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s theme. He has a way, as good as the President's, to whom much of his matter is addressed, of making his apologues and stories tell; they are apt, and give the reader the sensation of being clinched. One feels like a nail when it catches the board. But sometimes the transition to a grotesque allusion from a fine touch of fancy or from the inbred religiousness of the subject is abrupt. Jean Paul may offer you, in his most glowing page, a quid of tobacco, if he pleases; the shock is picturesque, and sometimes lets in a deep analogy. But the hour in which Mr. Conway writes, the height of faith from which his pen stoops to the mortal page, the unspeakable solemnity of the theme, which our volunteers are rudely striving to trace upon their country's bosom with their blood, and our women are steeping in their tears, ought to drive all flippancy shuddering from the lines in which sarcasm itself should be measured and awful as the deaths which gird us round.
But the two volumes are full of power and feeling. They are written so that all may read. Their effect is popular, without stooping deliberately to become so. They are among the brightest and simplest pages which this exciting period has produced. It would be a great mistake to gauge their effect by what they bring to pass in the minds of cabinet-officers, editors, and party-leaders: for they put into plain, stout language the growing instinct of the people to get at the cause of the war which lays them waste.
Some of the most effective pages in these volumes are those which lament the dread alternative of war, and which show that emancipation would be merciful to all classes at the South. It is no paradox that to free the slaves to-morrow would restore health to the South and regenerate its people.
And we are glad that Mr. Conway speaks so emphatically against that measure of colonization, whether the proposition be to deport the contrabands to Hayti, or to tote them away to Central America under the leadership of intelligent colored representa