The International Weekly Miscellany - Volume I, No. 2 | Page 3

for the advancement of society,--as may be gathered from
our first quotation. These two sentiments impart elevation, faith, and
resignation; so that memory, thought, and a chastened tenderness,
generally predominate over deep grief. The grave character of the
theme forbids much indulgence in conceits such as Tennyson
sometimes falls into, and the execution is more finished than his
volumes always are: there are very few prosaic lines, and few instances
of that excess of naturalness which degenerates into the mawkish. The
nature of the plan--which, after all, is substantially though not in form a
set of sonnets on a single theme--is favorable to those pictures of
common landscape and of daily life, redeemed from triviality by genial
feeling and a perception of the lurking beautiful, which are the author's
distinguishing characteristic. The scheme, too, enables him
appropriately to indulge in theological and metaphysical reflections;
where he is not quite so excellent. Many of the pieces taken singly are
happy examples of Tennyson, though not perhaps the very happiest. As
a whole, there is inevitably something of sameness in the work, and the
subject is unequal to its long expansion; yet its nature is such, there is
so much of looseness in the plan, that it might have been doubled or

trebled without incongruity. It is one of those books which depend
upon individual will and feeling, rather than upon a broad subject
founded in nature and tractable by the largest laws of art. Hence,
though not irrespective of laws, such works depend upon instinctive
felicity--felicity in the choice of topics and the mode of execution,
felicity both in doing and in leaving undone: this high and perfect
excellence, perhaps, In Memoriam has not reached, though omission
and revision might lead very close to it."
[Footnote 1: In Memoriam. By Alfred Tennyson. 1 vol. 12mo. Boston:
Ticknor, Reed & Fields. 1850.]
* * * * *
ETHERIZATION.--A writer in the Medical Times says, "The day,
perhaps, may not be far off, when we shall be able to suspend the
sensibility of the nervous chords, without acting on the center of the
nervous system, just as we are enabled to suspend circulation in an
artery without acting on the heart."
* * * * *
LEIGH HUNT.
One of the most delightful books of the season will be The
Autobiography of LEIGH HUNT, which is being reprinted by Harper &
Brothers, and will very soon be given to the American public in an
edition of suitable elegance. The last great race of poets and literary
men, observes a writer in the London Standard, is now rapidly
vanishing from the scene: of the splendid constellation, in the midst of
which Campbell, Scott, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Southey,
Crabbe, and Byron, were conspicuous, how few remain! Moore
(rapidly declining), Rogers (upward of eighty), Professor Wilson,
Montgomery, and Leigh Hunt, are nearly all. It is fitting that we prize
these few, as the remnants of a magnificent group, which cannot be
expected very soon to be repeated.
Leigh Hunt has, for nearly half a century, occupied a prominent place

in the public eye, as a politician of a peculiarly bold and decided stamp,
when boldness was necessary for the utterance of the truth; and as a
poet and prose-writer of a singularly-genial and amiable character. As
the chief founder and critic of the Examiner, he would doubtless
occupy a high place in literary history, but as the author of "Rimini" he
is entitled to a more enduring and enviable fame. This will always
stand at the head of his works: but his "Indicator," his "London
Journal," his "Jar of Honey," and others, abound with the illustrations
of a most imaginative and cordial spirit.
We are glad to possess a good autobiography of Leigh Hunt. It is the
first we have from a long list of celebrated men; and no one could give
us such correct, discerning, and delightful insights into their usual life
and true characters. Hazlitt, Lamb, Shelley, Keats, Byron, and a crowd
of others become familiar to us in these pages. It was in the Examiner
that the first compositions of Shelley and Keats were introduced to the
British public; and the friendship which Mr. Hunt maintained with
those poets, till their deaths, casts a sunshine over that portion of his
life, which is peculiarly charming.
Perhaps the two points of this Autobiography which will most attract
the attention of the reader are the author's imprisonment for a libel on
the Prince Regent, and his visit to Italy. In that imprisonment of two
years, he was visited by Byron, Moore, Brougham, Bentham, and
several other eminent men. In the journey to Italy, which was
undertaken in order to coöperate with Byron and Shelley in bringing
out of the "Liberal," Hunt had the misfortune to be deprived