PERSONAL MEMOIRS OF A RESIDENCE OF THIRTY YEARS WITH THE INDIAN TRIBES ON THE AMERICAN FRONTIERS; with brief Notices of Passing Events, Facts, and Opinions, A. D. 1812 to A. D. 1842. By HENRY R. SCHOOLCRAFT. In one volume: pp. 703. Philadelphia: LIPPINCOT, GRAMBO AND COMPANY.

WE present the subjoined notice of a work which we have not had the pleasure to receive from its publishers, with the confidence that it does not exaggerate the merits which it sets forth and commends. The critic is an old and favorite contributor to the KNICKERBOCKER, whose own literary works give value and force to his literary opinions:

"THIS book is inscribed to A. B. JOHNSON, Esq., of Utica, with whom, in 1810, the author made his first excursion to the West, preparatory to the manufacture of window-glass by a hundred-thousand-dollar corporation, just created by the New-York Legislature. Mr. SCHOOLCRAFT alone possessed any knowledge of glass-making, and to him, with a salary of a thousand dollars a year, was confided the planning of all necessary buildings, contracting for their erection, originating the furnaces, procuring raw materials, governing the artisans, disbursing the expenditures, manufacturing the glass, and preparing it for market. But few manufactories of window-glass existed in the United States, and their absence was painfully apparent in new settlements, by window-sashes disfigured with rude substitutes for glass. This state of the country caused the stock of the corporation to be owned by patriotic citizens; and among the most active and influential of the corporators was the Hon. JOHN GREIG, who resided in Canandaigua, and who is still there, the foremost citizen in all that is praiseworthy; illustrating strikingly, by his eminent social position, the scriptural promise, that 'He who watereth shall be watered again.'

"The bank of Seneca Lake, a mile from Geneva, was selected for the new establishment. Forest timber covered the site; but in about three months glass was manufactured for market, and a small village had been erected for the workmen. Mr. SCHOOLCRAFT was only seventeen years old; and this reveals his early character as unmistakably as the agricultural productions of a country reveal its climate. He was precocious generally, being an expert draftsman, mature penman, with a respectable knowledge of chemistry and mineralogy, while ethically he was exempt from the irregularities which ordinarily accompany youth. We happened to know him intimately at this period, and these remarks result from that intimacy, not from the book, in which his residence at Geneva, and its important incidents, are modestly referred to in a dozen words.

"The author's early expectations, and the pervading tendency of his feelings, were toward a devotion of his life to a sedentary cultivation of literature and science. But 'PROVIDENCE shapes our ends, rough-hew them as we may;' and SCHOOLCRAFT compares more with LEDYARD for activity, than with any other American whose records have interested the world. During thirty years he was an active explorer of the unsettled portions of our territory, when the great lakes and rivers of the west were traversed only by canoes. In one of these excursions he traced the Mississippi to its source, the source being previously deemed problematical; PIKE, in 1806, having placed it at Leech Lake, and Cass, in 1820, at Red Cedar Lake. He was efficiently instrumental in directing public enterprise to the copper regions of Missouri, and in disclosing the general topography of the Mississippi valley, and the regions of the lakes. In no other book is the wonderful progress of our country, in population and industry, so strikingly apparent. We find the author conjecturing the business capabilities of places which, in less than twenty years thereafter, are populous cities; and in the year 1830, he makes one of perhaps the first party of pure pleasure, having no objects of business of any kind, who ever went from the upper lakes to visit Niagara Falls.'

'But the principal interest of the memoirs consists in what pertains to the Indians, among whom the author, during much of the thirty years, acted as agent of the United States. Official station, and his having married a highly educated half-breed grand-daughter of an Indian chief of the vicinity, yielded him unsurpassed advantages for ascertaining the habits of the Indians, their traditions, customs, knowledge, language, superstitions, and opinions generally. The whole information passes into the possession of the reader incidentally, rather than doctrinally; the memoirs constituting a journal of what the author saw and heard, whereby the mass glides before the reader like the contents of a diorama which is being gradually unfolded, every incident introducing naturally its successor. The author avoids the common error of narrating only his intellectual reflections; he gives you the raw, sensible materials, wherefrom every reader can make his own reflections. The raw material is also of a kind which is daily becoming more difficult to collect; the unsophisticated Indian and his antiquities, language, customs, and traditions, being already defaced by time, and fading fast from existence. Nothing could have been more providential than the

residence among the Indians for thirty years of such a person as SCHOOLCRAFT, and at such an epoch. Before his day, men have passed their lives among the Indians, but not like him have they, for thirty years, devoted a vigorous intellect and discriminating judgment in collecting useful information, with no hope of reward but to instruct contemporaries, and to be kindly remembered by posterity. We may well say, with HAMLET, 'You cannot feed capons so;' nor can you feed men so, except the occasional self-denying literary enthusiast.

