now, indeed, however some departing echo of them may linger in the wrecks of our own Moss-trooper and Satanic Schools, do at length all happily lie behind us. Some trifling incidents at Wetzlar, and the suicide of an unhappy acquaintance, were the means of 'crystallizing' that wondrous, perilous stuff, which the young heart oppressively held dissolved in it, into this world-famous, and as it proved world-medicative Werter." "In

Goethe's Works, chronologically arranged, we see this above all things: A mind working itself into clearer and clearer freedom; gaining a more and more perfect dominion of its world. The pestilential fever of Skepticism runs through its stages: but happily it ends and disappears at the last stage, not in death, not in chronic malady (the commonest way), but in clearer, henceforth invulnerable health. Werter we called the voice of the world's despair passionate uncontrollable is this voice; not yet melodious and supreme, as nevertheless we at length hear it in the wild apocalyptic Faust: like a death-song of departing worlds; no voice of joyful morning stars singing together' over a Creation; but of red nigh-extinguished midnight stars, in spheral swan-melody, proclaiming It is ended!

"What follows, in the next period, we might, for want of a fitter term, call Pagan or Ethnic in character; meaning thereby an anthropomorphic character, akin to that of old Greece and Rome. Wilhelm Meister is of that stamp: warm, hearty, sunny human Endeavour; a free recognition of Life in its depth, variety, and majesty; as yet no Divinity recognised there. The famed Venetian Epigrams are of the like Old-Ethnic tone: musical, joyfully strong; true, yet not the whole truth, and sometimes in their blunt realism, jarring on the sense. As in this, oftener cited perhaps, by a certain class of wise men, than the due proportion demanded:

"Why so bustleth the People and crieth? Would find itself victual,
Children too would beget, feed on the best may be had:

Mark in thy notebooks, Traveller, this, and at home go do likewise;
Farther reacheth no man, make he what stretching he will.'

"Doubt, reduced into Denial, now lies prostrate under foot: the fire has done its work, an old world is in ashes; but the smoke and the flame are blown away, and a sun again shines clear over the ruin, to raise therefrom a new nobler verdure and flowrage. Till at length, in the third or final period, melodious Reverence becomes triumphant; a deep all-pervading Faith, with mild voice, grave as gay, speaks forth to us in a Meisters Wanderjahre, in a West-Ostlicher Divan; in many a little Zahme Xenie, and true-hearted little rhyme, which,' it has been said, 'for preg'nancy and genial significance, except in the Hebrew Scrip'tures, you will nowhere match.' As here, striking in almost at a

venture:

"Like as a Star,

That maketh not haste,

That taketh not rest,
Be each one fulfilling
His god-given Hest."*

Or this small couplet, which the reader, if he will, may substitute for whole horse-loads of Essays on the Origin of Evil; a spiritual manufacture which in these enlightened times ought ere now to have gone out of fashion :

"What shall I teach thee, the foremost thing?"
Could'st teach me off my own Shadow to spring!'

Or the pathetic picturesqueness of this:

"A rampart-breach is every Day,
Which many mortals are storming:
Fall in the gap who may,

Of the slain no heap is forming.

“Eine Bresche ist jeder Tag.

Die viele Menschen erstrümen ;
Wer da auch fallen mag,

Die Todten sich niemals thürmen.'

"In such spirit, and with eye that takes in all provinces of human Thought, Feeling, and Activity, does the poet stand forth as the true prophet of his time; victorious over its contradiction, possessor of its wealth; embodying the noblenesses of the past

"Wie das Gestirn,

Ohne Hast,
Aber ohne Rast,
Drehe sich jeder

Um die eigne Last."

There is nothing about "god-given hest" in these lines, which addition seems to have been made to throw an air of piety over them. Their literal rendering is:

Like a star,

Without haste,

But without rest,

Let each one revolve

Round his proper charge.

But the power of the German words may be as intransfusible into our our language as those of another couplet elsewhere quoted by this reviewer," the emphasis of which,” he says, no foreign idiom can imitate."

"Die Tugend ist das hochste Gut,

Das Laster Weh dem Menschen thut."

"In which emphatic couplet," he asks, "does there not, as the critics say in other cases, lie the essence of whole volumes such as we have read?"

That those of our readers, who are unacquainted with the German, may not remain altogether ignorant of these wonderful lines, we will give such a translation of them as our language admits. It is as follows:

Virtue is the highest good,

Vice causes woe to man.

into a new whole, into a new vital nobleness for the present and the future."

The writer of the two articles we have quoted belongs to a school of which we have few examples in England or our own country, but the disciples of which are numerous on the continent of Europe and especially in Germany. It is distinguished by its tone of unbounded assumption. Its writers speak forth only mysteries and oracles, and this, often in language as obscure and barbarous, as that in which the ancient mysteries and oracles were involved. They are priests of some one or other new revelation from nature to mankind, which, though it cannot yet be fully understood, is to effect wonderful things; and especially to sweep away all old notions of philosophy, morals, and religion. Its doctrines, or its proofs, are never clearly stated; its mysteries are never exhibited by day-light; it is brought into no connexion with what have hitherto been the opinions and belief of men. The language in which these are expressed is contemptuously rejected. As we read, the uncouth and dark words seem to be heaving with the workings of some powerful spirit, good or evil; but when they assume a definite meaning, it is, perhaps, an extravagant paradox, which we may, at first sight, hesitate to reject, because we cannot believe that one would really say any thing so absurd as it seems, and may therefore question, whether the views of the writer are not deeper than our own. At other times, after the labor of disengaging the idea from the words with which it is encumbered, it appears at last to be only some familiar truth or some familiar falsehood. This class of writers has not yet appeared sufficiently in England to incur the ridicule which they merit; and on the continent of Europe, such is the present chaotic state of opinion, that it may be some time before it is successfully applied.

