men become hardened in the midst of habitual tenderness-a fate worse than the hangman's. Visits are made duties; dress, cards, scandal, are to them business-serious business. To have no opinion on the most important subjects, and because you have none, not to utter it, is the shame of the lowest rabble, and the virtue of the highest diplomatist. In this employment the whole organs of the soul are ossified. So also they have a peculiar phraseology of their own, in their conversation, as in their despatches-in Germany a diplomatic French, which is transmitted from father to son, which I heard sixteen years ago, but which no Frenchman speaks now. Diplomacy and the work of diplomacy holds together only externally let but a strong will, or a strong necessity arise in the world, and down with a touch tumbles this painful architecture of solemn lies. Then comes a loud cry right from the heart at last!-a speaking wound-war and desolation-universal swamping-in the midst of which, who is the Noah that is safe in his ark?these fellows with the manchettes !-This they know, and nothing else. 'Tis strongly said, but soothly: Might the devil bodily show them their own work, as it is and acts! Mark me! upon them judgment shall be done. A single right-headed and right-hearted king could

do it."

NATURE. 66 Why should I not be natural?-let me twist myself into a thousand affectations, and I shall not be so various, as when giving my affections their free natural play."

ACTORS AND AGE.-"N. played admirably to-night-only one thing he wanted, youth-and for the loss of youthfulness he has himself to blame-living amid tobacco and low people all the forenoon, and then assuming the artist at six o'clock in the evening. Fie! fie! fie! as if a man could assume elegance of manner, and youthfulness of soul. A man must be always elegant-must act art every moment of his life. We make ourselves old mainly by neglecting our youth, which we ought rather conscientiously to cultivate."

FUTURITY. "There is a thought which is hammering my head in two; and it is this. The future does not come to meet us-does not lie before us-but comes streaming over our heads from behind.-Sauve qui peut!— I see plainly there is no redemption here."

GOD." I cannot understand how even the noblest religion, and the most assured faith, can lift a man altogether above the terrible abysses that surround us. It is but a floating, a swaying at the best--I at least am capable of nothing more. Can any philosophy, any thinking bring us beyond ourselves-beyond the limits of that which makes us what we are? Must we not surrender at discretion-yield ourselves up to a personal God, from whom our moral nature, altogether indivisible and indestructible, has proceeded (like the visible world), into whose bosom we retreat, and in whom we are necessitated to put our fullest and most exclusive trust-the great aboriginal heart, in relation to whom, and only in relation to whom, our hearts exist?"

ADVICE."The opinions and advice of others only confuse a man of

any substantiality. The people will put us right (according to their notion) in spite of ourselves, and in spite of God. March right on!"

ART." A genuine work of art, whether wood or marble be the material, must never say, either directly or indirectly, what it would be at, but show it at once. Simple as this observation is, and flowing as it does from the very nature of the beautiful, as distinguished from the true, the greatest authors have sinned against it immensely."

Knowledge of MEN.-"Yesterday evening there was an illumination here, and we sat on one margin of the lake to take a prospect of it on the other. But I, instead of looking on the lamps, looked into the water and up to the sky, and there stood a clear beautiful star aloft and immovable. In the water I saw it also, beautiful indeed, but often moved by the wind, changing its form, and not seldom dim. Suddenly the thought struck me-so it is with men; we know them, we judge them only in the strangest, most complex, and often most unnatural relations, far away from their proper selves, in situations and in atmospheres where they are shaken, and troubled, and become dim. We look always one way-down-down into some muddy pond (called belike history) where the real character of a man is tossed upon the waves of a vain opinion. Pitiful!-look up at once-into the man's face-into his soul-where God gives you opportunity."

HAPPINESS" Not happiness, but victory and pleasure is the lot of Perfect happiness I for one could not stand. A man must file and be filed. In a state of perfect bliss this is impossible.'

man.

A DANGEROUS MAN.-"He who cannot tune himself down is dangerous and pernicious."

FREEDOM.-"Two such contradictory things as external and internal happiness are not easily brought into harmony. A man must not insist upon making himself happy by force. We must choose between the two. Will we throw ourselves on the world, or will we maintain our own character?-We have this choice--this is our freedom of the will

beyond this belongs to God. Clearness of intellectual perception, purity, and, if possible, strength of will, is our problem, and our only happiness. To all else we may laugh-weep-pray."

