second expedition in May, 1853, with a liberal outfit, and a choice band of comrades to share the hardships and the honours of his undertaking. He made with all practicable speed for Baffin's Bay, determined to push on as far to the North as the openings of Summer would give him leave of passage, before the setting in of the Arctic Winter. After a considerable variety and stress of adventure, he reached a place called Rensalaer Bay, on the coast of Greenland, the 22d of August. The utmost efforts were made to force his brig on into a higher latitude, but without success. Of the position where his Winter quarters had to be established, he speaks as follows:

The decided inclination to the eastward, which the shore shows here, is important as a geographical feature; but it has made our progress to the North much less than our wearily-earned miles should count for us. Our latitude, determined by the sun's lower culmination, if such a term can be applied to his midnight depression, gives 78° 41'. We are further North, therefore, than any of our predecessors, except Parry on his Spitzbergen foot-tramp. There are those with whom, no matter how insuperable the obstacle, failure involves disgrace; we are safe at least from their censure.

The plan of the expedition was, to make by ship the highest attainable point in Baffin's Bay, and then to shoot off as far towards the Pole as boats and sledges could penetrate, scouring the coast-lines for vestiges of Sir John Franklin's party. It was with great reluctance that Kane yielded to rest at so low a point. "I do not like," says he, "being caught by Winter before attaining a higher Northern latitude than this, but it appears almost inevitable." Inevitable, sure enough, it proved to be the brig was never extricated from her icy bed. The experiences of Kane and his party through the ensuing five months of sunless Winter, with its ninety days of inexorable night, its cold running down to 75° below zero, and its wilderness of ice in the varied forms of glacier, berg, belt, barrier, field, floe, &c., &c., are related with surpassing skill. The interest of the story would be painful, but for the unfaltering ardour and fortitude of spirit informing it, and lifting us above the sense of suffering. The author never stops to sentimentalize over the objects or events of his narrative, nor to angle for applause by efforts at fine writing; a few quick, flashing sentences, setting forth in transparent and beautiful language the most distinctive features of his matter, and the picture is before us, too life-like to leave any doubt of its truth.

The great wizard of modern Romance hardly shows more potency of touch in any thing than in the painting of dog character. His portrait of Bevis in Woodstock is one of the last things to be forgotten by any one who has read that tale. Here is a dog portrait by Kane that need not fear a comparison with the best of Sir Walter's in that line:

December 22, Thursday.--There is an excitement in our little community that dispenses with reflections upon the solstitial night. Old Grim is missing. and has been for more than a day. Since the lamented demise of Cerberus, my leading Newfoundlander, he has been patriarch of our scanty kennel.

Old Grim was a character such as peradventure may at sometime be found among beings of a higher order, and under a more temperate sky. A profound hypocrite and time-server, he so wriggled his adulatory tail as to secure every one's good graces and nobody's respect. All the spare morsels, the cast-off delicacies of the mess, passed through the winnowing jaws of Old Grim,-an

illustration not so much of his eclecticism as his universality of taste. He was never known to refuse any thing offered or approachable, and never known to be satisfied, however prolonged and abundant the bounty or the spoil.

Grim was an ancient dog: his teeth indicated many winters, and his limbs, once splendid tractors for the sledge, were now covered with warts and ringbones. Somehow or other, when the dogs were harnessing for a journey, Old Grim was sure not to be found; and, upon one occasion, when he was detected hiding away in a cast-off barrel, he incontinently became lame. Strange to say, he has been lame ever since, except when the team is away without him.

Cold disagrees with Grim; but by a system of patient watchings at the door of our deck-house, accompanied by a discriminating use of his tail, he became at last the one privileged intruder. My seal-skin coat has been his favorite bed for weeks together. Whatever love for an individual Grim expressed by his tail, he could never be induced to follow him on the ice after the cold darkness of the Winter set in; yet the dear, good old sinner would wriggle after you to the very threshold of the gangway, and bid you good-bye with a deprecatory wag of the tail which disarmed resentment.

His appearance was quite characteristic:-his muzzle roofed like the oldfashioned gable of a Dutch garret-window; his forehead indicating the most meagre capacity of brains that could consist with his sanity as a dog; his eyes small; his mouth curtained by long black dewlaps; and his hide a mangy russet, studded with chestnut-burrs: if he has gone indeed, we "ne'er shall look upon his like again." So much for Old Grim!

