Literary Notices

LITERARY NOTICES.

EMERSON’S UNITED STATES MAGAZINE, for August. New York: J. M. Emerson & Co., No 1 Spruce street.

This number, as always is the case, we find filled with valuable and instructive reading. For storing the mind with agreeable and useful information, we know of no superior to it in the literature of the country. We have read with especial interest the notice of Mr. C. L. Brace’s work on “the Norse Folk;” and are pleased to find in Mr. Brace’s pages something like a refutation, or at least a considerable mitigation, of the wholesale imputations against the virtue of the Northern nations, which appear in Bayard Taylor’s letters from Stockholm. Mr. Brace says—

“When a Bonder (farmer or yeoman) would woo a maiden, he is allowed by the parents to sleep with her, both being in their full clothing. When there are several lovers, three or four will frequently pass the night together. For this purpose, beds of immense width are in use among the peasants. Sometimes, for more unreserved communication, they will sleep in the cattle-stalls, as otherwise they are in the same room with their parents. Saturday and Sunday nights are the universal nights through Northland for the “wooing.” The custom has furnished much subject for the poets of the country, and probably will be one of the last which the Bonders will abandon, under the influences of advancing civilization. It exists only occasionally in Sweden out of Dalecarlia: but, as we have seen, in many parts of Norway, in Finland, and, it is said, in Switzerland. Here, it seems entirely pure and innocent. A friend tells me he had known a Bonder thus woo his maiden for nine years! One great preservative in Dalecarlia against vice is undoubtedly the early age at which marriages are made—the groom often not being more than eighteen.”

ADDRESS TO THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE on the character and merits of the Chinese Potato. By Wm. R. Prince.

Mr. Prince, as a gardener and horticulturist, is too well known to need encomium, or to require any endorsement to give weight to his views on subjects connected with his profession. From his description of the size to which the description of potato called dioscorea batatas can be grown, its remarkable nutritive qualities and productiveness, we should infer that its general introduction into gardens is a consummation devoutly to be wished. Mr. Prince has, at his establishment at Flushing, L. I., a plantation containing above 100,000 plants of this vegetable.