During the past year Mr. Underwood has published several poems of remarkable merit, referring to the war.  In the present we have a work of higher ambition, and one which is truly well done.  In it the horrors of slavery, the iniquitous abuses to which it so often gives rise—­the tortures, vengeances, murders, and fiendish punishments, which in their turn follow the crime—­are portrayed with striking truthfulness and real power.  The author is evidently no Abolitionist on hear-say—­the whole poem gives evidence of practical familiarity with ‘the institution,’ and the sense of truth has inspired his pen in many passages with wonderful power.  The terrible sufferings of an almost white man and slave as here portrayed, his revenge and punishment at the stake, are as moving as they are manifestly true to life.  We commend this little pamphlet-poem to every friend of freedom, and sincerely trust that it will attain the large circulation which it deserves.

SKETCHES OF THE RISE, PROGRESS, AND DECLINE OF SECESSION.  With a Narrative of Personal Adventures among the Rebels.  By W.G.  BROWNLOW, Editor of the Knoxville Whig.  Philadelphia:  Geo. W. Childs. 1862.

A decided character this ‘Parson Brownlow,’ and a representative man; truly and bravely American, very Western in his traits; a man fond of fierce argument and tough antagonisms, and not fearing the death either by halter or revolver, which he will probably meet some day, for the sake of Jehovah and his own stern convictions.  Not exactly a man of salons and elegant reunions—­yet full of real courtesies and gifted with the kind heart of a true hater of wickedness, which flashes into fury at witnessing deeds of cruelty and shame.  And he has seen many such—­seen what few have done and lived—­he has passed through a life’s warfare with men of his own grim obstinacy without his own honesty and stern Puritan-like morality.  We have followed his course for years—­we have met him ‘afore-time,’ when quite other subjects of quarrel engaged him, and could have prophesied then with tolerable accuracy what part he would play when it came to a question between bayonets and prisons for the truth.

As we have hinted, he is a splendid hater, and a ferocious antagonist, a prince of vituperators and a very vitriol-thrower of savage sarcasms at his enemies and those of humanity.  And why should he not be all of this, when we consider that in the stage whereon his part of life is played a more delicate student of all the proprieties would have about the same chances of success as attended the unfortunate cat which ventured without claws among panthers.  Measure such men by their moral worth and by the good they do, and do not require of the hard-shell Methodist preacher and tough polemical grappler with Satan in his most bristly and thick-skinned Western incarnations that he display too much delicacy.  Those who will read his book may gather from it, beyond the interesting personal and political narrative of which it consists, many useful and curious hints as to the social development of America and of what men the country is truly made.  It is a real work—­one of value—­interesting to all, and very truly one of the monuments of this war and of the scenes which preceded it in Tennessee.