Germany, although they well deserve to be known, are busy mastering the stage for the new ideas. Herwegh, Hoffmann, Dingelstedt, Prutz, with their free and loud songs, send forth tidings of the new spring of political life and liberty. These tendencies, in a word, are no longer the property of some learned men, or the idealistic dreams of a few exalted poets; they are founded in the consciousness of the entire nation. What a philosopher or a poet thinks and sings in the little asylum of his garret or his cell, a Prussian statesman, the minister Schön at Königsberg-glory and honour to his name!-says in plain and hard words to the ear of his royal master. It resounds throughout all the chambers of deputies in Germany; Carlsruhe, Stuttgart, Darmstadt, Cassel, give echo to these complaints and reclamations; and the nation astonished at first and perplexed, itself takes up the work at last, makes it its own, and pursues it with more or less happiness, far as the juncture of present affairs and the bounds of an opposition, yet loyal as it is decided, will allow.

I attempt to give you here, in slight outline only, an idea of what is going on in our country. France and England-we know it but too well!-do not take as great a notice of such endeavourings and beginnings as they ought to do. Too much occupied by their own interests-England is only aware of the industrial and commercial movements in Germany, as far as they are or may one day grow dangerous to her own power and dominion; and France looks still upon us as upon a fantastic and idealizing people of poets and thinkers, very little fitted for a political mission or position. Yet it would be well for both to know, and to have some interest in knowing, that the excitement I have described, and which occupies the whole country without regard to custom-houses and passport-offices, is indeed a national excitement. It will not bring forth a heavy and decisive Catastrophe: never will it end in what is called a Revolution: for this neither the political complications are so threatening as in France, nor the social as in England. Providence leads the German nation a softer way, though it may be a much longer and slower one. But you should not leave us in this track we are pursuing without your brotherly attention and assistance. English and French know little of our German literature but to the times of Old Göthe or Father Lessing. A few names, Tieck, Novalis, Hoffmann, Körner, all very unconnected, have found their way across the Rhine, and in the English Review as well as in the French Feuilleton we see ourselves generally judged by things which, having borne their fruits amongst us, are themselves passing away. Tieck and the Romantic School had their great merits and they enjoy a well-merited reputation; pensions of German princes, while they are living, and necrologies of German biographers, when they are dying. Uhland, the German love-bird; Rückert, the oriental nightingale; Freiligrath, the eagle of the desert: they have had their times: but they are mute now, and their sweet songs, uttered in melancholy nights, their complaining shrieks and sighs, only flutter away like the voice of the evening's wind on a silent lake. Other sympathies, other wants, raise themselves in the midst of the changed and renewed nation.

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They seize upon even the most peaceful manifestations of life and genius. Painters desert from the Madonnas and the Holy Families. At Dusseldorf, Lessing gives us Huss at the Council, a great and powerful composition, full of modern strength and free ideas; at Munich, Kaulbach draws in a true romantic style his destruction of Jerusalem, the downfal of the old, and the rising life of the new.

Perhaps you may think I boast too much of too small and too uncertain a beginning. Let me be candid and not forget the dark side of my picture, full of bright hope as I yet claim it to be. But that gloomy side, such as it is, is not to be found, where you in France and England seek it. The "reactionaire" tendency, believe me, has not any powerful or active stronghold in the place where Anastasius Grün (Count Auersperg) raised the very first song of liberty and bold opposition; not in that great metropolis where Cornelius for the fiftieth time paints his doomsdays, satans, and demons; where Schelling pours forth his oracles of mystic philosophy, and Stahl his principles of firm and absolute statesmanship. No, neither Vienna nor Berlin are the centres of retardative tendencies. But look at those small, dusky, dirty, poor, and miserable little places, called residences of German dukes and princes! look at those men who never saw any thing in their lives but the walls of their college, and then the walls of their bureaux, shops, or casinos! look at those courts and constitutions, and governments, and administrations, and armies, all in duodecimo! look at those lackeys in general's dress! Hic hæret aqua, hic Rhodus, hic salta. That is the heel of Achilles. Poor Germany, who does not yet know what the wise man teaches, that it is not well to take the bread from the children of the house and to give it to the dogs!

THE TRAVELLING PHILOSOPHERS OF SWEDEN.

Stockholm: September 1, 1842.

