overworn by incessant labor. ness of association with him. upon us but we forbear. These hopes are strongest in proportion to the near- The work on the Book of Revelation is to be followed by one on the Book of Daniel, the Introduction to which is now familiar to our readers. In regard to the Commentary on Revelation, we are authorized to say, that an extended Review of it, together with other books on the Apocalypse, with special reference to the Millenarian views, may be soon expected, by a writer every way competent for the work. VI. Calvin Translation Society. This society was formed in 1843, with its centre at Edinburgh. Its object is to publish the entire works of John Calvin, in English. Part of them are new, and part of them the old translations. The volumes are beautifully printed, and are to extend to about forty. Our readers may be interested in the names of the patrons of the Society, especially as it shows the appreciation abroad, of the Great Reformer. They are the Dukes of Manchester and Argyll, Lords Cholmondeley, Breadalbane, Hill, Ashley, Calthorpe, Belhaven, Lindsay, Rayleigh, the Duchess of Gordon, the Bishops of Cashel, Calcutta and Georgia (U. S.) The "Acting and Editorial Secetary" is Robert Pitcairn. The following works have been published: The Commentaries on Romans, Acts, Psalms, in four volumes; the Twelve Minor Prophets, in five volumes; Gospel of John, two volumes; Genesis, two vols.; Corinthians, two vols.; Ezekiel, two vols.; Isaiah, vol. I.; Jeremiah, vol. I.; Tracts, two vols.; Institutes, in three vols.; Harmony of the Evangelists, three vols.; Commentary on Romans, new translation. We are sure that our readers would be delighted to look at these beautiful books, and feel gratified that a Society of such men are engaged in giving to the world so fine an edition of the works of so noble a man. One of the subscribers informs us that he obtains the volumes at one dollar and eighty cents each. We can hardly conceive of a finer addition to a minister's library. VII. The Wodrow Society. This Association was instituted in May, 1841, "for the publication of the Works of the Fathers and Early Writers of the Reformed Church of Scotland." The following works have been published: 1. Two vols. of the Works of John Knox, containing the History of the Reformation in Scotland. 2. Calderwood's History of the Kirk of Scotland, in eight vols. Calderwood is supposed to have finished this history in 1637. He died in 1650. The materials of his history were chiefly taken from Knox's History of the Reformation, Bannatyne's Memorials, Davidson's Scottish Martyrology, (a work never published, and perhaps no longer extant,) and Melville's Diary and Autobiography. While these formed the ground-work of his narrative, he also availed himself of the Records of the General Assembly; the State Papers written during the reigns of Mary Stuart and James VI.; and the numerous pamphlets and broad-sheets on Ecclesiastical matters, which constituted so large a portion of the literature of the day." 3. Select Works of Robert Rollock, Principal of the University of Edinburgh. Died 1599. 2 vols. 4. Autobiography and Life of Rev. Robert Blair. 5. Narration of the State, &c., of the Kirk of Scotland, since the Reformation, by William Scot, minister of Cupar. Records touching the Estate of the Kirk in the years 1605-6, by John Forbes, minister of Alford. 6. Two vols. of Select Biographies, containing the Life of John Welsh, Patrick Simson, John Livingstone, Lord Kenmure, Walter Pringle, David Dickson, William Guthrie, Fraser of Brea, John Nisbet, the Lady Coltness, the Lady Anne Douglas, Mrs. Janet Hamilton, Mrs. Goodall, with the Tract of John Stevenson. 7. Ferme and Melville's Commentary on Romans, translated from the Latin. 8. Wodrow Miscellany. There are probably some others which we have not seen. The whole number of volumes is twenty-four. The Society was dissolved in 1850, but two publications about to be issued, uniform with those of the Society, were recommended to the subscribers. They are, the additional four volumes to complete Knox's Works, and a collection of original and hitherto unpublished Letters of the Covenanters, edited by Rev. James Anderson, in two volumes. VIII. On the Study of Words. By Richard Chenevix Trench, B. D., Vicar of Itchenstoke, Hants; Examining Chaplain to the Lord Bishop of Oxford, and Professor of Divinity, King's College, London. From the second London edition, revised and enlarged. pp. 236. This book consists of six Lectures, with the following titles: I. Introductory Lecture. II. On the Morality of Words. III. The History in Words. IV. The Rise of new words. V. The Distinction of Words. VI. The School master's use of Words. The Lectures were addressed to a large class of young men in London, who were preparing to become schoolmasters. It is a delightful book. Although it does not make all that might be made of the subject, yet its drift, (to use a word that became rather famous in our last General Assembly), is in the right direction. Some extracts will show the animus of the writer. “But has man fallen, and deeply fallen, from the heights of his original creation? We need no more than his language to prove it. Like everything else about him, it