MEMOIR OF MRS. MARY E. Van Lennep, ONLY DAUGHTER OF THE REV. JOEL HAWES, D. D., And wife of the REV. HENRY J. VAN LENNEP, MISSIONARY IN TURKEY: BY HER MOTHER. Hartford: Belknap & Hamersley. Wherever there are those who delight in the contemplation of exalted christian excellence, in connection with great natural loveliness, this work will find a cordial welcome. It is the character of a daughter sketched by a mother's hand, and warm from a mother's heart. And yet the production is of a perfectly unpretending character, and will revolt nobody by its partial or exagge rated representations. It furnishes a fine model of female character, fitted alike to rebuke the gay and worldly, and to strengthen and animate those who have set out in the Christian race. The history is brief, but it most strikingly exhibits the wisdom and goodness and grace of God. Dr. Hawes' sermon at the close, is a fitting and beautiful tribute to the memory of his daughter, and is of itself worth more than the cost of the book. The cause of missions cannot fail to be served by this publication. ADVENTURES IN MEXICO AND THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS: BY GEO. F. BUXTON, MEMBER OF THE ROYAL GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY, &c. New York: Harper & Brothers. This book, just fresh from the pen of a highly respectable Englishman, is exceedingly modest in its pretensions, and yet it gives about as fair a view of Mexican life and manners as any thing that we have fallen in with. The writer just relates what occurred to him, or what came under his observation from day to day, but he does it with so graceful and graphic a pen, that one cannot help feeling a deep interest in the various incidents of his journey. He pays a handsome tribute to our own country in his preface, and concludes his book with an account of a most self-glorifying conversation which a pompous Yankee held with him, and which will cause many of his readers, as it caused him, to "explode in an immoderate fit of laughter." GERMANY, ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND; OR RECOLLECTIONS OF A SWISS MINIS. TER: BY J. H. MERLE D'AUBIGNE, D. D. New York: Robert Carter. No one conversant with the writings of Merle D'Aubigné, could read a single page of this volume, without detecting its authorship. It bears the same striking and noble characteristics, with all his previous productions. It is made up of two parts-Travelling Recollections and Historical Recollections-for the one he draws upon his observation, for the other upon his almost boundless knowledge of history. The first part of the book is the record of what he saw and heard, on a tour through Germany and Great Britain in 1847; and his description of the existing state of things in the two countries, is exceedingly ju dicious and graphic. The character which he sees we see; the scenes in which he mingles seems present to us, and we feel that we have a share in them. His remarks upon Scotland are particularly interesting; and some of them are truly and deeply philosophical. The part of the work devoted to Historical Recollections. has the same freshness and point and beauty and power, that characterize his historical works previously published. The book seems to have grown up from a report of the author's travels, made at several successive times to his Geneveso friends; and others besides his friends, if there are such,-certainly the inhabi tants of other nations and the generations to come, will be thankful for the train of events in which the work had its origin. GOSSIPING LETTER. MY DEAR TIMOTHEUS: How is your subscription list? Will people hang on to those mawkish "flash" magazines, in which the plot of discarded novels is divided every month into infinitesimal portions for the amusement of love-sick milliners, and sentimental inhabitants of the boudoir; neglecting in the mean time the strong thought and attic style of the American Literary? I say not these things against the lady-literature of the day: they are only forced out of me by comparison. Look at their mezzotints-from the first artists of course-spraw. lingly executed with eyes as large as the feet, legs that were never made to match, and immense backgrounds of "darkness visible." Look at their steel engravings, engraved expressly for this magazine," after copies that were worn-out when you and I were boys. What do they consist of? "Views," dim and shadowy as the valley of the shadow of death; of cities, as the latter looked forty years ago; fine interiors of barns; representations of scraggy trees; rocks smooth as glass; and an everlasting stream of water wandering among weeds about a foot high. Did you ever read one of the prospectuses? You would think that all the literary men and women of the present age had left home, friends and reputation behind them to assist in the grand injection of fire and fury into the great "flash" enterprise. The writers are all the "best" of the age; this lie they never baulk at. One would suppose that the occupation of Washington Irving, Prescott, Sparks, and the rest of our world-known scribblers was gone, and that the fancy-writers of the day, like a swarm of locusts settling on every "greenthing," had filled the American mind with a taste as verdant as their literary efforts. Goodness! what a strong stomach the public owns. It digests humbug as easily as the gastric juice of an ostrich converts glass into nutriment. But enough of this. I will not commit you or myself wholly against fashionable magazines, but what do they assume so much for? Do their conductors believe that true literature can only be found in connection with an inhuman fashion-plate? They ought to modestly retreat to their legitimate place, and pretend to be just what they are-a congeries of love stories and sentimental verses, improving not at all to the mind, and intoxicating the heart with romantic yearnings for the impossible. They are literary play-things; elegant trifles, pleasing to the eye, and not altogether useless companions in the leisure hours of certain people. CONTENTS. II. WHY DOST THOU LINGER, SPRING? BY LILY Graham, V. FLORENCE - THE APPENINES- BOLOGNA. BY THE AUTHOR OF "THE CHRISTMAS HOLIDAYS IN ROME," Fourteen years after the May Flower anchored by Plymouth. rock, another vessel, filled with no less distinguished adventurers, touched upon the New-England coast, near Boston. In the former came John Alden, one of the ancestors of John Quincy Adams; in the latter, Henry Adams, with a large family, the first of the name that came to this country. The Adamses settled at Mount Wollaston, which was, at first, annexed to Boston in 1634, for the special benefit of the new colonists, but afterwards in 1640 it became incorporated as a separate town, by the name of Braintree. Henry Adams, junior, was for several years town clerk, and the first of the family elected to a civil office in America. His youngest brother, Joseph, who resided in the same town, left ten children. One of them, bearing the paternal name, married the grand-daughter of John Alden, of the Plymouth colony. His second son was the father of John Adams, who succeeded Washington as President of the United States, and who was the father of the distinguished man whose name stands at the head of this page. John Quincy Adams was, therefore, a descendant in the fifth generation of Henry Adams, who was driven by persecution from Devonshire, England, in 1634, and among the earliest colonists of New-England. On his mother's side, as above shown, he was a descendant of John Alden of the May Flower. It would be difficult to conceive of events better suited to produce a great man, than conspired in the ancestry, birth and education of the subject of this brief sketch. Born in the summer of 1767, at Braintree, Massachusetts, of illustrious parents, and of ancestors alike venerable and distinguished for the common pursuit of freedom, at a period when liberty and bondage were each struggling for the mastery on the soil of New-England, he early imbibed that liberal and patriotic spirit, for which he was celebrated in mature age. Blessed as he was with a distinguished father, it was his good fortune also to enjoy the early instructions of a most accomplished |