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suppose that he was much to pity. The case is the contrary. His sufferings are the sole source of his pleasures. Reversing the saying of the frogs in the fable, what seems death to you is sport to him. Every emotion that tenants his heart must pay a rackrent, or the income of his happiness is so far deficient. Like Sindbad in the Valley of Diamonds, the lower the gulf he descends into, the wealthier he becomes. If he be found in tears, it is a proof that he is lost in extacy. He not only agrees with the author of Hudibras, that Pain is the foil of pleasure and delight, and sets them off to a more noble height," but goes further, and, like Zeno, makes pain and pleasure identical. To help him to an annoyance or two, therefore, is to confer a favour on him that awakens his most lugubrious gratitude. He is like Brother Jack in the Tale of a Tub, whose felicity consisted in planting himself at the corners of streets, and beseeching the passengers, for the love of Heaven, to give him a hearty drubbing. Or he reminds us of Zobeide's porter in the Arabian Nights, who, as each successive load was laid upon his aching shoulders, burst forth with the exclamation: "O fortunate day! O, day of good luck!" But why waste our ink in these vain illustrations? There is no saying what he resembles, or what he is or what he does, except that he doubts and groans, and allows his latitudinarianism in the one volume to carry on the war so soporifically against his valetudinarianism in the other, that not Mercury himself, if he took either in hand, could avoid catching the lethargic infection, and dropping dead asleep over the page.

The apex of Tieck's cranium must, we should think, display a mountainous development of the organ of Selfesteem. It is quite manifest that whatever he chooses to pen becomes in his own conceit inerasable and inestimable. A piece of bizarre barbarianism that Rabelais would have blotted out on a first reading is reckoned as the production of Ludwig Tieck, worthy of being enshrined in gold and amber. With submission, nevertheless, to our esteemed, he here reckons without his host; that is, without his host of readers, and also without us, his knouter, who are a host in ourself. The world, we would beg to assure him, gains nothing but dead losses by snch acquisitions to the staple stock of literature. Where a man's genius, indeed, is very prononcé, where "his soul is like a star and dwells apart," people

have an excuse for attaching importance to his extravagances. But Tieck, if a star at all-and he is rather a starling than a star-is but one of a family constellation, whose number may hereafter, when Time shall have brushed away the dust from our moral telescopes, appear as augmented as their glory will appear diminished. If we hold up all we have got from him between our eyes and the light, we shall be rather at a loss to discover in what it is that he has transcended his neighbours. The grotesque make of an article, he ought to recollect, is but a soso set-off against its inutility. Common sense judges of all things by their intrinsic worth. A pedlar scarcely guarantees the admiration of a sensible purchaser by shewing him a pair of bamboo sandals from the shores of the Bhurrampooter, or a necklace of cherrystones strung together by a child born without arms or legs. We want not that which is unique and singular, but that which is of paramount and permanent interest. The Roman Emperor who rewarded with a bushel of milletseed the man whose highest ambition it was to cast a grain of that seed through the eye of a needle, set an example of contempt for mountebankism which we are at length beginning to copy. We do not now-a-days, like our ancestors, barter an estate for a Dutch tulip. Not exactly, Ludwig! Your thoughts, Ludwig, are not one gooseberry the more valuable to the public on the score that they are your thoughts exclusively. "I cannot be expected," says Goldsmith's Chinese, "to pick a pebble off the street, and call it a relic, because the king has walked over it in a procession." If the Useful should take precedence of the Ornamental, how far into the rear should it not hustle the Fantastic? Poets generally reflect less to the purpose than other men, or they would have long ago found out that the world is weary of their impertinences, and that nothing satisfies in the long run but what was of sterling respectability from the beginning. A publican can think of nothing better for luring the thirsty crowd into his pot-house than a Hog in Armour, and a poet must clap some parallel monstrosity over the door of his own sanctum sanctorum, or he fears that he will not be left in a situation to quarrel with his company. But Nature, after all, does not often back the appeals of the Bedlamite. common growth of Mother Earthher humblest tears, her humblest

"The

mirth," suffice for the generality. Few people catch mermaids in these times and still fewer are caught by them. A phoenix is a nine days' wonder-a sight to be stared at and talked of during a season; but our affections are given to the goose, and she is honored from Michaelmas to Michaelmas. Let Tieck but bring us geese into the market and we shall be satisfied. We will not even object to go to the length of puffing off all his geese as swans. The sole stipulation we make with him is, that he shall close the gates of his Phoenix-Park.

