doctrine. Fern Leaves, by FANNY FERN-the pseudonym of a lady who is said to be the sister of N. P. Willis-is the title of a rather large collection of short and familiar sketches of manners, stories, passages of sentiment or satire, and fragments of gossip, written in an easy, careless style, not without a certain audacity of censure directed against one-half of the human family. The most remarkable trait in these papers, is their rather angry complaint of a want of 'gentlemen' in the United States. The justice or injustice of the writer's frequent censure of the characters, as well as the manners of her countrymen, is a question of facts which, happily, it is not our duty to determine. The facility with which these numerous Fern Leaves have been thrown off, reminds us of Jean Paul's prediction, that 'the days will come when all men [and all women], from the North Pole to the South, will write books;' and we may add, as a natural consequence, that nobody will read them.

One of the pleasantest of the books descriptive of nature in America, is the volume entitled Rural Hours, by Miss COOPER, who has also written a work on The Rhyme and Reason of Country Life. In the former volume, we find faithful sketches of the change of the seasons, and the habits of birds, insects, and plants. The descriptions have a quiet truthfulness of detail, which distinguishes them from passages written for effect. For example, many writers have attempted to paint in words the glory of American forest-scenery in autumn, but we have seen no sketch that can rival Miss Cooper's in distinctness and brilliancy. Without some preface, it might appear too highly coloured.

6

The Indian summer and autumn include the most beautiful days in the American year. Bryant, Lowell, and other poets have described the glory of this season. Emerson has almost forgotten himself and his abstractions, when speaking of the halcyon-days that sleep over the broad hills and warm wide fields.' First come the calm, clear days of the early grain-harvest, while the forests wear all their rich foliage, without a trace of decay; and one day after another passes beneath an unclouded blue sky, and closes with a brilliant sunset. Next, when the ripe maize has been gathered in, and the orchards have yielded their stores of apples, plums, peaches, and other fruits, light frosts follow, and the first sign of the dying year is seen here and there in the woods, where a maple-tree is glowing with the colours of decay. Still the greater part of the forest preserves its glossy green or russet foliage. But a few nights, nay, even one night, of sharper frost, will change the colouring of the landscape from its varied shades of green to deep red, bright yellow, gold, orange, scarlet,

and other rich hues, such as Turner might have envied. In such a scene, we can hardly see a poetical truth in the words 'melancholy autumn.' As Bryant says: 'The woods have put their glory on'—

'The mountains that enfold,

In their wide sweep, the coloured landscape round,
Seem groups of giant kings, in purple and gold,
That guard the enchanted ground.'

Another stanza in the same poem might be regarded as hyperbole; but it is nothing more than the natural truth—

'Beneath yon crimson tree,

Lover to listening maid might breathe his flame,
Nor mark, within its roseate canopy,

Her blush of maiden shame.'

AUTUMNAL CHANGES.

'We behold the_green woods becoming one mass of rich and varied colouring. It would seem as though Autumn, in honour of this high holiday, had collected together all the past glories of the year, adding them to her own; she borrows the gay colours that have been lying during the summer months among the flowers, in the fruits, upon the plumage of the bird, on the wings of the butterfly, and working them together in broad and glowing masses, she throws them over the forest to grace her triumph. Like some great festival of an Italian city, where the people bring rich tapestries and hang them in their streets; where they unlock chests of heir-looms, and bring to light brilliant draperies, which they suspend from their windows and balconies, to gleam in the sunshine.

The hanging woods of a mountainous country are especially beautiful at this season; the trees throwing out their branches, one above another, in bright variety of colouring and outline, every individual of the gay throng having a fancy of his own to humour. The oak loves a deep rich red, or a warm scarlet, though some of his family are partial to yellow. The chestnuts are all of one shadeless mass of gold-colour, from the highest to the lowest branch. The bass-wood, or linden, is orange. The aspen, with its silvery stem and branches, flutters in a lighter shade, like the wrought gold of the jeweller. The sumach, with its long pinnated leaf, is of a brilliant scarlet. The pepperidge is almost purple, and some of the ashes approach the same shade during certain seasons. Other ashes, with the birches and beech, hickory and elms, have their own tints of yellow. That beautiful and common vine, the Virginia creeper, is a vivid cherry-colour. The sweet-gum is vermilion. The Viburnum tribe and dogwoods are dyed in lake. As for the maples, they always rank first among the show; there is no other tree which contributes singly so much to the beauty of the season, for it unites

