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THE COURANT ; A SOUTHERN LITERARY JOURNAL. 237

great temple of Art, while obeying the promptings of their genius for achievements in which success has been their vindication
and reward.

In the life of HARRIET HOSMER is embodied this fine paragraph,
as a gem of first water, even among the precious pearls,
not "at random," but systematically and elegantly "strung"
by Mrs. ELLET. As Lowell wisely and poetically says:

"Great dreams preclude low ends."

"Better aspire and fail, than not aspire at all ; better to
know the dream, and the fever, and the awakening, if it must
be, than to pass from the cradle to the grave on the plane of
content with things as they are. There may be aspiration without genius; there cannot be genius without aspiration, and
where genius is backed by industry and perseverance, the aspiration
of one period will meet its realization in another."

For woman's humble name to be thus associated with the
great principles of art, which are eternal, will conduce more
to her self-respect than her vanity, and more to her encouragement
than her self-conceit, when giving emphasis to the sentiment—
"There is no sex in mind." M. M.

For the Courant.
THE BOOK OF IRIS.
(CONTINUED.)

The first glimpse which we have of the heroine of "the
book,'' who, like the angel of the Apocalypse, is "clothed in the rainbow," is in the ensuing lines, which afford an apt specimen
of the authors new style: which may be termed the "revived
DELLA CRUSCAN," being new, only as forming the vehicle
of different, materials from those of which the works of the
originators of this famous style were composed.

"She knew the marble shapes that set men dreaming.
Yet with her shoulders bare, and tresses streaming.
Showed not unlovely, to her simple seeming."

The low dressing, here described, is certainly rather in the
extreme of the fashion; while the unkempt hair, or "tresses
streaming" over her naked shoulders, must have given, we
should think, somewhat of an air distrait, or of a " Crazy
Jane," to the otherwise lovely creature; who, though not exactly
a maid of all work, but one not fit for any work at all,
except that in which she figures so fantastically, and forms an
apparition much more calculated, as it strikes us, to set children screaming than men dreaming, however attached the latter may be to "marble shapes," which the author says they have so strong a penchant for, and to which he likens his etherial, sensitive, and any thing but stony-hearted heroine. Iris, however, though thus described as truly decolé, and sentimentally miserable, is, at the same time, represented as being pretty much of a female philosopher, and as

"Saying, unsaddened—This [her beauty] shall soon be faded,
And double-hued [that is, gristled] the shining tresses braided,— [Just now, they were flying over her shoulders!]
And all the sunlight of the morning shaded !"

Though unsaddened by these otherwise rather melancholy reflections, she sometimes had, the author tells us, "her hours of weeping, and of tearful smiles ; "and was sad only in her follies! her book being full, he states, of these new and strange species of mournful levities, and "laughing melancholies."—Strange creatures, certainly these romantic young ladies, and Album-keeping and poetizing boarding-school Misses.

But, though "the book" is represented as being written by the ideal Iris, its true paternity is so plainly traceable in its filmy fictions, unreal or merely imaginary characters, and, in the cloistered or college pedantry, that crops out (to use a now familiar phrase,) in every page, and in every sentence—that the author is never for a moment lost sight of by the reader, in the ludicrous and often-changed disguises which he assumes: Now, that of a dreamy and undefinably unhappy damsel, "all tear and anguish;" now, of her sympathising biographer; and, lastly, of her admirer, or her despairing and poetizing lover. Of the mixture of science and sentiment, of the pedantic and the pensive, of lecturing and rhyming, of which "the book" presents so strange an example, we have an early specimen in the author's superfine, and, at the same time, scientific description of the genus blonde, to which, he says his heroine belongs. "I wonder if some thing of the spiritual transparency is not typified in the golden blonde organization.— There are a great many little creatures—many small fishes, for instance, that are literally transparent—with the exception of some of the internal organs. The heart can be seen beating, etc. The central nervous column, with its sheath, runs as a dark stripe through the whole length of the diaphnous muscles. Other little creatures are so darkened with pigment that we can see only their surface. Conspirators and poisoners are painted with black beady eyes, and swarthy hue. Judas Iscariot, in Leonardo's picture, [what picture ?]* is the model of them all!"