PEDANTRY." I have now found out the thing that of all things I most thoroughly hate. It is pedantry. This necessarily presupposes emptiness, and clings to mere forms. Pedantry of the nobler kind possesses a sort of half feeling of this emptiness, and honestly, for want of strong grinders, nibbles at the husk; but regular, ingrown pedantry is proud, and boasts of its emptiness, from utter ignorance of any thing substantial. It is the most revolting of all sights to see such a big nothing in full march-to me utterly unendurable. And the worst kind of pedantry is pharisaical morality-a railing in of utter barrenness with genteel stakes, that keep out both heat and light from a soil where more than usual were necessary--a thing altogether to be abhorred."

RULE OF COMPOSITION." If you would write to any purpose, you must be perfectly FREE from without in the first place, and yet more free

within. Give yourself the natural rein-think on no pattern, no patron, no paper, no press, no public; think on nothing, but follow your impulses. Give yourself as you are- -what you see, and how you see it. It is an entire mistake, their prate about objectivity and self-exenteration. Shakspeare, Goethe, Cervantes, gave the world as they saw it, each for himself-they could not give it otherwise. The more world you put into your work so much the better-so much the richer are you in yourself, so much the richer do you make your readers. But you cannot give them the world only; and if you give it otherwise than as yourself truly and substantially know it and feel it, you are a weak imitator and a LIAR. Every man sees with his own eyes, or does not see at all. This is incontrovertibly true. Bring out what you have. If you have nothing, be an honest beggar rather than a respectable thief.”

Knowledge. "If any man would see a thing, pierce through it, and thoroughly know it, he must, in the first place, love it."

INNOCENCE." Innocence is beautiful; virtue is a plaster, a scar, an operation."

These remarks are sufficiently characteristic, and will enable the reader to judge for himself whether Rahel is a character with whom it might be beneficial to form a more intimate acquaintance. The last remark is in the paradox style, such as that of the Stoics, that pain is no evil, and is only true (as most general moral and mental axioms are) when taken from one point of view. So understood, it may be taken as a shibboleth of the Rahel-Goethe-Carlylian school; for these three have great similarities, and will be profitably studied together. Rahel and Carlyle possess indeed, in more points than those we specially noted above, a most remarkable affinity. They are both sturdy, truthful, warm-blooded, and combine the functions of concentrated, inward meditation, and strong clinging to outward nature in a remarkable degree. Both are irregular and unrhythmical, tortuous and even painful in the expression of their thoughts on paper; they both admire Goethe to idolatry, and they are both very different from Goethe, the man without a centre," as Schlegel said, the painter, the literary decorator. But in this they agree with Goethe-and it is well symbolized in the above paradox-in that they habitually look on mau more as a natural growth than as the product of self-culture. They are the natural antipodes of Immanuel Kant, who placed the whole man in the self-directing, autocratic idea of duty. It is not our business here to argue points of this nature; we shall only say, that though the Goethian manner of speech is apt to be misunderstood, it can only be so, and wrested to their own destruction, by men who are already sold to the flesh and the lusts thereof irredeemably. Rahel was as staunch an admirer of Fichte as of Goethe; she

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possessed in large measure that true Catholicity of mind which reconciles all apparent contradictions.

We subjoin a few criticisms, from which the healthiness and soundness of Rahel's taste may be sufficiently inferred. There is a manly, straight-forward, healthy, English character about them.

TIECK.-"Tieck is a delightful, simple, versatile man-but as a writer —I will tell you what I think of Phantasus. Out of that book I have learned something new, viz. that a man may say the wisest and most delicate things, and yet be wearisome beyond all endurance. To write good dialogue is, I think, the most difficult of all literary problems. Shakspeare, Goethe, and Jean Paul in the Flegeljahre, have managed it. This continuous flow of life, with its numberless presuppositions, and making itself manifest by the most delicate, but not therefore less characteristic traits, can be seized and mirrored only by a mind at once vivacious, profound, and easy; and there is required also for writing good dialogue a continual presidency of judgment and discrimination in the midst of inspiration, a thing which succeeds only with the highest order of minds. Now comes Tieck with his raw speeches and counterspeeches, cunningly stuffed and bandaged without any situation but the most arbitrary, which shows neither men, nor place, nor any thing definite. Then these poor phantasmagorists go a walking in such a phantasmagorical country, and talk me verily to death. One's only consolation is, when the rigmarole is out, and the first talker compliments himself on having ended the discussion, that it is all a matter of paper, and that no one can force us to hold a discourse of such kind with such ladies and gentlemen!-I should go sheer mad amid their saloons and their gardens, their waterfalls and their wells, their lifeless jokes! No, no! Tieck is not the man for dramatic dialogues. He must speak in his own person, Seria mista jocis; he is no Goethe. He cannot take a

bit of life (Ein Stück Leben), and set it by itself, and frame it, and put things into it of which a man need not speak. * * *”

