Harper’s Magazine for June
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HARPER'S MAGAZINE FOR JUNE.—
We have received the June number of this interesting serial.1 The present is the first of the 17th Vol. of the monthly, and is probably in the variety of its contents and the beauty of its illustrations the best number yet issued. “Harper” has kept on steadily improving from the inception of the enterprise to the present day, and we think that people ought to feel proud of it as an example of what American enterprise and talent can do. With its enormous circulation, scattered as it is, broad-cast over the land, it must exert a proportionate influence on the minds of the masses, and that influence, it appears to us, has uniformly been good and enlightening. Entering more extensively than any other publication of the day into the domestic circle, and read in the bosom of families, it requires a most careful supervision and a most delicate and discriminating taste to decide as to the nature of its contents and to exclude all that the most fastidious would characterize as objectionable. This difficult task the editors of “Harper” have most admirably succeeded in.
The present issue contains a most interesting sketch of the City of Elms, as it was and as it is. Then follows “Tropic Journeyings,” an interesting illustrated paper. Then a profusion of tales, all of merit; an essay, “Our Sons,” written in a grave and sensible vein; and the continuation of Thackeray’s2 “Virginians.” The latter, though it don’t yet please the popular taste over much, is marked by the most exquisite traits of the great Satirist’s genius. Under the masks of another century we recognize the same human nature which is playing about us to-day, and the air of calm repose, the profound worldly philosophy and the air of perfect reliance upon the dramatic development of his characters betray, as usual, the master hand. An original poem by Bryant3—“A Night Scene”—appropriately crowns this varied collection of good things. The author of Thanatopsis writes so rarely of late that anything from his pen is quite an event in the literature of the month.
We refer the reader to their advertisement in another column for an explanation of the “future intentions” of the proprietors.
Notes:
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2. William Thackeray (1811–1863) was an English satirical author and illustrator. Whitman summarized his assessment of Thackery when asked by Horace Traubel late in life as follows: "I have read Vanity Fair and liked it: it seemed to me a considerable story of its kind—to have its own peculiar value. But Thackeray as a whole did not cast his sinker very deep though he's none the worse for that" (With Walt Whitman in Camden, Monday, October 29, 1888). [back]
3. William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) was an American poet best known for his poem "Thanatopsis." He was also the editor of the New-York Evening Post. For more information, see Andrew C. Higgins, "Bryant, William Cullen (1794#8211;1878)," Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998). [back]