The following Spring and Summer were all alive with enterprise and activity in carrying out the purposes of the expedition. By divers sledging parties, researches were prosecuted on the East side of Baffin's Bay, as far as to latitude 81° 25', where they were arrested by a boundless stretch of open sea. On the West side, the survey was pushed still further North, and terminated at about latitude 82° 30'. This period of wild and wonderful adventures is reflected in Kane's description with the same force and trans. parency, as that of the dreary and dismal night preceding. In his pages, the whole area of his explorations seems a sort of inverted fairy-land swarming with the miracles of a newly-discovered creation. Of course such an ice. bound world of romance could not be wanting in scenes of untold grandeur and sublimity. Among the foremost of these is the "Great Glacier of Humboldt;" and the following will show that it was looked upon by an eye well worthy of the sight :

My recollections of this glacier are very distinct. The day was beautifully clear on which I first saw it; and I have a number of sketches made as we drove along in view of its magnificent face. They disappoint me, giving too much white surface and badly-fading distances, the grandeur of the few bold and simple lines of nature being almost entirely lost.

I will not attempt to do better by florid description. Men only rhapsodize about Niagara and the ocean. My notes speak simply of the "long, evershining line of cliff diminished to a well-pointed wedge in the perspective;" and again, of "the face of glistening ice, sweeping in a long curve from the low interior, the facets in front intensely illuminated by the sun." But this line of cliff rose in solid glassy wall three hundred feet above the water-level, with an unknown unfathomable depth below it; and its curved face, sixty miles in length, vanished into unknown space at not more than a single day's railroad-travel from the Pole. The interior with which it communicated, and from which it issued, was an unsurveyed mer de glace, an ice-ocean, to the eye of boundless dimensions.

it was in full sight,-the mighty crystal bridge which connects the two continents of America and Greenland. I say continents; for Greenland, however isolated it may ultimately prove to be, is in mass strictly continental. Its least

possible axis, measured from Cape Farewell to the line of this glacier, in the neighbourhood of the 80th parallel, gives a length of more than twelve hundred miles, not materially less than that of Australia, from its Northern to its Southern Cape.

Imagine, now, the centre of such a continent, occupied through nearly its whole extent by a deep unbroken sea of ice, that gathers perennial increase from the water-shed of vast snow-covered mountains and all the precipitations of the atmosphere upon its own surface. Imagine this moving onward, like a great glacial river, seeking outlets at every fiord and valley, rolling icy cataracts into the Atlantic and Greenland seas; and, having at last reached the Northern limit of the land that has borne it up, pouring out a mighty torrent into unknown Arctic space.

The Summer of 1854 was well-nigh spent, and Dr. Kane still lingered in the hope of extricating the brig. This was found impossible. Two of the party had already fallen victims to the terrible severities of Arctic life. There were seventeen remaining; but there seemed little chance that any of them would survive the furies of a second Winter. What was felt and done in this

exigency is thus given in the narrative :

Every thing before us was involved in gloomy doubt. Hopeful as I had been, it was impossible not to feel that we were near the climax of the expedition. I determined to place upon Observatory Island a large signal-beacon, or cairn, and to bury under it documents which, in case of disaster to our party, would convey to any one who might seek us intelligence of our proceedings and our fate. The memory of the first Winter quarters of Sir John Franklin, and the painful feelings with which, while standing by the graves of his dead, I had five years before sought for written signs pointing to the fate of the living, made me careful to avoid a similar neglect. A conspicuous spot was selected upon a cliff looking out upon the icy desert, and on a broad face of rock the words "ADVANCE, A. D. 1853-54," were painted in letters which could be read at a distance. A pyramid of heavy stones, perched above it, was marked with the Christian symbol of the Cross. It was not without a holier sentiment than that of mere utility that I placed under this the coffins of our two poor comrades. It was our beacon and their gravestone. Near this a hole was worked into the rock, and a paper, enclosed in glass, sealed in with melted lead.

Of course the "paper" was a brief memorandum of the expedition up to that time. All hope abandoned of getting the brig released from her icy prison, the next question was, whether they should set off without her, or stay and share her fate till another Spring. Dr. Kane resolved on the latter, but offered full leave and a fair provision to as many as chose to go. Seven determined on making off for a kinder sky, but, after some months of incredible hardships and suffering, found their way back, glad enough to rejoin their comrades. Dreary and dismal indeed was the prospect for those who resolved to stay; but there was also the manhood to face it. Kane's journal gives the following, under date of October 26 :

Wilson and Brooks are my principal subjects of anxiety; for, although Morton and Hans are on their backs, making four of our ten, I can see strength of system in their cheerfulness of heart. The best prophylactic is a hopeful, sanguine temperament; the best cure, moral resistance, that spirit of combat against every trial which is alone true bravery.

The tone of mind, which this gifted and high-souled explorer carried into and through the long oppression of darkness that followed, is well shown in a

brief passage, than which we have rarely met with any thing touched with a purer eloquence or deeper pathos :

The intense beauty of the Arctic firmament can hardly be imagined. It looked close above our heads, with its stars magnified in glory, and the very planets twinkling so much as to baffle the observations of our astronomer. am afraid to speak of some of these night-scenes. I have trodden the deck and the floes, when the life of earth seemed suspended, its movements, its sounds, its coloring, its companionships; and as I looked on the radiant hemisphere, circling above me, as if rendering worship to the unseen Centre of light, I have ejaculated in humility of spirit, "Lord, what is man, that Thou art mindful of him?" And then I have thought of the kindly world we had left, with its revolving sunshine and shadow, and the other stars that gladden it in their changes, and the hearts that warmed to us there; till I lost myself in memories of those who are not; and they bore me back to the stars again.

