he possessed. This, to a certain extent, is | is not to be copied, for it was in his nature. true; Auber's music was essentially gay He conveyed in notation what he could so and vivacious, coquettish and fascinating. He was not a Raphael, a Michael Angelo, or a Rubens in music; but he was a genre composer of the first class. In "Masaniello," however, he did attain breadth of effect and grandeur; and his Prayer, extracted from an early Mass, is unsurpassed for devotional intensity. His orchestral Preludes rank with those of the first masters. In the "Domino Noir" and the "Diamants de la Couronne" his melodious inspirations were manifested in the highest degree. There is in all his music piquancy and picturesqueness. The forms are his own; the type is his own creation. Imitators have abounded; but Auber's esprit

brilliantly express in conversation. He was a charming causeur; he had his mot and his epigram always ready. His cynicism was cheerful, not bitter. Those who have had the good fortune to listen to a passage-at-arms in art between Auber, Rossini, and Meyerbeer, in the presence of the celebrated Berryer, can recollect the totally distinct characteristics of the Frenchman, the Italian, and the German. The familiar face of Auber, walking on the Boulevard des Italiens, will no more be seen. His works will survive and perpetuate his name as a Musician; his acts of kindness will be remembered, and cause his memory to be respected as a Man.

ODOURS AND THEIR ACTION ON THE HEALTH. THE last part of the Zeitschrift jür Biologie The following remarks apwear in a late num- contains the results of an elaborate series of exber of La Presse médicale belge. A knowledge periments by Gustave Meyer of Oldenburg on of perfumes reaches to the most remote antiq- the effects of feeding dogs and man on bread uity. The Jews made use of them in the time alone, and bread mingled with meat and other of Moses. They were highly esteemed by the articles of diet. He shows what indeed has Greeks in the time of the wise but rigorous | long been known, that to feed either animals or Solon. Their use was carried to excess by the man on bread alone is a great waste of material, Romans; and finally, in our times, they appear and that immense quantities must be given in to have arrived at their utmost perfection and order that the body should lose no flesh, whilst delicacy. It has been reserved also for the pres-on the other hand the addition of some, even ent day to use them in the greatest profusion. But if the perfumes that are everywhere found, and can be extracted by certain processes, may be used with safety, this cannot be said in every case of the odours that are naturally exhaled by flowers, leaves, or fruits. Their action on the economy in a limited space, and especially during the night in a closed chamber, deserves to be noticed. It manifests itself by serious disorder, headache, syncope, and even by asphyxia if their action is too long prolonged. In nervous persons numbness may occur in all the members, convulsions, and loss of voice, but in general only a state of somnolence, accompanied by feebleness and retardation of the action of the heart. This state is often associated with well marked dimness of vision. Amongst the flowers that are most deleterious may be mentioned the lily, hyacinth, narcissus, crocus, rose, carnation, honeysuckle, jessamine, violet, elder, &c. In addition to the danger caused by their sinell should be mentioned their action on the air. During the night flowers actively produce carbonic acid, which is injurious to health. Majendie even cites a case of death caused by a large bouquet of lilies which the sufferer, a previously healthy woman, had slept with in her bedroom. Amongst the more dangerous plants may be mentioned the walnut, the bay-tree, and hemp. The action of these is well known, the latter indeed producing a kind of drunkenness.

though a small quantity, of meat is economical. He demonstrates that the tissues of the body become more watery with insufficient food, which renders the whole organism less capable of resisting injurious influences. In his experiments on man he endeavoured to ascertain which of the several kinds of bread in ordinary use (white bread, rye bread, black bread) was absorbed in greatest amount during its passage through the alimentary canal, and found that white wheaten bread occupies the first place, then leavened rye bread, then the bread (rye) prepared by the Horsford-Liebig process, and lastly the Pumpernickel (North German black bread). Nevertheless, the first is not so satisfying to the feeling of hunger as the three latter, and is more expensive in every point of view. He denies the great nutritious value often attributed to bran, since the nitrogenous compounds it contains are mingled with much nonassimilable matter, but admits that if these could be extracted and were then returned to the flour, the best results would be obtained, as the meal already contains abundance of salts.

