Text: Edgar Allan Poe (?), Literary, Broadway Journal (New York), December 27, 1845, vol. 2, no. 25, p. ???, col. ?

[page 387, column 2, continued:]

Wiley & Putnam's Library of American Books. No. 10. The Alps and the Rhine. By J. T. HEADLEY.

This is one of the most entertaining books yet issued in the American series. The vivacity and brilliant fancy of Headley throw a charm over all his descriptions — a charm that has all the effect of novelty — if indeed it is not.

A marked peculiarity of the author is the Irishy abandon or neck-or-nothingness of his manner. He writes as if he held it a sin to keep us waiting a moment — either for grammar or any thing else.

“I have never felt” says his Preface “the need of stronger Saxon more than when standing amid the chaos of an Alpine abyss or looking off from the summit of an Alpine peak. Like the attempt to utter a man's deepest emotions, words for the time shock him.”

Why “off?” — is not “from” enough? The “summit of a peak” is something, we presume, like the end of an extremity. As for the subsequent sentence, we give it up.

Mr. Headley is only committing a very common error, we think, in saying: “We get a definite idea of very few things in the world we have never seen, by mere naked details” — etc., etc.

Here we are forced to say, imprimis, that Mr. H. has really no reference to things in the world we have never seen — but to things in the world we have seen. It is not the grammatical construction of the sentence, however, but its philosophy to which we allude. When details fail to convey distinct impressions, it is merely because the details themselves are indistinct. But all this is hypercriticism: — the book is an admirable book, and Mr. Headley is an admirable man.