One of the signs of these times is the spread of all kinds of societies for the advancement of all kinds of knowledge. It is not surprising that the north should obey the common impulse, and that a Scandinavian society for the furthering of physical science should have been founded, holding an annual meeting in the cities of Stockholm, Copenhagen, Christiania, and Götheborg, by turns.

If it is fair to measure the prosperity of these gregarious bodies by the number of heads, the meeting held in July last at Stockholm must have surpassed the most ardent wishes of its supporters. Not to mention the tribes of indigenous Swedes who attended it, the government steam-vessel, Heckla, placed at the disposal of the Danish savans by the king of Denmark, brought a large cargo of wisdom from Copenhagen, headed by Conferenz-räd Orsted the first mathematician of Denmark; while troops of Norsemen, led by Professor Hansteen, also a great mathematician, thronged the steamboats on the lakes, and poured down over the Fells. The meeting, though open to all wise men from all parts of the world, was not well attended either by English or Germans; of the former, a solitary but sufficient specimen pre

sented himself, Professor Johnson, of Durham; of the latter great things were expected, and it was confidently hoped that the veteran Humboldt would gladden the eyes of the assembly. But alas for science! the "silberne Hochzeit" of the Emperor Nicholas happened in the same week as the Scandinavian gathering, and the philosopher, who is also a Geheime Rath, being bidden to the marriage feast at Petersburg, either could not or would not come. The example of the great man was followed by many little ones in Germany; for be it remembered your German is not like alligators and Englishmen, amphibious; on the contrary he is for the most part decidedly hydrophobic, and the waters of the East Sea are salt and rough enough to fill him with a fearful anticipation of sea-sickness and shipwreck. If, however, the quality of the meeting was not so high as had been hoped, its quantity, as we have said, was undeniable. So that when the bands from Copenhagen and Norway had joined their brethren at Stockholm, there were found to be nearly 500 members ready to brandish (to borrow the expression of the president of another society nearer home) "the torch of science in its nomadic course."

The arrangements of the provisional committee at Stockholm, superintended by Baron Berzelius, were excellent, and the greatest attention was paid to the comfort of the visiters. The king and the prince royal behaved in the most gracious way. The House of Nobles was appropriated to the sections and general meetings, and the palace of Prince Carl given up as a place of evening resort. In these favourable circumstances the incongruous mass of physicians, geologists, chemists, naturalists, botanists, &c. &c., resolved itself with very little loss of time into various sections, in the labours of which, together with three general meetings for the sake of the public, rather more than a week was to be consumed. In several of these sections, especially in those for medicine and geology, many papers were read, and much work was, it is said, done: but without denying the worth of the crops thus reaped off these several fields in the great domain of natural seience, it may be doubted whether the true benefit gained by these rushings together of labourers to the harvest, does not consist less in any set essays, crammed and conned over months before to be spouted out in these sections, than in quiet hints and genial conversation; and in the vividness, almost amounting to revelation, with which a true man of original mind, who has thought deeply and devoted his life to one branch of science, imparts his convictions in unpremeditated words to a knot of believing hearers, not ex cathedrâ in the section-room, but it may be in a garret, or when walking abroad beneath the blue sky among the woods and fields: while on the other side the acquirements of many a man, whom, drawing upon the stores of a good library, and not from his own head, we had fancied to be a giant when afar off and personally unknown, turn out to be those of a pigmy or cunning imitative ape when confronted with us face to face.

As for the general meetings of such societies, no actual work is done in them, being for the most part the mere outward shows and bodily shape of wisdom, displayed that the vulgar may gaze upon so many

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257 shining lights, and, returning home with hard words ringing in its ears, gin descant on the blessings of natural philosophy with a comfortable conviction of its own and the world's enlightenment. Such a state of mind the first general meeting was well fitted to beget. Conferenzrad Orsted opened the proceedings with an intensely abstruse paper in Danish, "on the application of mathematics to the conveyance of all other kinds of truth." Few of the uninitiated were fortunate enough to understand even the drift of the discourse, and some asserted at the end that was a paper on clocks" because there were mysterious pendulums and dials, on some diagrams handed round. The desirable state of bewilderment having been produced, the popular part of the day's work followed, Professor Berzelius reading a paper on the rise the coast in the Scandinavian Peninsula," which he attributed to the cooling of the earth's centre. In the course of his discourse he also combated the Glacier theory of M. Agassiz; showing satisfactorily its insufficiency as regards Sweden; and finally sent the good people away in the belief that they had learned a great deal. pilt to is wrong

