repent the noble pride of thy heart never! It is | Plattner's mouth, created whole books in me." not always our duty to marry, but it is always-The following dream is perhaps his grandest, our duty to abide by right, not to purchase hap-as, undoubtedly, it is among his most celebrated. piness by loss of honour, not to avoid unwed- We shall give it entire, long as it is, and therededness by untruthfulness. Lonely, unadmired with finish our quotations. What value he heroine in thy last hour, when all Life and himself put on it, may be gathered from the the bygone possessions and scaffoldings of Life following Note: "If ever my heart," says he, shall crumble in pieces, ready to fall down; in" were to grow so wretched and so dead, that that hour thou wilt look back on thy untenant- all feelings in it which announce the being of ed life: no children, no husband, no wet eyes a God were extinct there, I would terrify mywill be there; but in the empty dusk, one high, self with this sketch of mine; it would heal pure, angelic, smiling, beaming Figure, godlike me, and give me my feelings back." We and mounting to the Godlike, will hover, and translate it from Siebenkäs, where it forms the beckon thee to mount with her,-mount thou first chapter, or Blumenstück, (Flower-piece.) with her, the Figure is thy Virtue.'" We have spoken above, and warmly, of Jean Paul's Imagination, of his high devout feeling, which it were now a still more grateful part of our task to exhibit. But in this also our readers must content themselves with some imperfect glimpses. What religious opinions and aspirations he specially entertained, how that noblest portion of man's interests represented itself in such a mind, were long to describe, did we even know it with certainty. He hints somewhere that "the soul, which by nature looks Heavenward, is without a Temple in this age;" in which the careful reader will decipher much. "But there will come another era," says Paul," when it shall be light, and man will awaken from his lofty dreams, and find-his dreams still there, and that nothing is gone save his sleep. "The stones and rocks, which two veiled Figures, (Necessity and Vice,) like Deucalion and Pyrrha, are casting behind them, at Goodness, will themselves become men. "And on the Western Gate (Abendthor, evening-gate) of this century stands written: Here is the way to Virtue and Wisdom; as on the Western-Gate at Cherson stands the proud Inscription: Here is the way to Byzance. "Infinite Providence, Thou wilt cause the day to dawn. "But as yet, struggles the twelfth-hour of the Night the nocturnal birds of prey are on the wing, spectres uproar, the dead walk, the living dream."-Hesperus. Preface. Connected with this, there is one other piece, which also for its singular poetic qualities, we shall translate here. The reader has heard much of Richter's Dreams, with what strange prophetic power he rules over that chaos of spiritual Nature, bodying forth a whole world of Darkness, broken by pallid gleams, or wild sparkles of light, and peopled with huge, shadowy, bewildered shapes, full of grandeur and meaning. No Poet known to us, not Milton himself, shows such a vastness of Imagination; such a rapt, deep, old Hebrew spirit, as Richter in these scenes. He mentions in his Biographical Notes the impression which these lines of the Tempest had on him, as recited by one of his companions: "We are such stuff As dreams are made of, and our little Life "The passage of Shakspeare," says he, "rounded with a sleep, (mit Schlaf umgeben,) in "The purpose of this fiction is the excuse of its boldness. Men deny the Divine Existence with as little feeling as the most assert it. Even in our true systems we go on collecting mere words, playmarks, and medals, as the misers do coins; and not till late do we transform the words into feelings, the coins into enjoyments. A man may, for twenty years, believe the Immortality of the Soul;—in the one-and-twentieth, in some great moment, he for the first time discovers with amazement the rich meaning of this belief, and the warmth of this Naptha-well. "Of such sort, too, was my terror at the poisonous stifling vapour which floats out round the heart of him who for the first time enters the school of Atheism. I could with less pain deny Immortality, than Deity; there I should lose but a world covered with mists, here I should lose the present world, namely, the Sun thereof: the whole Spiritual Universe is dashed asunder by the hand of Atheism, into numberless quicksilver-points of Me's, which glitter, run, waver, fly together or asunder, without unity or continuance. No one in Creation is so alone, as the denier of God; he mourns, with an orphaned heart that has lost its great Father, by the corpse of Nature, which no World-spirit moves and holds together, and which grows in its grave; and he mourns by that Corpse till he himself crumble off from it. The whole world lies before him, like the Egyptian Sphinx of stone, half-buried in the sand; and the All is the cold iron mask of a formless Eternity.