The

COAL is cropping up everywhere. Coal of excellent quality has been discovered near the silver mines of Caracoles, in Bolivia. Oregon territory, Alaska, and California, are each of them publishing analyses of coals discovered.

NUMBERS OF THE LIVING AGE WANTED. The publishers are in want of Nos. 1179 and 1180 (dated respectively Jan. 5th and Jan. 12th, 1867) of THE LIVING AGE. To subscribers, or others, who will do us the favor to send us either or both of those numbers, we will return an equivalent, either in our publications or in cash, until our wants are supplied.

PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY

LITTELL & GAY, BOSTON.

FOR EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. But we do not prepay postage on less than a year, nor where we have to pay commission for forwarding the money.

Price of the First Series, in Cloth, 36 volumes, 90 dollars.

Any Volume Bound, 3 dollars; Unbound, 2 dollars. The sets, or volumes, will be sent at the expense of the publishers.

PREMIUMS FOR CLUBS.

For 5 new subscribers ($40.), a sixth copy: or a set of HORNE'S INTRODUCTION TO THE BIBLE, unabridged, in 4 large volumes, cloth, price $10; or any 5 of the back volumes of the LIVING AGE, in numbers, price $10.

Where the still herds like spots of shadows Love the wayfarer becomes Love the guest;

From Blackwood's Magazine.

A CENTURY OF GREAT POETS, FROM 1750 DOWNWARDS.

NO. I.-WILLIAM COWPER.

the most delicate and finest-toned which humanity possessed. His power on it was such that the most trivial motif, the most mean topic, became in his hands an occasion of harmony. We confess without hesitation that the music of Pope's verse does not enchant and enthral our particular ear, but it did that of his own generation. It belonged, as does so much of the poetry of France, to an age more moved by culture than by nature; building upon certain doctrines and tenets of literary belief; trusting in style as in a confession of faith, and establishing as strict a severance between the orthodox and heterodox in literature, as ever a community of ecclesiastics has done in a religious creed. Perhaps that was the only period of English literature in which an Academy would have been possible. Pope made himself the poetic standard of the age. His contemporaries were measured by it as by a rule; and no one came up to the height of the great master. He gave to his generation a stream of melodious words such as might have made the whole country sweet, but which, unfortunately, being often employed to set forth nauseous or trifling subjects, gave no nobility to the mind of his period, but only a mathematical music - something which touched the ear rather than the heart.

THERE is no art which has suffered so many fluctuations, or which shows more exactly how the tide of genius ebbs and flows, than the art of Poetry. Within the last two hundred years there have been some score of interregnums during which the world has mournfully declared, as with one voice, that its power of appreciating verse was over, and the fountain dried from which that stream should come. One of these grand crises had arrived in the middle of the eighteenth century. In the interval between the end of Milton and the beginning of Pope the art of song had suffered one of its many metamorphoses. It had changed from an inspired message into an elaborate chime of words. Milton, grand, harmonious, and musical as is his utterance at all times, was a man overflowing with high thought and lofty meaning; with so much to say to his generation that the mode of saying it might almost have been expected to become indifferent to him. It never did so, because of the inborn music of the man - that wonderful sense of melody in which he has never been surpassed, if indeed ever equalled, in the English tongue. But notwithstanding this great natural gift, his subject was the But in Pope his school came to a close. thing pre-eminent with him; and as his It was impossible to do anything finer, subject was of the highest importance and more subtle, or more perfect in the art of solemnity, so his verse rose into organ- combining words. If there had been given floods of severest sweetness. Dryden, to him a message to deliver, probably he who succeeded him, did not possess a would not have reached to such perfection similar inspiration. He had no message in the mode of delivering it; but as it to the world to speak of, and yet he had a was, he brought to its highest fulfilment great deal to say. Accordingly with him and completion the poetical style of which the subject began to lower and the verse he was capable. And the time had come to increase in importance. And in Pope for a new melody, something which should this phase of poetry attained its highest rouse up the jaded world from the slumber development. With him everything gave into which it had fallen after all that way to beauty of expression. No pro- monotony of sweetness which had lulled phetic burden was his to deliver. The its brain into insensibility. The man who, music of the spheres had never caught his in the silence of the age, was being preear. Verse was the trade in which he pared for this work, was about the last was skilled, not the mere mode of utter- man whom we would have chosen for it ance by which a mind overflowing with had we been admitted to the councils of thoughts of heaven or earth communicated Providence. He was a man of weak yet these thoughts to its fellows. He was an tenacious character, unsteady mind, and admirable performer upon an instrument melancholy temperament; a pensive being

