greater number of combinations than ours, and Goethe seems to have employed them all to express by sounds as well as images, the singular elevation of irony and enthusiasm, of saḍness and mirth, which impelled him to the composition of this work. It would indeed be too childish to suppose that such a man was not perfectly aware of all the defects of taste with which his piece was liable to be reproached but it is curious to know the motives that determined him to leave those defects, or rather intentionally to insert them.

Goethe has submitted himself to rules of no description whatever in this composition; it is neither tragedy nor romance. Its author abjured every sober method of thinking and writing; one might find in it some analogies with Aristophanes, if the traits of Shakspeare's pathos were not mingled with beauties of a very different nature. Faust) astonishes, moves, and melts us; but it does not leave a tender impression on the soul. Though presumption and vice are cruelly punished, the hand of beneficence is not perceived in the administration of the punishment; it would rather be said that the evil principle directed the thunderbolt of vengeance against crimes of which it had itself occasioned the commission; and remorse, such as it is painted in this drama, seems to proceed from hell, in company with guilt.

The belief in evil spirits is to be met with in many pieces of German poetry; the nature of the North agrees very well with this description of terror; it is therefore much less ridiculous in Germany, than it would be in France, to make use of the devil in works of fiction. To consider all these ideas only in a literary point of view, it is certain that our imagination figures to itself something that answers to the conception of an evil genius, whether in the human heart, or in the dispensa tions of nature: man sometimes does evil, as we may say, in a disinterested manner, without end, and even against his end, merely to satisfy a certain inward asperity that urges him to do hurt to others. The deities of paganism were accompanied by a different sort of divinities of the race of the Titans, who represented the revolted forces of nature; and, in Christianity

he evil inclinations of the soul may be said to be personified under the figure of devils.

It is impossible to read Faust without being excited to reflection in a thousand different manners: we quarrel with the author, we condemn him; we justify him; but he obliges us to think upon every thing, and, to borrow the language of a simple sage of former times, upon something more than every thing (de omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis). The criticisms to which such a production is obnoxious may easily be foreseen, or rather it is the very nature of the work that provokes censure still more than the manner in which it was treated; for such a composition ought to be judged like a dream; and if good taste were always watching at the ivory gate, to oblige our visions to take the regulated form, they would seldom strike the imagination.

Nevertheless, the drama of Faust is certainly not composed upon a good model. Whether it be considered as an offspring of the delirium of the mind, or of the satiety of reason, it is to be wished that such productions may not be multiplied; but when such a genius as that of Goethe sets itself free from all restrictions, the crowd of thoughts is so great, that on every side they break through and trample down the barriers of art.

CHAPTER XXIV.

LUTHER, ATTILA, THE SONS OF THE VALLEY, THE CROSS ON THE BALTIC, THE TWENTY-FOURTH OF FEBRUARY, BY WERNER.

SINCE Schiller is no more, and Goethe has ceased to write for the stage, the first dramatic author of Germany is Werner: obody has known better than he how to throw over tragedy the charm and the dignity cf lyric poetry; nevertheless, that which renders him so admirable as a poet, is prejudicial to his success in the representation. His pieces, which are of a rare

beauty, if we look only at the songs, the odes, the religious ana philosophical sentiments that abound in them, are extremely open to attack, when considered as dramas for action. It is not that Werner is deficient in theatrical talent, or even that he is not much better acquainted with its effects than the generality of German writers; but it seems as if he wished to propagate a mystical system of love and religion by the help of the dramatic art, and that his tragedies are the means he makes use of, rather than the end he proposes to himself.'

1 "What the new Creed specially was, which Werner felt so eager to plant and propagate, we nowhere learn with any distinctress. Probably, he might himself have been rather at a loss to explain it in brief compass. His theogony, we suspect, was still very much in posse; and perhaps only the moral part of this system could stand before him with some degree of clearness. On this latter point, indeed, he is determined enough; well assured of his dogmas, and apparently waiting but for some proper vehicle in which to convey them to the minds of men. His fundamental principle of morals does not exclusively or primarily belong to himself; being little more than that high tenet of entire Self-forgetfulness, that 'merging of the Me in the Idea; a principle which reigns both in Stoical and Christian ethics, and is at this day common, in theory, among all German philosophers, especially of the Transcendental class. Werner has adopted this principle with his whole heart and his whole soul as the indispensable condition of all Virtue. He believes it, we should say, intensely, and without compromise, exaggerating rather than softening or concealing its peculiarities. He will not have Happiness, under any form, to be the real or chief end of man; this is but love of enjoyment, disguise it as we like; a more complex and sometimes more respectable species of hunger, he would say, to be admitted as an indestructible element in human nature, but nowise to be recognized as the highest; on the contrary, to be resisted and incessantly warred with, till it become obedient to love of God, which is only, in the truest sense, love of Goodness, and the germ of which lies deep in the inmost nature of man; of authority superior to ll sensitive impulses; forming, in fact, the grand law of his being, as subjection to it forms the first and last condition of spiritual health. He thinks that to propose a reward for virtue is to render virtue impossible. He warmly seconds Schleiermacher in declaring that even the hope of Immortality is a consideration unfit to be introduced into religion, and tending only to pervert it, and impair its sacredness.