bears at once the stamp of his greatness and of his degradation; of his glory and of his shame. What dark and sombre threads he must have woven into the tissue of his life, before we could trace such dark ones running through the tissue of his language! "It needs no more than to open a dictionary, and to cast our eye thoughtfully down a few columns, and we shall find abundant confirmation of this sadder and sterner estimate of man's moral and spiritual condition. How else shall we explain this long catalogue of words, having all to do with sin, or with sorrow, or with both? How came they there? I open the first letter of the alphabet. Presently follow words such as these; affliction,' agony,' 'anguish,' 'assassin,' 'atheist,' avarice,' and twenty more-words, you will observe, for the most part, not laid up in the recesses of the language, to be drawn forth and used at rare opportunities, but occupying, many of them, its foremost ranks. And, indeed, as regards abundance, it is a melancholy thing to observe how much richer is every vocabulary in words that set forth sins than in those that set forth graces." pp. 37-39. "There is much, too, we may learn from looking a little closely at the word ' passion.' We sometimes think of the passionate' man as a man of strong will, and of real though ungoverned energy; but this word declares to us most plainly, the contrary; for it, as a very solemn use of it declares, means properly, ‘suffering;' and a passionate man is not a man doing something, but one suffering something to be done on him. The same sense of passion and feebleness going together, of the first being born of the second, lies, as I may remark by the way, in the two-fold use of the Latin word impotens, which meaning first weak, means then violent; and then often weak and violent together. pp. 51, 52. "We see that words continually take their side, are some of them children of light, others children of this world, or even of darkness; they beat with the pulses of our life; they stir with our passions; they receive from us the impressions of our good and of our evil, which again they are active further to propagate among us. Must we not own then, that there is a wondrous and mysterious world, of which we may have hitherto taken too little account, around us and about us? And may there not be a deeper meaning than we have hitherto attached to it, lying in that solemn declaration, By thy words thou shalt be justified; and by thy words shalt thou be condemned.' p. 71. "The feeling wherewith one watches the rise above the horizon of new words, some of them to shine forever as luminaries in the moral and intellectual heaven above us, can oftentimes be only likened to that which the poet so grandly describes, of -Some watcher of the skies, When a new planet swims into his ken.' "I would instance of words religious and ecclesiastical, such as these: Christian,' first in Acts xi. 26; Trinity,' first in Tertullian, Adv. Prax. c. 3; ' Catholic,' as an epithet applied to the Church, first by Ignatius, Ad Smyr. c. 8; Canonical,' as a distinctive characteristic of the received Scriptures, Origen, Opp. v. 3, p. 36, (Ed. de la Rue); 'New Testament,' as expressing the complex of the sacred books of the new covenant, Tertullian Adv. Marc. iv. 1. Adv. Prax. xv. 20; Gospels,' as applied to the four inspired records of the life of our Lord, Justin Martyr, Apol. i. 66; or, again, historical and geographical, as the first mention of 'Judea,' Eschylus, Suppl. 282; the first emerging of the names 'Germany,' and the German,' probably first in the works of Cæsar; the earliest mention of Rome by any writer, probably Hellanicus, a contemporary of Herodotus; or when the entire Hesperian peninsula acquired the title of Italy,' which had been gradually creeping up for centuries, from its southern extremity, in the time of Augustus Cæsar; Merivale (Hist. of Rome, v. 3, p. 157) notices what he believes the first use of it which has come down to us in this its widest sense. When Asia, on this side Taurus, was first called 'Asia Minor' in Orosius, i. 2; that is, in the fifth cen tury of our æra; the earliest notice which we have of the Normans,' under this title, in the Geographer of Ravenna; who first gave to the newly discovered continent, in the west, the name of America.' Alexander Von Humboldt, who has studied the question closely, ascribes its general reception to its having been introduced into a popular and influential book on geography, published in 1507. At what moment the words' tyrant' and 'tyranny,' marking so distinct an epoch as they do in the political history of Greece, first appeared-in the writings of Archilochus, about B. C 700; when and from whom the fabric of the external universe first received the title of 'Cosmos,' or 'beautiful order,' (the word is ascribed, as is well known, to Pythagoras, born about B. C. 570); with many more of the same description." pp. 110-112. "How many words, with which we are now perfectly familiar, are for us what bills of exchange, or circular notes are for the merchant and the traveller. As in one of these last, innumerable pence, a multitude of shillings, not a few pounds, are gathered up and represented, so have we, in some single words, the quintessence