GOETHE. "Have you not observed how great Goethe always is when he speaks of the stars, like Homer when he speaks of the sea?

"I see there is a fashion abroad of criticizing and characterizing poets and poems, and how often does the name of Goethe stand at the begining, at the end, in the middle. There is a class of critics that wish to bring the great poet's works into a sort of natural series, one naming this first, the other that, in a chance enough sort of way so far as I have seen. Why do they not propose at once the question :-Out of which one of Goethe's works might one draw the conclusion that he could have made all the rest? If this question can be answered, then the starting-point of such a series is found at once. It is evident however, that to answer it requires study and thought, and an intimate organic knowledge of the poet's soul, and his whole poetical developement, such as not every critic can boast. To the proposed question I should answer Tasso."

MADAME DE STAEL.-" Madame de Staël is a hurricane that incommodes me, nothing else; there is no quietude in that woman (es ist nichts Stilles in ihr). There is nothing that she will not be counting upon

her finger-tips... The Allemagne!-mere radotage!-and what is worse she is not always honest and true to herself-witness what she says about divorce-she is afraid of appearing too liberal. When any person who does not know Germany from other sources, reads her book-book did I say! thoughts, observations, aperçus, lectures, loose, rambling, and without any principle of self-government, no assimilation, no blood to blood-this book pictures Germany as a dark cold hole out of which smoke comes, amid which sad phantasmagoric figures float, God-condemned to honesty, and where, now and then, an unearthly sage sits, and magically meditates. And this from her!-the woman without senses and without music!-sneering at German universities, herself a walking, talking university-fie! fie! she is like all Frenchwomen. There is no country in the world but France. Eye, ear and skin are bewitched there, and only there. All the cottages are Greek temples! And yet I was there myself and saw it-frost as much as in Berlin-weather not an inch better-our villages a thousand times more lovely—I know, in fact, nothing more sad than those stony, leafless and flowerless villages in the North of France. But so it is with the Frenchwoman. The dear Lady Staël-for me her book is nothing else but a long lyrical sigh that she was prevented from parading her talk in Paris. This is the key to understand the only good chapters in the book. And yet I love her-or rather I ought to say I pity her-she has too few grand gifts (grossartige Gaben)—a certain inquietude of understanding, to which (much for her own happiness) is allied intellectuality enough (mere intellectuality), and a word-imagination! How such people do gad about! How they talk, and are talked about! What perambulations! What books! what criticisms of books!--and after all-poor creature!-(die Arme)—she has seen nothing, heard nothing, understood nothing."

SCHILLER'S WALLENSTEIN." Thecla is only the tragic Gurli— nothing better. Kotzebue's heroine and Schiller's are both without bones, without muscle, without marrow; altogether without human anatomy-moving about without human limbs. To my astonishment also, these many years, with the applause of the German public!-but I see now how it is. The sickly race have a pleasure in seeing their morality flattered in the person of mere idealities; in that region they may float prettily, and forget all healthy organization-forget the one thing needful, and learn scientifically to parade a thousand beautiful, poetical, aesthetical, philosophical excuses."

SCHLEIERMACHER.- "Schleiermacher's Criticism of Ethics' is a fabric of hammers, which works at the highest, but is not the highest. "Schleiermacher began to sink as soon as he went to Halle. He entered there a little more into society than he was wont; and some foolish friends made him believe, that he could work and write for society. For this, however, he had, and has no talent. But the people praised him--and their praise ruined him-put him on the wrong scent. Before Halle he was undoubtedly one of the first, purest of minds. In his original, chaste, revered, soul-solitude, he was sublime. I know him well: I love him and if he were only younger, should tell him all this to his face, and not without success.'