out a sacrifice to make room for a new stock of understanding. We may yield our minds up to admire Niebuhr unreservedly, and it is pleasant therefore to get a _Life_ of him in English, so full as this is of the actual man, as he poured out portions thereof to his bosom friends, and wherein the large lumps of true Niebuhr gold are contained in a biographic deposit which itself is a long way removed from dross. The quiet, unaffected way in which this work has been done by the English writer of the book before us, her elegant simplicity of style, her thorough mastery of the subject, enable us to pass from Life to Letters, and from Letters back to Life, without any sense but of a perfect harmony between both. The two volumes are of a kind that can be read through from the beginning to the end with unremitting pleasure. We strongly suspect that Niebuhr, at the age of twelve, would have bewildered with his knowledge some few of our university professors. Here is part of a sketch, representing him when he was not very far removed from long clothes: How keenly alive he was to poetical impressions appears from a letter of Boje's written in 1783: "This reminds me of little Niebuhr. His docility, his industry, and his devoted love for me procure me many a pleasant hour. A short time back I was reading 'Macbeth' aloud to his parents without taking any notice of him, till I saw what an impression it made upon him. Then I tried to render it all intelligible to him, and even explained to him how the witches were only poetical beings. When I was gone, he sat down (he is not yet seven years old), and wrote it all out on seven sheets of paper without omitting one important point, and certainly without any expectation of receiving praise for it; for, when his father asked to see what he had written, and showed it to me, he cried for fear he had not done it well. Since then he writes down every thing of importance that he hears from his father or me. We seldom praise him, but just quietly tell him where he has made any mistake, and he avoids the fault for the future.