cause I cannot lie. Fancy not that I take credit for it: I cannot, just as one cannot play upon the flute."

"In the meanest hut is a romance, if you knew the hearts there."

"So long as we do not take even the injustice which is done us, and which forces the burning tears from us; so long as we do not take even this for just and right, we are in the thickest darkness, without dawn."

"Manure with despair,-but let it be genuine; and you will have a noble harvest." "True misery is ashamed of itself: hides itself, and does not complain. You may know it by that."

"What a commonplace man! If he did not live in the same time with us, no mortal would mention him."

"Have you remarked that Homer, whenever he speaks of the water, is always great; as Goethe is, when he speaks of the stars."

:

"If one were to say, 'You think it easy to be original but no, it is difficult; it costs a whole life of labour and exertion,'-you would think him mad, and ask no more questions of him. And yet his opinion would be altogether true, and plain enough withal. Original, I grant, every man might be, and must be, if men did not almost always admit mere undigested hearsays into their head, and fling them out again undigested. Whoever honestly questions himself, and faithfully answers, is busied continually with all that presents itself in life; and is incessantly inventing, had the thing been invented never so long before. Honesty belongs as a first condition to good thinking; and there are almost as few absolute dunces as geniuses. Genuine dunces would always be original; but there are none of them genuine : they have almost always understanding enough to be dishonest."

"He (the blockhead) tumbled out on me his definition of genius; the trivial old distinctions of intellect and heart; as if there ever was, or could be, a great intellect with a mean heart!"

"Goethe? When I think of him, tears come into my eyes: all other men I love with my own strength; he teaches me to love with his. My Poet!"

"Slave-trade, war, marriage, working-classes-and they are astonished, and keep clouting and remending?"

"The whole world is, properly speaking, a tragic embarras."

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.. I here, Rahel the Jewess, feel that I am as unique as the greatest appearance in this earth. The greatest artist, philosopher or poet, is not above me. We are of the same element; in the same rank, and stand together. Whichever would exclude the other, excludes only himself. But to me it was appointed not to write, or act, but to live: I lay in embryo till iny century; and then was, in outward respects, so flung away. It is for this reason that I tell you. But pain, as I know it, is a life too: and I think with myself, I am one of those figures which Humanity was fated to evolve, and then never to use more, never to have more: Me no one can comfort."-" Why not be beside oneself, dear friend? There are beautiful pa

rentheses in life, which belong neither to us nor to others: beautiful I name them, because they give us a freedom we could not get by sound sense. Who would volunteer to have a nervous fever? And yet it may save one's life. I love rage; I use it, and patronize it."—“ Be not alarmed; I am commonly calmer. But when I write to a friend's heart, it comes to pass that the sultry laden horizon of my soul breaks out in lightning. Heavenly men love lightning."

"To Varnhagen. . . One thing I must write to thee; what I thought of last night in bed, and for the first time in my life. That I, as a relative and pupil of Shakspeare, have, from my childhood upwards, occupied myself much with death, thou mayest believe. But never did my own death affect me; nay, I did not even think of this fact, that I was affected by it. Now, last night there was something I had to write; I said Varnhagen must know this thing, if he is to think of me after I am dead. And it seemed to me as if I must die; as if my heart were flitting away over this earth, and I must follow it; and my death gave me pity: for never before, as I now saw, had I thought that it would give anybody pity of thee I knew it would do so, and yet it was the first time in my life I had seen this, or known that I had never seen it. In such solitude have I lived: comprehend it! I thought, when I am dead, then first will Varnhagen know what sufferings I had; and all his lamenting will be in vain; the figure of me meets him again through all eternity no more; swept away am I then, as our poor Prince Louis is. And no one can be kind to me then; with the strongest will, with the exertion of despair, no one: and this thought of thee about me was what at last affected me. I must write of this, though it af flict thee never so."

:

"To Rose, a younger sister, on her marriage in Amsterdam.-Paris, 1801. Since thy last letter I am sore downcast. Gone art thou! No Rose comes stepping in to me with true foot and heart, who knows me altogether, knows all my sorrows altogether. When I am sick of body or soul, alone, alone thou comest not to me any more; thy room empty, quite empty, for ever empty. Thou art away, to try thy fortune. O Heaven! and to me not even trying is permitted. Am not I in luck! The garden in the Lindenstrasse where we used to be with Hanne and Feu-was it not beautiful? I will call it Rose now; with Hanne and Hanse will I go often thither, and none shall know of it. Dost thou recollect that night when I was to set out with Fink the time before last? How thou hadst to sleep up stairs, and then to stay with me? O my sister, I might be as ill again -though not for that cause: and thou too, what may not lie before thee! But, no, thy name is Rose; thou hast blue eyes, and a far other life than I with my stars and black ones.

Salute mamma a million times; tell her I congratulate her from the heart; the more so as I can never give her such a pleasure! God willed it not. But I, in her place, would have great pity for a child so circumstanced. Yet let her not lament for me. I know all her goodness, and thank her with my soul. Tell her I have the fate of nations and

of the greatest men before my eyes here: they too go tumbling even so on the great sea of Existence, mounting, sinking, swallowed up. From of old all men have seemed to me like spring blossoms, which the wind blows off and whirls; none knows where they fall, and the fewest come to fruit."