many interruptions, I was often kept up very late; and as he was a severe teacher, both from his habits of mind and his ambition for me, my feelings were kept on the stretch till the recitations were over. Thus, frequently, I was sent to bed several hours too late, with nerves unnaturally stimulated. The consequence was, a premature development of the brain, that made me a "youthful prodigy" by day, and by night a victim of spectral illusions, nightmare, and somnambulism, which at the time prevented the harmonious development of my bodily powers, and checked my growth; while, later, they induced continual headache, weakness, and nervous affections of all kinds. As these again reacted on the brain, giving undue force to every thought and every feeling, there was finally produced a state of being both too active and too intense, which wasted my constitution, and will bring me— even although I have learned to understand and regulate my now morbid temperament—to a premature grave.' The statements of her friends confirm her own account.

This explanation of the cause of various eccentricities disarms ridicule. Unhappily, after her father's death, Margaret's educacation, under her own management, was continued in a mode hardly less injurious than her early training. In the course of a few years, we find her reading largely and discursively in English, French, and German literature; attempting abstruse metaphysics, and losing herself in a bewildering misuse of books. One of her friends, Mr Clark, states, that 'in about three months from the time (1832) that Margaret commenced German, she was reading with ease the master-pieces of its literature. Within the year, she had read Goethe's Faust, Tasso, Iphigenia, Hermann and Dorothea, Elective Affinities, and Memoirs; Tieck's William Lovel, Prince Zerbino, and other works; Körner, Novalis, and something of Richter; all of Schiller's principal dramas, and his lyric poetry' -to say nothing of English books.

In the same year, we find the authoress venturing, without a guide, into the dim recesses of German philosophy! She confesses, in a letter to a friend, that she could not understand Fichte ;' and adds this curious paragraph, which must excite the compassion of every reader who is acquainted with the mazes of bewilderment in the works of Fichte, Jacobi, and his friend Hamann : 'Jacobi I could understand in details, but not in system (!) It seemed to me that his mind must have been moulded by some other mind, with which I ought to have been acquainted in order to know him well-perhaps Spinoza's.1 Since I came home, I have been consulting Buhle's and Tennemann's histories of philosophy,

1 Jacobi had no system, but wrote against the views of Spinoza.

and dipping into Brown, Stewart, and that class of books.' The same letter mentions a contemplated Life of Goethe. After all this diversity of study in one year, the authoress writes to her friend: New lights are constantly dawning on me; and I think it possible I shall come out from the Carlyle view.' This last obscure expression seems to imply that Margaret had studied the writings of Thomas Carlyle. She found comfort in the fact, that even Sir James Mackintosh had been puzzled by the metaphysical problems which had baffled her own intellect ! 'It is quite gratifying,' she writes, 'after my late chagrin, to find Sir James, with all his metaphysical turn and ardent desire to penetrate it, puzzling so over the German philosophy, and particularly what I was myself troubled about at Cambridge-Jacobi's Letters to Fichte.' After this, she commenced reading Bacon's Novum Organum, and was shocked by finding that her own knowledge, acquired by discursive reading, was 'vague and superficial.'

In 1839, Margaret Fuller published a translation of Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe; and in the following year, wrote several papers for The Dial, a periodical conducted by Ralph Waldo Emerson. At Concord, where she resided for some time, she enjoyed the society of Hawthorne, then living at the Old Manse, William Ellery Channing, Emerson, and other literary friends. Her conversation, as described by her best friends, was characterised by an excessive self-esteem. After a tour in 1843, she published a work entitled Summer on the Lakes, consisting of descriptions interspersed among various speculations.

When Emerson discontinued The Dial, Margaret went to New York, where she resided with Horace Greeley, editor of The Tribune, and wrote for his paper the reviews of current literature. In 1845, she published her most characteristic work-Woman in the Nineteenth Century; an earnest protest against the commonly received views of the social position of women. Her views are explained by her friend, Mr Greeley, in a letter from which we may quote a passage :-'She demanded [for her sisters] the fullest recognition of social and political equality with the rougher sex; the freest access to all stations, professions, and employments which are open to any. To this demand, I heartily acceded. It seemed to me, however, that her clear perceptions of abstract right were often overborne, in practice, by the influence of education and habit; that, while she demanded absolute equality for women, she exacted a deference and courtesy from men to women, as women, which was entirely inconsistent with that requirement.'

During a visit to England in 1845, Miss Fuller was introduced to several celebrated persons, of whom she gave some accounts