To the ridiculous, indeed, these philosophers appear, at present, to be altogether insensible. They seem in writing to have no feeling of the strangest incongruities, of the wildest extravagances, of mere silliness. They utter in their trances what a man of common sense would be so little likely to say in sober earnest, that one unaccustomed to their style is at a loss how to apprehend them. He cannot tell what to think of these Professor-Teufelsdrecks. Their mystic strain is sometimes broken with poor trivialities, and perhaps low jokes, forming as strange a mixture as if the discourses of Don Quixote and Sancho were blended together. The quick perception of incongruity is one of the strongest characteristics of good sense; and ridicule, which is the vivid expression of this perception, is one of the most effectual weapons against folly. Would that some avenger of the human intellect might rise up on the continent of Europe to apply it where it is needed. A

stroke of ridicule well directed is often only an argument in its most condensed form. It pierces at once the blown bladder which we might beat upon with a club in vain.

It is in consequence, partly, of this insensibility to the ridiculous, that we find in the descriptions, real or imaginary, of the writers of this school, sometimes exaggerated and factitious expressions of excitement, fits of unaccountable enthusiasm, and sometimes an attempt to sentimentalize about the trivialities, meannesses, and baser things of life. The heart goes forth, as in William Meister, to diffuse itself over puppet-shows, eating-parties, and the dirty adventures of strolling players. There is a mawkish pathos about the vulgar and gross, manifesting, as is thought, an extraordinary insight into the hidden inmost nature of things. In the creations of genius, it is the object of the poet or the artist to separate the ideal from all accidental and foreign associations, and to present it before us by itself, in its native essential character, so that, our perception of it being thus undisturbed, it may afford us the highest gratification. But the art of the new school is displayed in drawing us down to a steady contemplation of things of every-day occurrence, and many of them of the coarser sort, as the exciting causes of feeling. To an English taste the incongruity is often particularly ludicrous. We do not rank Goethe in the same class with his admirers, but, as exemplifications of what has been said, passages from his own writings most readily occur to us. "One thing," exclaims the passionate Werter to his beloved, "I beg of you. Put no more sand upon the little notes you write me. In my haste, I got it to-day upon my lips and it has made my teeth grit." This effusion is, as the naturalists say, the type of many; and some of these flowers of sentiment have a far more powerful odor.

In the wild speculations which are now prevalent on the continent of Europe, there is still much said about religion, and the sentiment of piety, and morals, and even Christianity. Goethe, as he tells us, had formed a Christianity of his own; and the philosopher Schelling, though a pantheist, is noted for his piety. But it is to be understood that all these words have lost their old meanings. The state of things may remind one of Voltaire's prophecy concerning Rousseau, " that he should talk about virtue and philosophy till no mortal should know what virtue and philosophy mean.' The evil done would be much less, if opinions really

at war with what have been the belief and the trust of wise and good men, appeared without disguise in their proper form, with no false assumption of venerated names. All is now uncertain and misty, floating and dazzling in the view of these worshippers of the clouds.

We have no intention of discussing the character or the genius of Goethe; or the causes of the extraordinary ascendency which he has attained over the minds of many of his countrymen. We have been led to make the preceding remarks from a consideration of what seems to us the tendency of his writings and the influence of his character, considered under a moral and religious aspect. We are not, however, among the admirers of his works, considered merely as literary productions. We doubt whether a cultivated English reader of correct principles and good taste could unhesitatingly lay his hand upon any one of them, and say that it would have been a loss to mankind had it never appeared.

We ought, however, to remark that it is rather the outrageous admiration which has been bestowed on Goethe, than any thing in his own character or writings, which we regard as likely to be very pernicious, at least to English readers. Upon their minds his writings can have little hold. An artificial and diseased taste must be created before they can read them, without much weariness and dislike. They will not be able to comprehend in what their power consists; and will only perceive that it must be of a different kind from what has hitherto been exercised by the master spirits among men. Even his drama of Faust, of which Mad. de Staël tells us, after her fashion, that in it, "the moral world is annihilated and hell put in its place," and that “one cannot recall the recollection of it without something like a feeling of dizziness," and of which many such extravagances have been said, may, in truth, be read by any person of tolerably strong head, without a feeling of dizziness, or danger to his faith, though not perhaps without strong disgust. It is only when the writer of such works is put forward as a teacher of philosophy and morals, that it becomes of much importance to question his claims.

We shall now lay before our readers accounts of the two principal of the many works concerning him which have appeared since his death. The first is by his friend, Falk. The notice of it is from the Foreign Quarterly Review (No. 34.), which we may here observe is, notwithstanding the article we have had occasion to comment upon, a highly respectable publication.

Goethe aus näherm personlichen Umgange dargestellt. Ein nachgelassenes Werk von JOHANNES FALK. (Goethe painted from close personal intercourse; a Posthumous Work of JOHN FALK.) 12mo. Leipzig. 1832.

STRANGE enough! a posthumous work on Goethe, by a biographer who dies before him! The hand which had engrossed in