"Now I've set my heart upon nothing you see;

Hurrah!

And the whole, wide world belongs to me,

Hurrah!

The feast begins to run low no doubt,
But at the old cask we'll have one good bout,
Come, drink the lees all out."

Such is the end of life, according to the manysided Goethe, the Father of Modern Transcendentalism; this great German, with his broad and deep experience. Thus, life is a round of sensual pleasures and defeated aims, and the idea of a deeper purpose is tossed off with a cup of wine and a hurrah!

Goethe's compeer, Schiller, was a man of a more earnest mould, and of whom also, the same translator remarks, the students of our country are to learn "lofty aspirations." Schiller makes life's purpose to be, freedom, political freedom. In "Don Carlos," Schiller has given us, as his biographer remarks, a representative of himself in the Marquis de Posa. The Marquis is the beau-ideal of a red-republican. In speaking to the king of Spain, he says:

"Be to us

A pattern of the Everlasting and the True!
Never, never, did a mortal hold so much,
To use it so divinely. All the kings
Of Europe reverence the name of Spain;
Go on in front of all the kings of Europe!
One movement of your pen, and new created
Is the earth. Say but, let there be freedom!"

Having aided by his writings the tendencies that brought about the French Revolution of '98, Schiller retired shrinking from its horrors to Jena, as professor of belles-lettres, working to "create beauty, and strew heavenly seeds through the world," as he expresses it, by his plays and poems.

Both of these great men were unfaithful to man's true destiny, for they wasted and debased in their lives those energies which were given for a divine purpose.

Shall we ask the German philosophers, or their French transcribers, the meaning of man? Our time would be better spent in asking the passersby in our streets; for they tell us, that the highest problem in philosophy is to establish what the commonest and most illiterate people hold as an undisputed fact !

In England we have one only who has spoken, but he is a blind worshipper of German philosophism and French revolutions. He has ventured to give a solution to man's destiny. It is," so says Mr. Thomas Carlyle, for it is he who speaks, "to make some nook of God's creation a little fruitfuller, better, more worthy of God; to make some human hearts a little wiser, manfuller, happier ;—more blessed, less accursed! This is work for a God !" Precisely so; but what he tells us man ought to do, is precisely what man feels that he is unable to do, and what he feels needs to be done for him, that is, to make him wiser, better, happier, more blessed; "this is, indeed, work for a God." But more of this here

after.

Shall we look at home for some one to unriddle the meaning of man? Perhaps our philosophers and poets of the East, the transcendentalists, will give us an answer. What says

Mr. Emerson, the Corypheus of Transcendental

ism, to the problem of life?

"Alas! the sprite that haunts us

Deceives our rash desire;

It whispers of the glorious gods,
And leaves us in the mire.

"We cannot learn the cipher
That's writ upon the wall;

Stars help us by a mystery
Which we could never spell.

"If but the hero knew it,

The world would blush in flame,
The sage, tell he but the secret,
Would hang his head in shame.

"But our brothers have not read it,
Not one has found the key;

And henceforth we are comforted—
We are but such as they!"

A very poor comfort that, we would say, which springs from the thought that we are all in the dark, and there is no hope for even one to find his way out; and this comes, above all, with ill grace from one, to whom, if his own account be true, nature has made all things clear.

“But thou, my Votary, weepest thou ?
I taught thy heart beyond the reach
Of ritual, Bible, or of speech;

Wrote on thy mind's transparent table
As far as the incommunicable:
Taught thee each private sign to raise,
Lit by the super-solar blaze.
Past utterance and past belief,
And past the blasphemy of grief,

The mysteries of nature's heart;
And though no muse can these impart,
Throb thine with nature's throbbing breast,
And all is clear from east to west."

We are not a little surprised how one who has been taught so much, and to whom all things have been made so clear, should still be left in the "mire," in regard to the mystery of life. We are, we confess, a little suspicious, that that nature which taught this Votary "beyond the reach of ritual, bible, or of speech!" was, no nature at all, but self. And the super-solar blaze he speaks of was a certain kind of light that usually leads men into "the mire," called "will-o'-the-wisp." But these men with a false imagination serve only to make things obscure which are clear. There is

"No man born into the world whose work

Is not born with him."*

* Lowell.