'The memoirs are, however, only a highly-condensed summary of a thirty years' daily collection of facts; not a detail of items. Many of the items have already been published, Mr. SCHOOLCRAFT being one of our most voluminous authors, as well as one most widely known in Europe and at home. What has not been thus published, he is preparing for publication, as a great national work, under direction of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, by virtue of an act of Congress, passed in March 1847. One large luxurious volume, in folio form, and elegantly illustrated by S. EASTMAN, Captain in the U. S. Navy, has just issued from the press, entitled 'Historical and Statistical Information respecting the History, Condition, and Philosophy of the Indian Tribes of the United States.' The human intellect acquires details most readily, by first acquiring a knowledge of them in gross: hence the present memoirs, though published after many volumes of detail, ought to be read first; just as the journal of our late State Convention is an advantageous precursor to a study of the constitution which the convention formed.

'We cannot close our too brief notice of these interesting memoirs, the chart of a laborious life, without saying that, although we have known the writer favorably for more than forty years, our respect for him is greatly increased by the perusal of this book. He has consorted early and long with public officers, not greatly his official superiors originally, but now high in authority, and prospectively to become still higher-perhaps the highest. For the sake of science, for the sake of literary industry and good example, we trust that the eminent citizens to whom we have alluded will, as a privilege of their exaltation, crown Mr. SCHOOLCRAFT's latter days with some station at Washington, in the line to which he has devoted his life, and where his knowledge may be made available to the country in the highest station to which it is congenial. We know not that his feelings will respond acceptably to this suggestion, and it may shock his delicacy; but we are sure that 'righteousness exalteth a nation,' and that nothing is more righteous than to reward unobtrusive merit.'

THE INDICATIONS OF THE CREATOR: or the Natural Evidences of the Final Cause. By GEORGE TAYLOR. In one volume. New-York: CHARLES SCRIBNER.

ALTHOUGH a belief founded on knowledge and investigation may not be more meritorious, in a theological point of view, than the faith of humble ignorance, yet has the first this higher duty and prerogative: it is the natural protector and defender of the faith of the uninstructed from the assaults of the enemies of morality and religion. Mr. TAYLOR, in the attractive volume before us, has aimed to popularize the additional proofs of the divine creation and government of the universe with which the discoveries of modern physical science has armed the believers in the existence of the DEITY. Proceeding upon the idea of CICERO, in his 'de Natura Deorum,' that the belief in a Deity is the basis on which all the virtues, all justice, piety, and religion must repose, he has in the present work adduced, in a summary way, all the lights of the present advanced state of science, to guide the sincere investigator, and to strike the modern skeptic with 'judicial blindness;' to leave him no excuse for his atheism but that hardness of heart which resists all the weapons of conviction.

The first great step of modern, as well as ancient, infidelity toward demoral izing the nations, has been to debauch their faith in the existence of a Supreme, Omniscient, and Omnipotent BEING, governing all things visible and invisible. The professors of this school of modern philosophy have alternately taught its disciples the atheistical tenets of blind fatalism, or the more dangerous, because more seductive and insidious, but really identical, dogmas of 'pantheism.' In this latter shape, they do but revive the exploded and most unphilosophical doc