Tieck is our particular friend. We have called him a quack. Our freedom of speech is a proof of our friendship. For the world we have little but hypoeritic smiles and silver lies. Tieck deserves better, and we have favored him with a gentle trouncing. He must not droop, therefore, but contrariwise rejoice. He must pluck up heart. There is pith and stamina with in him. We depend on him for yet giving us something rather less remarkable for platitude than his Bluebeard is. The Titian of The Pictures, the Prometheus of The Old Man of the Mountain-above all, the concoctor of The Love-charm can never be des titute of the means of retrieving his poetical reputation. But the task is one that will exact the sacrifice of his entire cistern of tears. If he undertake it, it must be with nerves of iron and a brow of brass. It was not, he should remember, by enacting Jackpudding under the mask of a Howling Dervish, that Milton or Goethe grew to be an intellectual Colossus. Annual self-exhibitions at Leipsic Fair may be all very well for nondescripts and nobodies-the awkward squad of the literary army-the tag-rag-and-bobtail of the bookmaking multitude, who are glad to pocket sixpence by hook or crook, and will bawl and bray the whole day long for half a dollar, but Tieck ought to be above those degrading shifts and antics. His mode of procedure is obvious and simple. He aspires to the title of a poet. Very good: let him give us conceptions we may make something out of; and sentiments that our flesh and blood hearts will respond with a

The weariful day was past,
The mind, overstrained,
Was fain to succumb at last.
In dungeons of drowsiness,
As when dull dreams oppress,
My spirit lay passionless,

thrill to. He need neither overleap the pale of the world, nor yet grovel in the low and swampy places of the world. Enough of work, we warrant him, will he find to do in the right spot. He can build himself a magnificent mansion, with "ample room and verge enough" in it to entertain the whole circle of his acquaintance, "yea, the great globe itself," if his architecture be not of the clumsiest. Embrace, O, Tieck, the Beautiful and True! Abandon the Factitious and the False! The bowers of Poetry, bestrewn with roses, and overarched with evershining laurel, shall no man visit but with Nature's passport! You cannot assimilate Kant and Shakspeare. Metaphysics and Poetry are by no manner of means nitrogen and oxygen. They dwell best asunder. Each should be kept at a distance from the other, as brandy should be kept at a distance from water. The tertium quid produced by the attempted amalgamation of both is a nauseous humbug. If any doubt of the truth of our assertion overcast your mind, peruse your own poems and doubt no longer.

One of the least unintelligible of Tieck's vagaries is a small composition entitled Ball-music. It is a tableau of the feelings of an imaginative but morbid mind, under the influence of the artificial excitement which such a scene as a ball-room presents, is calculated to engender. The lights and shades are too strongly contrasted, but the general idea is good, though not as well sustained as in more dextrous hands it might have been. It is altogether a sort of loose-jointed and rhapsodical commentary on that text of Holy Writ: In the midst of Life we are in Death. We shall hazard the selection of a few passages from this poem, which, indeed, affords about the best evidence we have been able to collect of its author's ability to put into the form of rhyme something that may escape the chance of being condemned as utterly insane. The poet begins by representing himself buried in à brown study, in the solitude of his parlour, out of which he is aroused by sounds that seem to proceed from a hundred orchestras.

And chilled and chained-
When the Devil of Riot arose,
Who so metamorphoses mortals,
And thundered against the portals
With many and clangorous blows.

Of Existence we wander,
Where shrivel and wither
All joys as they bloom;
The Destinies giving,
In pity, in kindness,

To all who come thither,
No Loving, no Living,
Νο

pauses to ponder,

But Chaos and Blindness,
And dreams and a tomb.
Therein who shall say

What strange horror remains,
What ghastly array

Of extravagant pains?

Wild flowers hold holiday revel beside it,

As anxious to hide it;

Is this intended for a moral? Probably; but we are at a loss to discover the advantage derivable from the theory that Despair itself has its own dreary philosophy. A poet need not, indeed should not, be a preacher; but we have a right to demand that the tendency of his writings shall in all cases be favorable to the encouragement of human hopes and energies, and in no case favorable to the depression of them. Man is a sane and ratiocinating being, or he is not. If he be, here is so much poetry made subservient to the interests of untruth and absurdity. If he be not, still nobody has an apology for trying to make his condition worse than it is. Those who live like Mirabeau may, to be sure, like Mirabeau, find it necessary to call for music to stun them in their last moments-and,

by the bye, Tieck and Mirabeau seem to have hit on the same idea-but the generality of people stand in no need of a flourish of trumpets to herald their entrance into eternity. We firmly believe that no tranquil-minded man ever yet took it into his head to regard Life as a mystery, or Death as a terror. If poets would now and then reflect before they write, what an amas of rhodomontade would be fortunately lost to the world!

The song beginning Die Geliebten und die Schönen, is written in very curious trochaics. The first four stanzas being free from nonsense, and the last four free from every thing except nonsense, we shall take the liberty of quoting the first four, and omitting the last four.

Sooth to sing, it seems a dreamy

Vision.

Lavishly from silver fountains

Fall diffused o'er lakes and mountains,

Light and Life; when lo! the beamy

Face elysian

Gladly

Would the shrinking foliage flourish, Would the flowers their petals nourish