"Such was the spirit of that new Faith, which, symbolized under mythasen of Baffometus and Phosphoros, and 'Saviours from the Waters,' and Trinities of Art, Religion, and Love,' and to be preached abroad by the aid of Schleiermacher, and what was then called the New Poetical School, Werner seriously purposed, like another Luther, to cast forth, as good seed, among the ruins of decayed and down-trodden Protestantism! Whethe

Luther, though entirely composed with this secret intention, has met with the greatest success on the stage of Berlin. The Reformation is an event of high importance for the world, and particularly for Germany, which was its cradle. The hardihood and reflective heroism of Luther's character make a lively impression, especially in a country where thought fills up by itself alone all the measure of existence: no subject, then, is capable of more strongly exciting the attention of Germans.

Whatever regards the effect of the new opinions on the minds of men, is extremely well painted in this play of Werner's. The scene opens in the mines of Saxony, not far from Wittenberg, the dwelling-place of Luther: the song of the miners captivates the imagination; the burden of this song is always an address to the upper earth, the free air, and the sun. These uneducated men, already laid hold of by Luther's doctrine, discourse together about him and about the Reformation : and, in the obscurity of their subterraneous abodes, employ their minds about liberty of conscience, the inquiry after truth, this new day, in short, this new light, that is to penetrate the darkness of ignorance.

In the second act, the agents of the Elector of Saxony come to throw open to the nuns the doors of their convents. This scene, which might be rendered comic, is treated with an affecting solemnity. Werner intimately comprehends all the diversities of Christian worship; and if he rightly conceives the noble simplicity of Protestantism, he also knows the severe

Hitzig was still young enough to attempt executing his commission, and pplying to Schlegel and Tieck for help; and if so, in what gestures of speechless astonishment, or what peals of inextinguishable laughter they answered him, we are not informed. One thing, however, is clear: that a man with so unbridled an imagination, joined to so weak an understanding, and so broken a volition, who had plunged so deep into Theosophy, and still hovered so near the surface in all practical knowledge of men and their affairs; who, shattered and degraded in his own private character, could meditate such apostolic enterprises, was a man likely, if he lived ong, to play fantastic tricks in abundance; and, at least, in his religious istory, to set the world a-wondering. Conversion, not to Popery, but, if : so chanced, to Braminism, was a thing nowise to be thought impossiple."—(Carlyle's Essays, p. 45.)—Ed.

anctity of vows made at the foot of the cross.

The abbess of the convent, in casting off the veil which had covered the dark ringlets of her youth, and now conceals her whitened locks, experiences a sentiment of alarm at once pathetic and natural; and expresses her sorrow in verses harmonious and pure as the solitude of her religious retirement. Among these female recluses is she who is afterwards to be united to Luther, and she is at that moment the most adverse of all to his influence.

Among the beauties of this act, must be reckoned the portrait of Charles the Fifth, of that sovereign whose soul is weary of the empire of the world. A Saxon gentleman attached to his service thus expresses himself concerning him: "This gi gantic man has no heart inclosed within his frightful breast. The thunderbolt of the Almighty is in his hand; but he knows not how to join with it the apotheosis of love. He is like the young eagle that grasps the entire globe of earth in one of his talons, and is about to devour it for his food." These few words worthily announce Charles the Fifth; but it is more easy to paint such a character, than to make it speak for itself.

Luther trusts to the word of Charles the Fifth, although a hundred years before, at the Council of Constance, John Huss and Jerome of Prague had been burnt alive, notwithstanding the safe conduct of the Emperor Sigismund. On the eve of repairing to Worms, where the Diet of the Empire is held, Luther's courage fails him for a few moments; he feels himself seized with terror and misgiving. His young disciple brings him the flute on which he was accustomed to play to restore his depressed spirits; he takes it, and its harmonious concords reproduce in his heart all that confidence in God which is the wonder of spiritual existence. It is said that this moment excited great sensation on the Berlin stage, and it is easy to conceive it. Words, however beautiful, cannot effect so sudden a change of our inward disposition as music; Luther considered it as an art appertaining to theology, and powerfully conducive to the development of religious sentiment in the human heart.

The part of Charles the Fifth, in the Diet of Worms, is not exempt from affectation, and is consequently wanting in gran