* "I merely remark farther, that with the belief of Atheism, the belief of Immortality is quite compatible; for the same Necessity, which in this Life threw my light dew-drop of a Me into a flower-bell and under a Sun, can repeat that process in a second life;-nay, more easily imbody me-the second time than the first. "If we hear, in childhood, that the dead, about midnight, when our sleep reaches near the soul, and darkens even our dreams, awake out of theirs, and in the church mimic the worship of the living, we shudder at Death by reason of the dead, and in the night-solitude turn away our eyes from the long silent windows of the church, and fear to search in their gleaming, whether it proceed from the moon. "Childhood, and rather its terrors than its raptures, take wings and radiance again in dreams, and sport like fire-flies in the little night of the soul. Crush not these flickering sparks!-Leave us even our dark painful dreams as higher half-shadows of reality!] of Creation hung without a Sun that made it, And wherewith will you replace to us those dreams, which bear us away from under the tumult of the waterfall into the still heights of childhood, where the stream of life yet ran silent in its little plain, and flowed towards its abysses, a mirror of the Heaven?— over the Abyss, and trickled down. And when I looked up to the immeasurable world for the Divine Eye, it glared on me with an empty, black, bottomless Eye-socket; and Eternity lay upon Chaos, eating it and ruminating it. Cry on, ye Dissonances; cry away the Shadows, for He is not!' "The pale-grown Shadows flitted away, as white vapour which frost has formed with the warm breath disappears; and all was void. O, then came, fearful for the heart, the dead Children who had been awakened in the Churchyard, into the temple, and cast themselves before the high Form on the Altar, and said, 'Jesus, have we no Father?' And he answered, with streaming tears, 'We are all orphans, I and you; we are without Father!' "Then shrieked the Dissonances still louder, asunder; and the Temple and the Children sank down, and the whole Earth and the Sun sank after it, and the whole Universe sank with its immensity before us; and above, on the summit of immeasurable Nature, stood Christ, and gazed down into the Universe chequered with its thousand Suns, as into the Mine bored out of the Eternal Night, in which the Suns run like mine-lamps, and the Galaxies like silver veins. "I was lying once, on a summer-evening, in the sunshine; and I fell asleep. Methought I awoke in the churchyard. The down-rolling wheels of the steeple-clock, which was striking eleven, had awoke me. In the emptied nightheaven I looked for the Sun; for I thought an eclipse was veiling him with the Moon. All the Graves were open, and the iron doors of the charnel-house were swinging to and fro by invisible hands. On the walls, flitted shadows, which proceeded from no one, and other shadows stretched upwards in the pale air. In the open coffins none now lay sleeping, but the-the quivering walls of the Temple parted children. Over the whole heaven hung, in large folds, a gray sultry mist, which a giant shadow like vapour was drawing down, nearer, closer, and hotter. Above me I heard the distant fall of avalanches; under me the first step of a boundless earthquake. The Church wavered up and down with two interminable Dissonances, which struggled with each other in it; endeavouring in vain to mingle in unison. At times, a gray glimmer hovered along the windows, and under it the lead and "And as he saw the grinding press of iron fell down molten. The net of the mist, Worlds, the torch-dance of celestial wildfires, and the tottering Earth brought me into that and the coral-banks of beating hearts; and hideous Temple; at the door of which, in two as he saw how world after world shook off its poison-bushes, two glittering Basilisks lay glimmering souls upon the Sea of Death, as a brooding. I passed through unknown Shadows, water-bubble scatters swimming lights on the on whom ancient centuries were impressed. waves, then majestic as the Highest of the All the Shadows were standing round the Finite, he raised his eyes towards the Nothingempty Altar; and in all, not the heart, but theness, and towards the void Immensity, and breast quivered and pulsed. One dead man only, who had just been buried there, still lay on his coffin without quivering breast; and on his smiling countenance, stood a happy dream. But at the entrance of one Living, he awoke, and smiled no longer; he lifted his heavy eyelids, but within was no eye; and in his beating breast there lay, instead of heart, a wound. He held up his hands, and folded them to pray; but the arms lengthened out, and dissolved; and the hands, still folded together, fell away. Above, on the Church-dome stood the dial-plate of Eternity whereon no number appeared, and which was its own index: but a black finger pointed thereon, and the Dead sought to see the time by it. said: 'Dead, dumb Nothingness! Cold, everlasting Necessity! Frantic Chance! Know ye what this is that lies