trines of EPICURUS, with this slight difference in favor of the ancient school over the modern, that, while EPICURUS did not expressly deny the existence of the gods, but merely held them indifferent to all human affairs, the pantheists make gods of every collection of organic and inorganic matter that ever existed, or ever will exist. This is the main foundation of the ingenious, metaphysical absurdities of SPINOLA, and of his modern, though, in many instances, unconscious followers. But in whatever form these irreligious theories may present themselves, it is not permitted to those who can give a reason for the enlightened and steadfast faith which is in them of the existence of the DEITY, to fold their arms, and leave the field as if the battle were won. It is a fight which has lasted more than forty centuries, in every successive generation of humanity. It is a contest 'never ending, still beginning:' new combatants present themselves continually, and with the same facts on either side. These facts are but the weapons. Knowledge, reason, induction, these are the life and breath and strength which must decide the issue. Happily for mankind, the spirit of persecution which sought to spread religion by fire, fagots and torture, has long ago discovered its error. The calm investigation of science, stamped with the seal of Christian charity, is found to be the best of all swords and of all shields. It is this spirit which sheds a serenity over the work of Mr. TAYLOR, and is not the least of its numerous recommendations. Not a word of denunciation, not a syllable of bigotry, disfigures his pages. It is truly refreshing to find a work, controversial in its aim and object, so entirely free from that almost inevitable concomitant of polemical philosophy, and sometimes of purely theological exegesis.

It is most curious to observe, however, that some of those philosophical writers who have furnished the strongest ramparts of natural religion in their works, have most offended the ignorant and besotted bigotry of their times. DES CARTES and PASCAL were each of them denounced as enemies of the true Church by unlettered bigots in the Church itself! Yet what magazine has supplied more weapons to combat infidelity than the works of PASCAL? Through all the works of DES CARTES, and particularly in his intimate scientific correspondence with his enthusiastic scholar and admirer, the Princess PALATINE, there breathes a spirit of true religion, on which Dr. Young's well-known line may have been founded:

'An undevout astronomer is mad.'

It is true, that upon some minds the transition from the darkness of ignorance to the wondrous light of science has operated to blind their vision; chiefly by causing them to forget that God has only enabled mortals to comprehend secondary causes. But where one such instance has occurred, thousands have derived from scientific researches a firmer faith and a purer devotion. They have searched the great book of nature in the same spirit as the Christian is enjoined to search the Scriptures—the spirit of truth. Those who thus pursue her, must be content to arrive slowly, and to remain at that great portal of the temple of human knowledge, where is inscribed its final doom in this world: "Tis but to know how little can be known;' yet are we not, therefore, to remit our endeavors within that limit. Modern science has accomplished more than even half a century ago was dreamed of. But it sees its labors of HERCULES are only beginning. Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased;' and as its new treasures accumulate, we may hope that some skilful hand shall still group all its new discoveries in one picture, with the same beneficent intention which has dictated the composition of the volume before us.

In this volume Mr. TAYLOR has undertaken to present a resumé of the chief discoveries which have from time to time furnished those grand explanations of the phenomena of nature that have shed such lustre on the savants of the nineteenth century: with that aim he has reviewed, in a summary way, the triumphs of science in various branches; all of which tend to establish the great proposition which lies at the foundation of natural religion. He gives us a coup d'œil, first, of the discoveries in regard to the Nebular Hypotheses; second, Astronomy; third, Geology; fourth, Comparative Physiology; fifth, Physical Geography: a large, a boundless field of investigation is each of them, truly. But it is not to attempt new theories or discoveries in them that Mr. TAYLOR proposes to himself or his readers. It is to count up what we have gained already, to set down and reckon up the victories won in the cause of science, and to apply them to the service of a yet higher and holier cause.

THE GOLDEN LEGEND. BY HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. In one volume: pp. 301. Bos ton: TICKNOR, REED AND FIELDS.

THIS is the most elaborately dramatic, if we may judge from perhaps a somewhat too cursory perusal, of all of Professor LONGFELLOW's writings. The frequent change and variety of scene, and the contrasts of character, are remarkable and striking. The language, generally highly poetical, sometimes rises to the extreme of imaginative, rhythmical eloquence, and sometimes, again, sinks to the mere platitudes of babbling juvenility. The measure is singularly irregular and various. The work, indeed, is a sort of museum of poetical styles; and yet in each the reader will be struck with gems that he would scarcely desire to encounter in any different setting. Designing again to advert to the 'Legend,' we content ourselves for the present with two extracts; the first an episode on a scene at Strasburg, in which we have this 'picture in little' of the great cathedral:

"Lo! with what depth of blackness thrown
Against the clouds, far up the skies
The walls of the cathedral rise,
Like a mysterious grove of stone,
With fitful lights and shadows blending,
As from behind the moon, ascending,
Lights its dim aisles and paths unknown!
The wind is rising; but the boughs
Rise not and fall not with the wind

That through their foliage sobs and soughs;

Only the cloudy rack behind,
Drifting onward, wild and ragged,
Gives to each spire and buttress jagged
A seeming motion undefined.