We had marked several other passages for quotation, but enough! What we have given are hardly more than of an average quality, perhaps not so much. And, to say truth, it seems very like profanation to be cutting off slices of such a work, we had almost said person, to show as specimens ; nearly as much so indeed as in the case of Shakespeare's plays. To our sense, Dr. Kane's whole narrative is literally brimfnl of fascination. The fairest dreams of ideal "beauty making beautiful old rhyme seem little better than tame prose, to the enchantment with which the most stern and hard-visaged facts are here invested, from the fellowship of high genius and heroic daring, combined with the refinements of good taste, thorough education, and liberal accomplishment. If the reader do not find more pleasure in this book on the fifth perusal, than in the bubbles and platitudes of fiction, with which the press is daily teeming, on the first, we can only say, so much the worse for him.

It is an old notion, that the highest praise meritable by man is that of doing things worthy to be written; the next highest, that of writing things worthy to be read. Whether this order is right, or whether it ought to be reversed, need not be discussed now; for the most cautious or even grudging criticism will hardly deny that Dr. Kane has fairly united the two claims. He has both done things worth the writing, and written things worth the reading. What he has done is an honour to American enterprise; what he has written is an honour to American literature. His genius and character may well be cherished as a national treasure. If all our bosoms swell with something of modest pride in having him for our countryman, it will be no more than just to him, and will do us no hurt.

It seems to be apprehended by some that Dr. Kane has paid too dearly for his fame. With submission, no! With all our might, we wish him health and a long life, for the world is better worth living in, while enriched with such structures of manhood. But no man having the piety and rectitude of Dr. Kane can pay too dearly for such a purchase. Martyrdom in such a cause and for such a crown is not too great a price; nor can he be justly said to have died prematurely, who has lived to achieve and to earn so much.

We ought to add that the tyypographical execution of the book is in the highest and best style of American workmanship. The embellishments and illustrations, though the chief praise of them is due to the author, who has the

art of picturing to the eye as well as to the mind, are in admirable keeping with the rest. All together, the work does great credit to the publishinghouse of Messrs. Childs & Peterson. If they have anything more of Dr. Kane's in reserve, we beg them to let it be forthcoming.

Compositions in Outline. By FELIX O. C. DARLEY, from Judd's Margaret. Engraved by KONRAD HUBER. New York: Redfield.

It gives us pleasure to call attention to this most noticeable work. These thirty illustrations in outline are by far the finest contribution to this species of art yet made by America; nor do we know that their superior or equal has been produced in the Old World.

The subject which they illustrate, the novel, "Margaret: a Tale of the Actual and the Ideal, Blight and Bloom," we have no special desire to enter upon. It was written by a Unitarian clergyman of Maine, the Rev. Sylvester Judd, and is a peculiar attempt at the elucidation of social and religious problems which we would endeavour to solve on far other principles. It is of the artist, not of the author, that we would speak. The portions of the written work which come immediately into requisition by the pencil are of course those where objective life is exhibited, rather than subjective. Mr. Darley deals with Mr. Judd's "actual;" when, as an artist, he necessarily requires an "ideal," he seeks and finds it in his own conceptions of character. Margaret, however, is in one respect admirably adapted to pictorial illustration. Its descriptions of persons are eminently exact and picturesque. A certain rudeness of phrase does not lessen this effect, but enhances it where smoother language would have tritely rounded off the natural angles of the novelist's original personages.

Margaret, in its portraiture of character and description of manners on the Western frontier of Massachusetts, at the close of the last century, presents variety of incident which supplies a ready fund of accessories to the artist in his dramatic development of character and the story,-for the work has a beginning, a middle and an end, and is alive with action. From the first plate of Margaret in infancy, where "a man in a three-cornered hat and wig, with nankeen small-clothes and paste buckles, takes the child in his arms," to the final grouping of Parson Wells and his Wife, which, in its exquisite feeling and grace and truthfulness to the lineaments of age-not a wrinkle forgotten, not a wrinkle which is not the grave of a departed sorrow, not a wrinkle which the sunset of life does not illuminate with the coming immortality, between these two extremes, babyhood and old age, the noisy overture of life is musically filled with the skill of a Beethoven. Margaret herself is in a vein of sadness. The greatest beauty is the pathetic; it is a compliment which our genius pays to our sufferings. If we must endure, patience rewards us with nobility. Obey, therefore, O man, thy lot acceptably; welcoming storm and cloud with the sunshine.

We may dwell upon this figure of Margaret in a hundredth perusal. Ten times