is of a certain worth, doubtless, to the weary, sinful adult,—­but to one who feels his life in every limb, incomprehensible, and an offence.  Of the vulgar superstition which would confuse the nursery with creeds and vain prayer-repetitions of the heathen there is far too much.  We have known parents, reputed pious and church-going, who delighted to pour crushing enigmas into infant ears, and then to make a sorry household jest of the feeble one’s grotesque attempts to extend or limit the Unspeakable.  As the highest concerns of man can be known only by the spirit, so they can be taught only by the spirit.  It is not the words we repeat, but the temper in which we daily live, that moulds the family to honor or dishonor.  It is the spirit of the father and mother which produces results mistaken for intuitions by the superficial.  And, truly, youth, thus warmly rooted in generosity and nobility, will, in its own good time, stretch tender leaves up to the Higher Light.  And when Nature is ready for worship, mark how wisely Richter directs it:—­“The sublime is a step to the temple of religion, as the stars are to that of infinity.  Let the name of God be heard by the child in connection with all that is great in Nature,—­the storm, the thunder, the starry heavens, and death,—­a great misfortune,—­a great piece of good-fortune,—­a great crime,—­a greatly noble action:  these are the sites on which to build the wandering church of childhood.”

In conclusion, we can only repeat, that the greatest charm of “Levana” is its suggestion of a possible household, from what the reader feels was once an actual household.  The cheap sentimentalism of parental relations has often been a favorite property with men of imaginative genius.  Rousseau and Byron knew how to use it as a fictitious background before which they might posture with effect.  But, until the world’s literature shall mercifully forget them, the “Enfants Trouves” and the Venetian bagnio strip these writers of their fine words, and hold them before the generations in scandal and disgrace.  No reader of “Levana” can miss the refutation of that poisonous lie, that men of genius, because of their mental endowments, have a natural inaptitude for domestic relations, or are unhappy therein from any other cause than their own foolishness or guilt.  We hear the tender strains of a deep poet, privileged by acquired worthiness to return to those divine instincts which were vivid in the simplest condition of the family.  To all who can bring the writings of Richter within their range we commend this book.  Those who have learned to enjoy his strong-darting language, his complex constructions, his kindly humor, will find these working together with noblest aim.  In these times of our country’s peril, there is some sanative virtue outside of treatises upon strategy or Union pamphlets.  It is well to print and circulate the literature of war.  But it is also a sweet and a timely mission to impart a new inspiration into that life of the family to-day which shall become the life of the nation to-morrow.