Poor Rahel! The Frenchman said above she was an artist and apostle, yet had not ceased to be a child and woman. But we must stop short. One other little scene, a scene from her death-bed by Varnhagen, must end the tragedy:

... She said to me one morning, after a dreadful night, with the penetrating tone of that lovely voice of hers: '0, I am still happy; I am God's creature still; He knows of me; I shall come to see how it was good and needful for me to suffer: of a surety I had something to learn by it. And am I not already happy in this trust, and in all the love that I feel and meet with?'

"In this manner she spoke, one day, among other things, with joyful heartiness, of a dream which always from childhood she had remembered and taken comfort from. 'In my seventh year,' said she, 'I dreamt that I saw God quite near me; he stood expanded above me, and his mantle was the whole sky; on a corner of this mantle I had leave to rest, and lay there in peaceable felicity till I awoke. Ever since, through my whole life, this dream has returned on me, and in the worst times was present also in my waking moments, and a heavenly comfort to me. I had leave to throw myself at God's feet, on a corner of his mantle, and he screened me from all sorrow there: He permitted it.' The following words, which I felt called to write down exactly as she spoke them on the 2d of March, are also remarkable: What a history!' cried she with deep emotion: A fugitive from Egypt and Palestine am I here; and find help, love, and kind care among you. To thee, dear August, was I sent by this guiding of God, and thou to me; from afar, from the old times of Jacob and the Patriarchs! With a sacred joy I think of this my origin, of all this wide web of prearrangement. How the oldest remembrances | of mankind are united with the newest reality of things, and the most distant times and places are brought together. What for so long a period of my life I considered as the worst ignominy, the sorest sorrow and misfortune, that I was born a Jewess, this I would not part with now for any price. Will it not be even so with these pains of sickness? Shall I not one day mount joyfully aloft on them, too; feel that I could not want them for any price? O August, this is just, this is true; we will try to go on thus! Thereupon she said, with many tears, 'Dear August, my heart is refreshed to its inmost; I have thought of Jesus, and wept over his sorrows; I have felt, for the first time felt, that he is my Brother. And Mary, what must she have suffered! She saw her beloved Son in agony, and did not sink; she stood at the Cross. That I could not have done; I am not strong enough for that. Forgive me, God, I confess how weak I am.'

"At nightfall, on the 6th of March, Rahel

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felt herself easier than for long before, and expressed an irresistible desire to be new dressed. As she could not be persuaded from it, this was done, though with the utmost precaution. She herself was busily helpful in it, and signified great contentment that she had got it accomplished. She felt so well she expected to sleep. She wished me good-night, and bade me also go and sleep. Even the maid, Dora, was to go and sleep; however, she did not.

"It might be about midnight, and I was still awake, when Dora called me: I was to come, she was much worse.' Instead of sleep, Rahel had found only suffering, one distress added to another; and now all had combined into decided spasm of the breast. I found her in a state little short of that she had passed six days ago. The medicines left for such an occur rence (regarded as possible, not probable) were tried; but this time with little effect. The frightful struggle continued; and the beloved sufferer, writhing in Dora's arms, cried, several times, 'This pressure against her breast was not to be borne, was pushing her heart out:' the breathing, too, was painfully difficult. She complained that it was getting into her head now, that she felt like a cloud there;' she leaned back with that. A deceptive hope of some alleviation gleamed on us for a moment, and then went out for ever; the eyes were dimmed, the mouth distorted, the limbs lamed! In this state the doctors found her; their remedies were all bootless. An unconscious hour and half, during which the breast still occasionally struggled in spasmodic efforts-and this noble life breathed out its last. The look I got then, kneeling almost lifeless at her bed, stamped itself, glowing, for ever into my heart."

So died Rahel Varnhagen von Ense, born Levin, a singular biographic phenomenon of this century; a woman of genius, of true depth and worth, whose secluded life, as one cannot but see, had in it a greatness far be yond what has many times fixed the public admiration of the whole world; a woman equal to the highest thoughts of her century; in whom it was not arrogance, we do believe, but a just self-consciousness, to feel that "the highest philosopher, or poet, or artist was not above her, but of a like element and rank with her." That such a woman should have lived unknown and, as it were, silent to the world, is peculiar in this time.