beneath you? When will ye crush the Universe in pieces, and me? Chance, knowest thou what thou doest, when with thy hurricanes thou walkest through that snow-powder of Stars, and extinguishest Sun after Sun, and that sparkling dew of heavenly light goes out, as thou passest over it? How is each so solitary in this wide grave of the All! I am alone with myself! O Father, O Father! where is thy infinite bosom that I might rest on it? Ah, if each soul is its own father and creator, why can it not be its own destroyer too? "Is this beside me yet a Man? Unhappy one! Your little life is the sigh of Nature, or only its echo; a convex-mirror throws its rays into that dust-cloud of dead men's ashes, down on the Earth, and thus you, cloud-formed wavering phantoms, arise.-Look down into the Abyss, over which clouds of ashes are moving; mists full of Worlds reek up from the Sea of Death; the Future is a mounting mist, and the Present is a falling one.-Knowest thou thy Earth again?' "Here Christ looked down, and his eye filled with tears, and he said: 'Ah, I was once there; I was still happy then; I had still my Infinite Father, and looked up cheerfully from the mountains, into the immeasurable Heaven, and pressed my mangled breast on his healing form, and said even in the bitterness of death: | we must here for the present close our lucuFather, take thy son from this bleeding hull, brations on Jean Paul. To delineate, with and lift him to thy heart!-Ah, ye too happy any correctness, the specific features of such inhabitants of Earth, ye still believe in Him. a genius, and of its operations and results in Perhaps even now your Sun is going down, the great variety of provinces where it dwelt and ye kneel amid blossoms, and brightness, and worked, were a long task; for which, perand tears, and lift trustful hands, and cry with haps, some groundwork may have been laid joy-streaming eyes, to the opened Heaven: here, and which, as occasion serves, it will be "Me too thou knowest, Omnipotent, and all my pleasant for us to resume. wounds; and at death thou receivest me, and closest them all!" Unhappy creatures, at death they will not be closed! Ah, when the sorrow-laden lays himself, with galled back, into the Earth, to sleep till a fairer Morning full of Truth, full of Virtue and Joy, he awakens in a stormy Chaos, in the everlasting Midnight, -and there comes no Morning, and no soft healing hand, and no Infinite Father!-Mortal, beside me! if thou still livest, pray to Him; else hast thou lost him for ever!" Probably enough, our readers, in considering these strange matters, will too often bethink them of that "Episode concerning Paul's Costume;" and conclude that, as in living, so in writing, he was a Mannerist, and man of continual Affectations. We will not quarrel with them on this point; we must not venture among the intricacies it would lead us into. At the same time, we hope, many will agree with us in honouring Richter, such as he was; and" in spite of his hundred real, and his ten "And as I fell down, and looked into the thousand seeming faults," discern under this sparkling Universe, I saw the upborne Rings wondrous guise the spirit of a true Poet and of the Giant-Serpent, the Serpent of Eternity, Philosopher. A Poet, and among the highest which had coiled itself round the All of Worlds, of his time, we must reckon him, though he -and the Rings sank down, and encircled the wrote no verses; a Philosopher, though he All doubly; and then it wound itself, innu- promulgated no systems: for on the whole, merable ways, round Nature, and swept the that "Divine Idea of the World" stood in clear Worlds from their places, and crashing, ethereal light before his mind; he recognised squeezed the Temple of Immensity together, the Invisible, even under the mean forms of into the Church of a Burying-ground, and all these days, and with a high, strong, not uningrew strait, dark, fearful,—and an immeasur-spired heart, strove to represent it in the Visiably extended Hammer was to strike the last hour of Time, and shiver the Universe asunder, ... WHEN I AWOKE. ble, and published tidings of it to his fellow men. This one virtue, the foundation of all other virtues, and which a long study more "My soul wept for joy that I could still pray and more clearly reveals to us in Jean Paul, to God; and the joy, and the weeping, and the will cover far greater sins than his were. It faith on him were my prayer. And as I arose, raises him into quite another sphere than that the Sun was glowing deep behind the full pur- of the thousand elegant sweet-singers and pled corn-ears, and casting meekly the gleam cause-and-effect philosophers, in his own counof its twilight-red on the little Moon, which try, or in this; the million Novel-manufactuwas rising in the East without an Aurora; rers, Sketchers, practical Discoursers, and so and between the sky and the earth, a gay forth, not once reckoned in. Such a man we transient air-people was stretching out its can safely recommend to universal study; and short wings and living, as I did, before the