and final result of an infinite number of anterior mental processes, ascending one above the other; and all of which have been at length summed up for us in them." p. 130. "Trivial' is a word borrowed from the life; mark three or four persons standing idly at the point where one street bisects at right angles another, and discussing there the worthless gossip, the idle nothings of the day. There you have the 'tres viæ,' the 'trivium;' and 'trivialities,' properly mean such talk as is holden by those idle loiterers that gather at those meetings of three roads." p. 216. Such shoals of books come out every season, that one's first impression would be, that the public power of appreciation would become confused, but it is very interesting to observe how a really valuable book quietly filtrates into the possession of the thinkers of the times, and so becomes successful. The froth subsides into the deep, the mire and dirt are dashed into some obscure corner, but the pearls are found by the diver, and cherished as priceless. For "there is a main spring after all." God, and not Satan made the world, and the great, the beautiful, and the true, find appreciators. So the reader must have observed, with delight and thankfulness, that of a poem for example, or a play, precisely the noblest and purest lines obtain universal currency, while the rubbish "rots like the weed on Lethe's wharf." This book, with its unpromising title, you will find already in the hands of the leaders in the army of Thought; the best Reviews are noticing it; and it has a reputation, we have no doubt, much beyond what the author expected for it; for men often produce their best works, unconsciously. When the mind is wrought into its highest and noblest state, it works with infinite ease, and hence does not value products which cost so little; but all the Sisyphan labor of its duller hours may be worth less than the sands of that golden stream which were rolled down sparkling in the sunshine, the sport of a summer's day, the Pactolus of the heart's holiday. We say not this at all to discourage labor-we are ourselves very far indeed from being idle men--but to give its due meed of praise to that divine gift of the Almighty's beneficence, which we call genius. We delight to see in our fallen world the signs of the presence of its blessed Creator; and surely that brilliant form of an intelligence, that we call the soul of Plato or Shakspeare, is one of the most wondrous results of creative power. How immensely less was the wisdom and the imagination requisite to create Niagara, then that which went to the moulding of Eschylus, or Newton! This philologico-philosophical criticism, of which Mr. Trench has given us so pleasant a specimen, is very fascinating to us, and we are delighted to find the book so popular. Coleridge seems to have had the deepest feeling of all men, of the concentrated power that lies in words. What intense ideas are enwrapped in the calling the Divine Second Person of the Trinity, "THE WORD," the Expression of the Godhead, as the Father is the Fountain of Being, and the Pentecostal Fiery Tongue reveals the essence of The Spirit! A nation concentrates her essential thought concerning some vital things in a word. Then there are the endless relations of language to language, the spirit of each nation in its mode of expression. Mr. Trench has most interestingly and pleasantly explored a part, though only a part, of this delightful field. IX. Niagara. A Poem, by Rev. C. H. A. Bulkley, New York: Leavitt, Trow & Co., MDCCCXLVIII. The Minstrels' Strife. A Poem, by Rev. C. H. A. Bulkley, delivered before the United Chapters of the Sigma Phi Fraternity, at their General Convention, held in Geneva, N. Y.: New York, 1850. Mr. Bulkley is Pastor of the Reformed Dutch Church at Ithaca, in the State of New York. He was formerly Pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Mount Morris, in the same State. Of a pure taste, cultivated manners, a genial heart, and sincere piety; all who know him open these beautifully printed leaves with a desire to be pleased. "Niagara" is a poem, as many of our readers probably know, of one hundred and thirty pages, with sixty pages more of valuable notes on the history and topography of the "Falls." Of this poem we need not speak, as it has been before the public since 1848. "The Minstrels' Strife" is more recent, and to our ear, of a finer melody. Niagara" is a descriptive poem, a class of writing we have sometimes thought, which it requires what the phrenologists call “constructiveness," to appreciate; but the latter is a poem of social movement, enshrining a fine philosophic idea, and perhaps it is owing to some speciality in our habits or way of thinking, that it strikes us more. That our readers may sympathize with us, (for no one ever has an opinion without wishing to make converts to it), we will quote from "The Minstrels' Strife" its opening, only mentioning that the idea of the poem is to illustrate the progress of the world from the False to the True, and that the first paragraph of course, mirrors the one, the second the other. "In early watches of the winter night The shivering wanderer toward the frozen pole, Sces in the sky's far zenith, streaming light, |