Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/825

1868.] gardens of delight; the arrowy current still rushed by palaces dreaming over its sparkling waters; swift caiques, manned by picturesque boatmen, still glided hither and thither among the fleets lying at anchor in the stream; and over all hung, as ever, that sky so gloriously blue; while the associations, the scenes, the men of other times crowded upon the soul and almost overpowered it with rapturous emotions.

The greater part of this passage is fine; but it is much injured in the last clause by carelessness, which, coming, as it does, where there should have been a carefully-managed climax, is much more detrimental than if it had appeared elsewhere in this series of clauses. When Mr. Benjamin says that the associations of other times crowded upon his soul, he says what he means, although not so well as the writer of the previous sentences could and should have said it. For as associations are the result of an intellectual process, the representation of them as crowding actively upon the mind is not happy. But when he says that not only the scenes but the men of other times crowded upon his soul, he says what he does not mean, and commits a fault that he and most of our readers will detect upon this mere hinting. He has substituted the things for the memories with which he was affected. This is a characteristic fault of his writing: he is not careful. He does not take pains to see that his sentences are constructed so that their meaning is not ambiguous, that the words he uses can really bear the loads he puts upon them, and, as in the case above quoted, that he has written what he really thought. It is only by such careful writing and thinking that books of more than the most ephemeral value or interest are produced. Let every man who purposes entering the field of literature make up his mind in the beginning that writing any thing that is worth reading is hard work. Mr. Benjamin's book, made up of various occasional contributions to newspapers and magazines, welded together, would have been a very pretty piece of work if he had spent more time over it, both in thought and in elaboration. He presents his readers with a very picturesque view of life in the Levant and around the Bosphorus, and takes them with him in his journeys and his visits with the freedom, the heartiness, and the kind attention of a bright, good-natured friend, bent on showing them the prettiest sights and making them quite at home in places strange to them, but to which he is no stranger. His book is a pleasant one to read aloud and to chat over, and has value to all who are interested in its subject, from the manifest correctness of its information. His descriptions have the faithful air of a photograph. We counsel him to avoid the quotation style into which he is apt to fall. Thus: "In the following pages we can do no more than to introduce [he should have omitted the preposition] the reader to this lovely region, hoping that he may taste the sober certainty of waking bliss on those shores where, if there be an Elysium on earth, it is there. In respect to temperature, the Bosphorus is very advantageously situated. It is the quality o' the climate to be of a more reasonable sort than is common in this world of great heat and cold. In winter the sweet south from the Marmora," etc. No style is more unpleasant than this. It is like a dish of cold scraps from various fine banquets; and so is almost insulting.

exhibition of the National Academy of Design fully justifies the anticipatory remarks in of last month. We have seen some better exhibitions, and many worse ones; none in which there were so few pictures so extremely bad, that they were supposed to have been admitted by the Hanging Committee as awful examples of what was to be avoided in art. The general impression, on a cursory examination of the galleries, is that of disappointment. There is not even one really great picture on the walls, not one whose transcendent beauty absorbs the admiration of all visitors. But, on the other hand, there are many pictures in the exhibition that please almost everybody by some quality of sentiment, some beauty or piquancy of incident, or by excellence of artistic handling—pictures that exert a pleasant charm on the eye without making a very strong impression on the heart or the imagination.

In the corridor hang several specimens of American pre-Raphaeliteism—hard in color, constrained in composition and draw-