Below on the square, an armed knight,
Still as a statue and as white,

Sits on his steed, and the moon-beams quiver
Upon the points of his armor bright,

As on the ripples of a river.

Our second extract, and all, save one, we are sorry to say, for which we can find room, represents a night-scene from a terrace overlooking the sea at Genoa :

'IT is the sea, it is the sea,

In all its vague immensity,

Fading and darkening in the distance!

Silent, majestical, and slow,

The white ships haunt it to and fro,
With all their ghostly sails unfurled,
As phantoms from another world
Haunt the dim confines of existence!
But ah! how few can comprehend
Their signals, or to what good end
From land to land they come and go!
Upon a sea more vast and dark
The spirits of the dead embark,
All voyaging to unknown coasts.
We wave our farewells from the shore,

And they depart, and come no more,
Or come as phantoms and as ghosts.

'Above the darksome sea of death
Looms the great life that is to be,
A land of cloud and mystery,

A dim mirage, with shapes of men
Long dead, and passed beyond our ken.
Awe-struck we gaze, and hold our breath
Till the fair pageant vanisheth,
Leaving us in perplexity,

And doubtful whether it has been
A vision of the world unseen,
Or a bright image of our own
Against the sky in vapors thrown.'

How forcibly is the spiritual deduction from this outward scene of nature presented in this precious extract! We select one more passage from a graphic

scene, 'A farm in the Odenwald:'

'ONE morning, all alone,

Out of his convent of gray stone,
Into the forest older, darker, grayer,
His lips moving as if in prayer,
His head sunken upon his breast
As in a dream of rest,

Walked the Monk FELIX. All about
The broad, sweet sunshine lay without,
Filling the summer air;

And within the woodlands as he trod,
The twilight was like the Truce of GOD

With worldly woe and care;

Under him lay the golden moss;

And above him the boughs of hemlock-trees
Waved, and made the sign of the cross,
And whispered their Benedicites:

And from the ground

Rose an odor sweet and fragrant
Vines that wandered,

Seeking the sunshine, round and round.

"These he heeded not, but pondered
On the volume in his hand,

A volume of SAINT AUGUSTINE,
Wherein he read of the unseen
Splendors of God's great town
In the unknown land,

And, with his eyes cast down
In humility, he said:

'I believe, O God,

What herein I have read,

But alas! I do not understand!'

But we must draw our notice, brief and inadequate as it is, to a close; commending to general perusal, however, in the mean time, the excellent but unequal dramatic poem upon which it is based.

THE LAND OF BONDAGE: its Ancient Monuments and Present Condition: being the Journal of a Tour in Egypt. By J. M. WAINWRIGHT, D. D. New-York: D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. THIS superbly executed and illustrated volume will attract a large share of the admiration and patronage of book-buyers, in the holidays which are now nearly upon us. The title of the work, in the first place, strikes us as felicitous. 'We cannot look,' says the author, in explanation of its choice, 'upon the colossal works which remain to fix our attention and excite our wonder, without the painful remembrance that they are to Egypt mighty land-marks of her ancient servitude. The very greatness of the pyramids is a speaking proof of the despotic power of an iron will, brought to bear with a crushing and irresistible force upon a population of bond-slaves. How futile would prove the attempt to raise, in a free land, structures so vast, and of such comparative inutility! Thus the very wonders that attract the footsteps of the pilgrim, and seem to be the glory of Egypt, distinguishing her from all other lands, cannot be contemplated without a reminiscence of her ancient degradation.' The starting-point of our author was Rome; and all the details of his journey to and through Egypt, although minute. are replete with interest. Indeed, we are not sure that the agreeable manner in which he records little things does not very materially help to make up the charm of his book. The little desagrémens of travel are given with perfect simplicity; as witness, among other instances, the reverend doctor imparting his first practical lesson in washing, starching, and ironing, to a stupid servant on board the boat, going down the Nile; a scene which will win many a smile from his readers. The engravings, of which there are twenty-eight, embrace all the principal scenes and objects to be met with in Egyptian journeying or voyaging, and are executed with spirit and elegance; while the printing and paper of the work are the very luxury of typography. Again we commend the volume to the liberal acceptance of the public. Although many kindred works have appeared, there are none which we have encountered that will better reward perusal.