Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 2.djvu/520

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512
Literary Notices.
[September,

trays are seen without distortion or exaggeration. He has done his country one more service in entire consistency with those that have filled up the whole course of his honorable and beneficent life. We have said that this is fit to be the crowning work of Mr. Giddings's life; but we trust that it is far from being the last that he will do for his country. A winter such as rounds his days is fuller of life and promise than a century of vulgar summers. He has won for himself an honorable and enduring place in the hearts and memories of men by the fidelity to principle and the unfaltering courage of his public course. Of the ignoble hundreds who have flitted through the Capitol, since he first took his place there,

"Heads without name, no more remembered,"

his is one of the two or three that are household words on the lips of the nation. And it will so remain and be familiar in the mouths of posterity, with a fame as pure as it is noble. The ear that hath not heard him shall bless him, and the eye that hath not seen him shall give witness to him.



OBITUARY.

The conductors of "The Atlantic" have the painful duty of announcing to their readers the death of Calvin W. Philleo, author of "Akin by Marriage," published in the earlier numbers of this magazine. The plot of the story was sketched at Length, and in the brain of the writer it was complete; but no hand save his own could give it life and form: it must remain an unfinished work. The mind of Mr. Philleo was singularly clear, his observation of nature and character sharp and discriminating, and his feeling for beauty, in its more placid forms, was intense and pervading. His previous work, "Twice Married," and the various sketches of New England life, with which the readers of magazine literature are familiar, are sufficient to give him a high place among novelists. He was warm in his friendships, pure in life, and his early death will be lamented by a wide circle of friends. In pace!