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By far the most remarkable, if not the most successful paper, was one read on one of the following days, by a high functionary, no less a person than his excellency Count Björnstjerna, Swedish minister at the Court of St. James, "On the primitive abode of the human race," which he placed, to the wonderment of all his hearers, among the wastes of Siberia The train of argument by which the noble count supported this his view was not very clear; but it was said he based his deduction on the paper read by Baron Berzelius, in which it had been proved scientifically, that the earth cooled first from the poles," and Siberia being very far north, the count, thought he might as well shift the seat of Paradise thither. All things considered, the scientific world may think itself lucky in not being forced to believe that our first parents were created and fell from eating the apple, in the sunny clime of Boothia Felix. This paper, which though it has increased the notoriety has not added to the fame of the noble a author, gave rise to much merriment at the time, and a certain wag was wicked, enough to declare that the thing arose from the count's having made a mistake between the two Poles, north and south, and the millions of the people bearing the same name; so that, hearing the earth cooled from the Poles, he instantly bethought him of the philanthropic efforts of the Emperor Nicholas towards colonizing Siberia, and thereon founded his theory of Paradise. It would be well if all the world, and especially the wretched exiles themselves,i were under the same delusion as the noble counted gulyfed to joud With regard to the unscientific part of the proceedings, nothing could be more satisfactory. The society dined together at the Bourse most merrily, and on one occasion were bidden to a banquet, at the palace, where they were received by the king in person thus presenting a very favourable contrast to his Majesty of Denmark, who had sent one of his chamberlains to preside at a dinner which he gave to the society at Copenhagen, not deigning to eat with them himself. In this way the time, passed quickly by, and after a pleasant expedition to Upsala, the foreigners departed in the very best humour e VOL. XXX. NO. LIX.

S

Before leaving this subject it may be as well to say a few words on an idea seldom openly expressed, but not the less deeply cherished by very many thinking men in the north, who see in this society the first step gained towards attaining that great Scandinavian League which they are so eager to bring about. The failure of the Calmar Union is forgotten by these modern philosophers (though the tradition of its wrongs is alive in the hearts of the Swedish people), the more so as the necessity of such an alliance seems to become more imperative from the overbearing preponderance of a near neighbour. But the impossibility of any immediate realization of this idea is plain from the vagueness of the term Union, which scarce ten of those who proclaim its necessity would agree in defining; it is a chimera which will suit all minds alike, and we may say to these idealists in the words of Mephisto

"Das ist die Zauberei, du leicht verführter Thor!

Denn jedem kommt sie wie sein Liebchen vor."

Yet supposing these theorists to agree among themselves, there are others whose consent to any such union must first be gained. The prejudices of three peoples are to be overcome. The Norwegian hates the Dane on the one hand, as his former oppressor, as much as he despises the Swede on the other, as the slave of an aristocracy. The Dane in his turn hates the Norwegian, because from a dependant, he has become an equal; and, as he looks over the Sound, cherishes the old grudge against Sweden, and chafes as he thinks of the days when the southern Swedish provinces were Denmark. The Swede loathes the Norwegian partly as an old foe, partly as placed by a ridiculous freak of fortune in a state of greater liberty than himself; and with regard to Denmark still lives in the old time, and remembers the tyranny of the Danish kings and their glorious expulsion. This popular feeling was well shown in a speech made to one of the Danes who attended the meeting, by a Swedish peasant. They were both being ferried across the Mälar, in a boat rowed by athletic Dalecarlian maidens in their quaint dress. "What part of Sweden do these girls come from?” asked the Dane. "From Dalarne" (Dalecarlia), was the reply," and it was their forefathers who thrashed the cruel Danes out of Sweden." Until this hatred has cooled down, and old prejudices become much more worn away, any union, however beautiful theoretically speaking, must fail in practice.

SISMONDE DE SISMONDI.

OUR last number had scarcely issued from the press, when we learned, through the medium of the public papers, the death of Sismonde de Sismondi, the great historical writer. He was born at Geneva, May 9, 1773, and died at his villa, in the immediate vicinity of his native city, on the 25th of last June, in the 70th year of his age. In 1792, when the government of Geneva was overthrown, Sismondi fled with his father to England. On their return to