After this short lecture on anatomy aud insectology—and display of his knowledge in the fine arts—and without stopping to explain the connection which he seems to have discovered to exist between the dark pigment that runs through the central nervous column of certain little creatures," and the "black beady eyes " and swarthy hue • peculiar to conspirators, or pointing out wherein the diaphanous muscles" of the above little creatures are illustrative of the spiritual transparency of the "golden blonde organization," he returns to "the wondrous book of Iris," and proceeds to describe the strange and grotesque objects, and certain monstrous figures, which he finds sketched on the margins of its leaves, and which—notwithstanding the mystery and significance with which he attempts to invest them—are evidently the mere idle and casual scrawlings of a school-girl, or such drawings as school-boys are in the habit of making on the blank leaves and edges of their usually dog-eared books. In these arabesque and crude scrawlings, however, our super-learned Professor, like the star-gazing philospher, who mistook a magnified fly, which had got into his telescope, for an elephant in the moon, thinks that he discerns so many efforts of youthful genius—or obscure and daring attempts of Iris—to "idealize what is vulgarly termed deformity;" which she, rising above such a mere common conception, or misconception, had "looked at in the light of one of Nature's eccentric curves, and as belonging to her system of beauty ; and as the hyperbola and patabola, belonging to the conic sections ;" though we cannot see them as symmetrical and entire figures, like the circle and ellipse. This "system of beauty," in which deformity is regarded as bearing a relation to symmetry, in the same manner as the "hyperbola and parabola belong to the conic sections, and may become entire figures, or the circle and ellipse," is certainly sufficiently learned, though not very intelligible; or, at any rate, cannot, we think, be considered as affording a very favourable specimen of the author's skill or success in looking through "the spiritual transparency of the golden blonde's organizatioin."

In attempting to carry out or accomplish this blending of beauty and deformity, Iris is, of course, not very successful; but her biographer thinks these attempts were suggested by her penchant for the crooked little gentleman, with whom all readers of the "Breakfast Table" papers, are familiar; and says : "at any rate, I cannot help referring this paradise of twisted spines [a paradise of twisted spines!] to some idea floating in her head, connected with her friend—whom Nature had warped in the moulding." "But this conjecture," he says, "is nothing to another transcendental fancy of mine." Here is this truly transcendental fancy, in describing which, the Professor out-does all his former out-doings; so that those who may take the trouble to read his account of the fancy, which he so specially claims as his own, will, we think, admit that nonsense can no further go: "I believe her soul thinks itself into his little crooked body at times—if it does not get really freed, or half-freed from her own.

Now comes another display of learning, by which it will be seen that he is acquainted with medicine, as well as with mathematics and astronomy, natural history, the classics, and the fine arts: "Did you ever see a case of catalepsy? Do you know what I mean?" [not exactly.] "Well—transient loss of sense, will, and motion; body and limbs taking any position in which they are put, as if they belonged to a lay figure. She had been talking with him [the little gentleman] one day, when the boarders moved from the table, nearly all at once." Now comes the description of the fit. "But she sate as before, her cheek resting on her hand, her amber-eyes wide open, and still. I went to her—she was breathing as usual, and her heart was beating naturally enough; but she did not anewer—[not having been asked any thing]. I bent her arm, it was plastic as softened wax, and kept the place I gave it. This will never do, thought I. I sprinkled a few drops of water on her forehead. She started, and looked round—'I have been in a dream,' she said; 'give me your hand.' She took my right hand in her left, which looked soft and white enough! but, good heaven! I believe she will crack my bones! "Such a squeeze from the "soft, white hand" of a fair lady, was more calculated, we should have supposed, to protluce at least a slight crack in the skull, than of the bones of the rough fist of a College Professor: but the grip, he tells us, was like that of a "crazy lady, when she snaps the iron window-bars of her prison, though ordinarily she had scarcely strength enough to draw on her glove!" On recovering from this cataleptic attack, "she trembled, and might have fallen, but for me: the poor little soul had been in one of those trances, that belong to the spiritual pathology of higher natures! mostly those of women." That she was subject to these trances, vulgarly yelped cataleptic fits, is previously mentioned in the following stanza of the prefatory poem, from which we have already given some equally exquisite specimens or examples of true poetry.

"She knew not love, yet lived in maiden fancies,
Walked simply clad, a queen of high romance,
And talked strange tongues, with angels, in her trances.''

These trances, the author hints, were of a pythonic, as well
as of cataleptic type, or were accompanied by the gift of second-sight —heretofore supposed to be confined to a highly-favoured and higher-dwelling people; or the natives of those mounts of vision —hills of heather, lyric winds and sighing caves—from which an Ossian caught the inspiration that breathes so sadly and sweetly from the æolian-toned strings of his immortal harp.