We say not that she was equal to De Staël, nor the contrary; neither that she might have written De Staël's books, nor even that she might not have written far better books. She has ideas unequalled in De Staël; a sincerity, a pure tenderness and genuineness which that celebrated person had not, or had lost. But what then? The subjunctive, the optative are vague moods: there is no tense one can found on but the preterite of the indicative. Enough for us, Rahel did not write. She sat imprisoned, or it might be sheltered and fosteringly embowered, in those circumstances of hers; she "was not appointed to write or to act, but only to live." Call her not unhappy on that account, call her not useless; nay, perhaps, call her happier and usefuller. Blessed are the humble, are they that are not known. It is written, "Seek2 z 2

on pressing request, take it up again, being a man indispensable. Thrice, or at least twice, did he, in different places, painfully construct a Free Constitution; consisting of "two chambers, and a supreme governor for life with liberty to name his successor," the reasonablest democratic constitution you could well construct; and twice, or at least once, did the people, on trial, declare it disagreeable. He was of old, well known in Paris; in the dissolute, the philosophico-political and other circles there. He has shone in many a gay Parisian soirée, this Simon Bolivar; and he, in his later years, in autumn, 1825, rode triumphant into Potosi and the fabulous Inca Cities, with clouds of feathered Indians somersetting and warwhopping round him*-and "as the famed Cerro, metalliferous Mountain, came in sight, the bells all pealed out, and there was a thunder of artillery," says General Miller! If this is not a Ulysses, Polytlas and Polymetis, a much enduring and many counselled man; where was there one? Truly a Ulysses whose history were worth its ink,had the Homer that could do it, made his appearance!

Of General San Martin, too, there will be something to be said. General San Martin, when we last saw him, twenty years ago or more, through the organs of the authentic steadfast Mr. Miers, had a handsome house in Mendoza, and "his own portrait, as I remarked, hung up between those of Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington." In Mendoza, cheerful, mudbuilt, whitewashed Town, seated at the eastern base of the Andes, "with its shady public walk well paved and swept;" looking out pleasantly, on this hand, over wide horizons of Pampa wilderness; pleasantly on that, to the Rocky-chain, Cordillera they call it, of the sky-piercing Mountains, capt in snow, or with volcanic fumes issuing from them: there dwelt General Ex-Generalissimo San Martin, ruminating past adventures over half the world; and had his portrait hung up between Napoleon's and the Duke of Welling

ton's.

Did the reader ever hear of San Martin's march over the Andes in Chile? It is a feat worth looking at; comparable, most likely, to Hannibal's march over the Alps, while there was yet no Simplon or Mont-Cénis highway; and it transacted itself in the year 1817. South American armies think little of picking their way through the gullies of the Andes; so the Buenos-Ayres people, having driven out their own Spaniards, and established the reign of freedom, though in a precarious manner, thought it were now good to drive the Spaniards out of Chile, and establish the reign of freedom there also instead: whereupon San Martin, commander at Mendoza, was appointed to do it. By way of preparation, for he began from afar, San Martin, while an army is getting ready at Mendoza, assembles "at the fort of San Carlos by the Aguanda river," some days' journey to the south, all attainable tribes of the Pehuenche Indians, to a solemn Palaver, so they name it, and civic entertainment, on

* Memoirs of General Miller.

the esplanade there. The ceremonies and deliberations, as described by General Miller, are somewhat surprising; still more the conclud ing civic feast, which lasts for three days, which consists of horses' flesh for the solid part, and horses' blood with ardent spirits ad libitum for the liquid, consumed with such alacrity, with such results as one may fancy. However, the women had prudently removed all the arms beforehand; nay, "five or six of these poor women, taking it by turns, were always found in a sober state, watching over the rest;" so that comparatively little mischief was done, and only "one or two" deaths by quarrel took place.

Few

The Pehuenches having drunk their ardentwater and horses' blood in this manner, and sworn eternal friendship to San Martin, went home, and-communicated to his enemies, across the Andes, the road he meant to take. This was what San Martin had foreseen and meant, the knowing man! He hastened his preparations, got his artillery slung on poles, his men equipt with knapsacks and haversacks, his mules in readiness; and, in all stillness, set forth from Mendoza by another road. things in late war, according to General Mil ler, have been more noteworthy than this march. The long straggling line of soldiers, six thousand and odd, with their quadrupeds and baggage, winding through the heart of the Andes, breaking for a brief moment the old abysmal solitudes!-For you farre along, on some narrow roadway, through stony laby rinths; huge rock-mountains hanging over your head, on this hand; and under your feet, on that, the roar of mountain-cataracts, horror of bottomless chasms;-the very winds and echoes howling on you in an almost preternatural manner. Towering rock-barriers rise sky-high before you, and behind you, and around you; intricate the outgate! The roadway is narrow; footing none of the best. Sharp turns there are, where it will behove you to mind your paces; one false step, and you will need no second; in the gloomy jaws of the abyss you vanish, and the spectral winds howl requiem. Somewhat better are the suspension bridges, made of bamboo and leather, though they swing like see-saws: men are stationed with lassos, to gin you dexterously, and fish you up from the torrent, if you trip there.

Through this kind of country did San Martin march; straight towards San Iago, to fight the Spaniards and deliver Chile. For ammunition wagons he had sorras, sledges, canoe shaped boxes, made of dried bull's-hide. His cannons were carried on the back of mules, each cannon on two mules judiciously harnessed: on the packsaddle of your foremost mule, there rested with firm girths a long strong pole; the other end of which (forked end, we suppose) rested, with like girths, on the packsaddle of the hindmost mule; your cannon was slung with leathern straps on this pole, and so travelled, swaying and dangling, yet moderately secure. In the knapsack of each soldier was eight days' provender, dried beef ground into snuff-powder, with a modicum of pepper, and a slight seasoning of biscuit or