Poganuc People: Their Loves and Lives.

Harriet Beecher Stowe gives us a loving picture of the life, almost two centuries ago, of a little mountain town in Connecticut, which, we suppose, may stand as a type of New England villages and townlets in the days which she seems to look back with some regret, "when its people were of our own blood and race, and the pauper population of Europe had not as yet been landed upon our shores"—a picture admirable for finish of drawing and a kind of delicate, sober harmony in the colouring. One might say of it that not a touch is wanting, and that it has not one in excess. The subject, too, is eminently happy—far enough away from us to have the attraction of novelty, and yet near enough for its details to be thoroughly intelligible.

With much skillfulness of touch, and humour, does Stowe set before us the various strata of Poganuc society, the stately and dignified families, with traditions of ancestral importance, some of whom, it is supposed, would have been better pleased if the Revolutionary War had had a different issue, and the sturdy democracy, few of whom would accept domestic service on any terms, and whenever they did always stipulated that their attendance should not be summoned by a bell, and that they should have free right of entrance into the house by the front door. Then we have a graphic account of the rivalry between the Congregationalism, or Presbyterianism, as it was called, which had only a few years earlier ceased to be the established religion of the State, and the Episcopalianism, which in New England, in the early days, she says, "was emphatically a root out of dry ground;" of the celebration of the Fourth of July, when the Declaration of Independence would be read by the stately old Colonel Davenport, who had been a confidential friend of Washington, clad in the very uniform in which he had held an important command during the war; and of the religious "revival," brought about by the zeal of Parson Cushing, in which even the hard heart of the cross-grained old pagan Zeph Higgins becomes at last softened; and last, not least, some exquisitely-worded descriptions of the on-coming of the tardy New England spring, and the glory and beauty of the brief New England summer.

The principal persons, too, who people the book, are life-like and striking, and worthy of their setting. Little Dolly Cushing, with her childish high spirits and love of fun, and her solemn and dreamy enthusiasms, is a most winning child-heroine; and her father, Dr. Cushing, the minister, a man of learning, who can delight his congregation by quoting Clement of Alexandria against the observance of Christmas, in the original Greek,—and delight them all the more because hardly a man among them has any idea who Clement was,—and is at the same time a shrewd, practical farmer, who has himself in his time been a farmer's boy, is an excellent type of the Puritan divine, the rigour of whose Calvinistic theology is softened by a strong vein of natural humour, and a healthy love of out-door life. Nor must Hiel Jones and Nabby Higgins be omitted, as fine specimens of the genuine Yankee lad and lass.

"Poganuc People," in short, is a book that on every ground merits unmixed praise.