the poetry of Salis makes us love its author as if he were our friend. Tiedge is a moral poet, whose writings lead the soul to the purest devotional feelings. We should still, in short, have to mention a crowd of other poets, if it were possible to point out every name deserving of applause, in a country where poetry is so natural to all cultivated minds.

A. W. Schlegel, whose literary opinions have made so much noise in Germany, has not, in any of his poems, allowed himself the slightest expression which can attract censure from the most severe taste. His elegies on the death of a young person; his stanzas on the union of the church with the fine arts; his elegy on Rome, are written throughout with delicacy and dignity. The two specimens I am about to give of his poetry will convey but a very imperfect idea of it; but they will serve, at least, to render the character of the poet better known. The sonnet, entitled Attachment to the World, appears to me charming.'

"Oft will the soul her wings unfold,

Invigorated by contemplation of purer things;
To her seems, in the narrow circle she traverses,
Her doing vain, and her knowing illusive.

"She feels deeply an irresistible longing

For higher worlds, for freer spheres of action,
And believes, at the close of her earthly career,

First lifted is the curtain revealing brighter scenes.

"Yet let death touch her body, so that she must leave it,
Then she shudders, and looks back with longing
On earthly pleasures and mortal companions:

“As once Proserpine, from Enna's meads

In Pluto's arms borne off, childish in her complaints,
For the flowers wept, which from her bosom fell."

completed, required no corrections-an effort which deserves to be recorded, for few poems in any language have been so complete and absolutely perfect in their structure as 'The Bride of Corinth.'"-Ed.

1 Again we give a literal translation from the German, not being able to content ourselves with a second-hand version through the French.-Ed

The following piece of verses must lose even more by a translation than the sonnet; it is called the Melodies of Life: the swan is placed in opposition to the eagle, the former as the emblem of contemplative existence, the latter as the image of active existence; the rhythm of the verse changes when the swan speaks, and when the eagle answers her; and the strains of both are nevertheless comprised in the same stanza united by the rhyme; the true beauties of harmony are also found in this piece, not imitative harmony, but the internal music of the soul. Our emotion discovers it without having recourse to reflection; and reflecting genius converts it into poetry.

THE SWAN.

"In the waters is pass'd my tranquil life,
It traces only a slight furrow that vanishes,
And never fail me in the watery mirror
The curving neck and rounded form.

THE EAGLE.

I dwell in the rocky cliffs,

I sail in the stormy air,
Trusting to the beating wings,

In chase and battle and peril.

THE SWAN.

"Me delights the blue of the sky serene,
Me sweetly intoxicates the spicewort's perfume,
When I, in the glow of the evening-red,
Rock my feather'd breast.

THE EAGLE.

"I triumph in tempests,
When they root up the forests,

I ask the lightning, whether it kills,
With glad annihilating pleasure.

THE SWAN.

'By a glance from Apollo invited,

Dare I bathe in harmony's tide,
At his feet reposing, when the songs
Resound in Tempé's vale.

THE EAGLE.

"I enthrone myself by Jupiter's seat; He winks and I bring him the lightning, Then drop I in sleep my wings

Over his ruling sceptre.

THE SWAN.

"With the blessed power of the gods penetrated, Have I myself in Leda's bosom entwined; Flatteringly caress'd me her tender hands, As she her sense in rapture lost.

THE EAGLE.

"I came out of the clouds like an arrow,
Tore him from his feeble companions:
I bore in my talons the youthful
Ganymede to Olympus on high.

THE SWAN.

"So bore she friendly natures, Helena and you, ye Dioscuri, Wild stars, whose brother-virtue,

Changing, shadow-world and heaven share.

THE EAGLE.

"Now hands the nectar-beeker

The youth to drinkers immortal;
Never brown'd is the fair young cheek,

As endlessly time hurries on.

THE SWAN.

Prophetically contemplate I oft the stars, In the water-mirror the deep-arch'd immensity, And me draws an inner tender longing Towards my home in a heavenly land.

THE EAGLE.

"I spread my wings with joy,

In my youth, towards the deathless sun,
Can never to the dust myself accustom,
I am akin to the gods.

THE SWAN.

Willingly yields to death a peaceful life;
When the web of existence is unwoven,

Loos'd is the tongue : melodiously celebrates
Each breath the holy moment.

THE EAGLE.

"The torch of the dead makes young again !!

A blooming phoenix, rises

The soul free and unveil'd,

And greets its god-like fortune.”

It is a circumstance worthy of observation, that national taste in general differs much more in the dramatic art than in any other branch of literature. We will analyze the cause of this difference in the following chapters; but before we enter on the examination of the German theatre, some general observations on taste appear to me necessary. I shall not consider it abstractedly as an intellectual faculty; several writers, and Montesquieu in particular, have exhausted this subject. I will only point out why literary taste is understood in so different a manner by the French and the nations of Germany.

1 Among the ancients, an eagle rising from the funeral pile was an emblem of the immortality of the soul, and not unfrequently also that of deification.

2 We have again been obliged to give a literal, line-by-line version, in order to avoid the shadow of a shadow in a retranslation from a Frenchı rendering.-Ed.

CHAPTER XIV.

OF TASTE.

HOSE who think themselves in possession of taste are more proud of it than those who believe that they possess genius. Taste is in literature what bon ton is in society; we consider it as a proof of fortune and of birth, or at least of the habits which are found in connection with them; while genius may spring from the head of an artisan, who has never had any intercourse with good company. In every country where there is vanity, taste will be placed in the highest rank of qualifications, because it separates different classes, and serves as a rallying-point to all the individuals of the first class. In every country where the power of ridicule is felt, taste will be reckoned as one of the first advantages; for, above all things, it teaches us what we ought to avoid. A sense of the fitness of things, and of propriety, peculiarly belongs to taste; and it is an excellent armor to ward off the blows of the various con tending kinds of self-love, which we have to deal with; in short, it may so happen, that a whole nation shall, with respect to other nations, form itself into an aristocracy of good taste; and this may be applied to France, where the spirit of society reigned in so eminent a manner, that it had some excuse for such a pretension.

But taste, in its application to the fine arts, differs extremely from taste as applied to the relations of social life; when the bject is to force men to grant us a reputation, ephemeral as our own lives, what we omit doing is at least as necessary as what we do; for the higher orders of society are naturally so nostile to all pretension, that very extraordinary advantages are requisite to compensate that of not giving occasion to the