Iris, he states, had told him that "the Scottish gift of second-sight ran in her family, and she was afraidshe had it." Accordingly, she soon has a premonition, or vision, of the approaching death of the little gentleman—which is accompanied, as usual, by a cataleptic attack, though of a milder character than that in which with "her soft white hand" she nearly "cracked his bones," and exhibited strength enough "to snap the iron window-bars " of a prison. "One day she came suddenly to me, looking deadly pale. Her lips moved as if she were speaking. Her hair looked strangely, as if lifting itself —[this must have been a trial to the nerves of the beholder] and her eyes were full of wild light. She sunk upon a chair. Some thing had frozen her blood with fear. I thought, from what she said, half-audibly, that she believed she had seen a shrouded figure." How horrid ! "That night, at about eleven
o'clock, I was sent for by the little gentleman, who was taken suddenly ill." We were in hopes that this attack had terminated fatally, so that the public might have been happily rid of one of the bores of "The Breakfast Table;" but here the paper abruptly ends, and, instead of the anxiouly-looked-for last scene, the poem of "Under the Violets" is served up to the readers. Among the mourners for the maiden whose death is commemorated in these affecting stanzas, are some whose sympathies and sorrows cannot but produce a "contagious feeling" in the breast of every reader of the least sensibility or refinement of sentiment.

'' When turning round their dial track,
Eastward the lengthening shadows pass—
Her little mourners clad in black—[of course.]
The crickets sliding through the grass,
Shall pipe for her an evening mass."

We doubt whether the piping of a mass is a usual, or would be a respectful mode of celebratiug that solemn service of the Catholic Church; or whether this kind of music would be endured, either at a funeral or cricket-match ; but, as the licentia vatum can no more be interfered with than the liberty of the press in our free and happy country, we do not know that we have any right to object, to the introduction of such players into the choir of the Muses as the Professor has enlisted and set a-piping in the above stanza.

But we have done, Mr. Editor, as your readers cannot but be tired of the twaddle and "perilous stuff ''—which we have been obliged to quote from "The Book of Iris" in self-defence, or in order to sustain the indictment we have preferred against the Professor and the conductors of the "Atlantic Magazine:" the one for writing, and the other for printing, and inflicting upon the public, such nonsense, pulling sentimentality, and mere scribbling, as that contained in the above book, and the other papers from the pen of " The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table." But, perhaps the Professor is, after all, only slyly satirizing the prevailing taste for mere mawkish sentimentality, improbable fictions, and the penny-a-liner style, both in prose and poetry; and has finally resolved to choke the public, if possible, with a dose—or over-dose—of this kind of writing; as we think he has successfully done (if this be his object) in the "Book of Iris," and the whining and die-away poems with which it is interspersed. If this, however, be his purpose, we must confess ourselves to be fairly sold, and submit to be quizzed in turn, or to take the place of the Professor in the pillory which we had prepared for him, as an offender against all the rules of criticism, composition, and good taste.
ATHENION.

BURTON'S Anatomy of Melancholy has been republished.—
The Boston Advertiser says, in a notice of the new edition:
"Burton's language, embroidered with gems from every source, is heavy and rich, like old brocade, and many an author has found Burton's writings a vast store-house of rich robes, in which he has arrayed himself, and gained general admiration. Thackeray represents Captain Shandon as drawing his editorial learning from Burton—and it is surprising to see how many of Burton's robes, after lending dignity to Sterne's thin figure, have draped the broad shoulders of Pisistratus Caxton. Those who have never read the 'Anatomy of Melancholy,' will find that they have long been familiar with many of its choicest bits of grave humour and simple wisdom.' "

• Of these grotesque arbesques, we have the following detailed and strange account. Here is some thing very odd, to be sure, an Eden of all bumped and crooked creatures. What could have been in her head, when she worked out such fantasies?" She had contrived, we are told, to give to all these humped and crooked creatures "beauty, or dignity, or melancholy grace." A "Bactrian camel, lying under a palm, with a melancholy grace," we suppose. "A dromedary flashing up the sands; a herd of buffaloes, uncouth, shaggy-maned, heavy in the forehead, light in the hind-quarter; and there is a Norman horse, with his huge, rough collar, echoing, as it were [what is this?] the natural form of the other beast" [or of the bison]. "And here are twisted serpents and stately swans, with answering curves in their bowed necks, as if they had snakes' blood under their white feathers." [echoing, we suppose, the natural form of the scaly and writhing reptiles] "A very odd page, indeed," says the Professor, as "not a creature in it is without a curve or twist; and not one of them a mean figure to look at;" all having a certain beauty, or dignity, or melancholy grace. "One more of these interesting items, and we are done." "A ray of cloud on one page, as I remember, with a streak of red zig-zag going out of it, across the papaer, as naturally as a crack runs through a China bowl!"