and his works are two things as distinct as light and darkness. Never was there a clearer example of the distinction so often lost sight of between personal and intellectual character a distinction which we are forced to recognize and accept without being able either to harmonize or to explain.

born to be a recluse, without any of the two characters are far from agreeing, and bolder manly gifts which please our yet they united in one person. His life national taste; without acquaintance with men, or experience in life; a hypochondriac, a man sick in body and in soul. Had he himself been aware of the effect he should have upon the literature of his country, no doubt he would have considered it a triumph of that goodness of God which chooses the weak things of the world to confound the strong. Such, more than William Cowper was born in Great any other, is the first impression produced Berkhamstead, Hertfordshire, in Novemupon us by the life of Cowper; that ber 1731, a few years before the death of mournful life over which so many a reader the potentate whom he succeeded, after a has mused with wonder and awe, marvel- long interval, upon the throne of English ling no less at the undeserved and need-poetry. Pope was lingering out his last less sufferings of the man, than at the curious vigour and vitality of the poet. In the one point of view, weak, helpless, unreasoning, and most miserable; in the other, full of the sunshine of cheerful ye solemn thought, good sense, and that genial universal sympathy which helps so many men to bear the burden of their troubles all the easier for the help they afford to others. So many have asked the question, How this could be? that it seems vain to reiterate an inquiry which no new information helps us to answer; but it is impossible to arrive at any just view of English poetry and poets without fully taking into consideration the timid, sad, half-feminine figure which was the first to triumph over the artificial boundaries which had been raised about his art, and to found in nature and freedom the greatest school of poets which has been known in England since the Elizabethan age.

days on his river-side when the delicate child of the Hertfordshire parson was being "drawn to school along the public way" in that bright early morning of his childhood when he had still a mother. This period did not last long. The poor little sickly boy was left without the guardianship most needful to a child when he was but six years old. He protested at fifty, with a vehemence which it is difficult to give a literal credence to, that his mother had never been out of his thoughts for a week altogether during that long half-century - a filial fidelity in which surely he never had a rival. His father married again, we are not told how soon; but the child scarcely seems to have ever lived at home after this first great loss of his life. He was sent off, probably, in the first sting of it, to school, to a certain Dr. Pitman's where the timid little fellow was badly used by a cruel big boy: then passed That Cowper did this there can be no two years under the charge of an occulist, doubt he was timid, not only as a woman, his eyes having shown symptoms of weakbut as a cloistered woman, from whom the ness-and at ten entered Westminster world has been entirely shut out- and School. Unfortunately, our only knowlprejudiced as every sectarian is by nature: edge of his childhood and youth is derived his being was given up to the pettiest from the gloomy account given by himself occupations, and a life such as even a girl in after life of his early unregenerate days, or an old woman might be pardoned for an account clouded in every detail with finding dreary and monotonous: he was the gloom of ideas which belong to a later used to dependence, and content with it, period of his life, and were very unlikely feeble of purpose, capricious, and obsti- to have entered the heart of a child. nate; yet in his way he turned the world From this account it would be inferred upside down, scorned models alike and that the poor little timid Cowper was a trammels, and, defying all precedents, child of remarkable depravity, brought up threw open the doors of poetry to all the by a succession of extremely wicked peoworld and to a new generation. These lple, all conspiring to heighten the natural

1