Beyond the Rockies. By Charles Augustus Stoddard. (Sampson Low and
Co.)—Mr. Stoddard is a practised traveller and a practised writer of books of travel, and his new volume bears many resemblances to his "Across Russia," and" Spanish Cities." It suggests journeys conducted under the most comfortable auspices. He and his friends, with a view to escaping a New York winter, travelled beyond the Rockies into California, instead of going to the Mediterranean, and Mr. Stoddard relates their experiences in an easy style. He traverses, of course, ground which has recently been rendered familiar by other travellers and writers. California, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, the Yosemite Valley, and Salt Lake, are now something more than mere names to the most of us, and Mr. Stoddard cannot, of course, do much more than say in his own way, what has already been said not ineffectively by others. But his style has the merit of freshness ; occasionally, indeed, it is illuminated by that spacial humour which we are in the habit of associating with "New England seriousness." Here is a specimen, "One does not care to stay long upon summits. They are briefly inspiring, but the work of the world is done lower down, and mostly on the dull levels. Peter wanted three tabernacles on Mount Tabor, but the Master paid no attention to his remark, and the inspired narrator tells us that Peter wist not what he said." We may refer the reader who desires to see Mr. Stoddard's style at its best, to the passages in which he describes the Yosemite Valley and that marvellous Coronado Beach of which we are told that "wherever the eye wandered there was beauty, from the aquamarine of the sea, edged along the shore with a ruffled foam crest of breakers, and higher up with a band of yellow sand, to the flowery hills and meadows, the dark mountains covered with the close foliage of the live-oaks, the distant peaks glistening in their crowns of snow, and over all a firmament of pure and ethereal blue in which the sun blazed bright all day long, and the moon and stars shone like radiant jewels by night." But the whole volume is carefully written, and is a conscientious performance in every way.
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