In- for those who, in the actual state of matters, finite Father; and from all Nature around me may the most blame him, repeat the old maxflowed peaceful tones as from distant evening-im: "What is extraordinary try to look at bells." with your own eyes." Without commenting on this singular piece, ON HISTORY. [FRASER'S MAGAZINE, 1830.] CLIO was figured by the ancients as the eldest daughter of Memory, and chief of the Muses; which dignity, whether we regard the essential qualities of her art, or its practice and acceptance among men, we shall still find to have been fitly bestowed. History, as it lies at the root of all science, is also the first distinct product of man's spiritual nature; his earliest expression of what can be called Thought. It is a looking both before and after; as, indeed, the coming Time already waits, unseen, yet definitely shaped, predetermined, and inevitable, in the Time come: and only by the combination of both is the meaning of either completed. The Sibylline Books, though old, are not the oldest. Some nations have prophecy, some have not: but, of all mankind, there is no tribe so rude that it has not attempted History, though several have not arithmetic enough to count Five. History has been written with quipo-threads, with featherpictures, with wampum-belts; still oftener with earth-mounds and monumental stoneheaps, whether as pyramid or cairn; for the Celt and the Copt, the Red man as well as the other less boasted sources, whereby, as matWhite, lives between two eternities, and, war-ters now stand, a Marlborough may become ring against Oblivion, he would fain unite himself in clear, conscious relation, as in dim unconscious relation he is already united, with the whole Future and the whole Past. A talent for History may be said to be born with us, as our chief inheritance. In a certain sense all men are historians. Is not every memory written quite full with Annals, wherein joy and mourning, conquest and loss, manifoldly alternate; and, with or without philosophy, the whole fortunes of one little inward kingdom, and all its politics, foreign and domestic, stand ineffaceably recorded? Our very speech is curiously historical. Most men, you may observe, speak only to narrate; not in imparting what they have thought, which indeed were often a very small matter, but in exhibiting what they have undergone or seen, which is a quite unlimited one, do talkers dilate. Cut us off from Narrative, how would the stream of conversation, even among the wisest, languish into detached handfuls, and among the foolish utterly evaporate! Thus, as we do nothing but enact History, we say little but recite it; nay, rather, in that widest sense, our whole spiritual life is built thereon. For, strictly considered, what is all Knowledge too but recorded Experience, and a product of History; of which, therefore, Reasoning and Belief, no less than Action and Passion, are essential materials? great in the world's business, with no History save what he derives from Shakspeare's Plays? Nay, whether in that same teaching by Experience, historical Philosophy has yet properly deciphered the first element of all science in this kind? What is the aim and significance of that wondrous changeful life it investigates and paints? Whence the course of man's destinies in this Earth originated, and whither they are tending? Or, indeed, if they have any course and tendency, are really guided forward by an unseen mysterious Wisdom, or only circle in blind mazes without recognisable guidance? Which questions, altogether fundamental, one might think, in any Philosophy of History, have, since the era when Monkish Annalists were wont to answer them by the long-ago extinguished light of their Missal and Breviary, been by most philosophical Historians only glanced at dubiously, and from afar; by many, not so much as glanced at. The truth is, two difficulties, never wholly surmountable, lie in the way. Before philosophy can teach by Experience, the Philosophy has to be in readiness, the Experience must be gathered and intelligibly recorded. Now, overlooking the former consideration, and with regard only to the latter, let any one who has examined the current of human affairs-and how intricate, perplexed, unfathomable, even when seen into with our own eyes, are their thousand-fold, blending movements-say whether the true representing of it is easy or impossible. Social Life is the aggregate of all the individual men's Lives who constitute society; History is the essence of innumerable Biographies. But if one Biography, nay, our own Biography, study and recapitulate it as we may, remains in so many points unintelligible to us, how much more must these million, the very facts of which, to say nothing of the purport of them, we know not, and cannot know! Under a limited, and the only practicable shape, History proper, that part of History which treats of remarkable action, has, in all modern as well as ancient times, ranked among the highest arts, and perhaps never stood higher than in these times of ours. For whereas, of old, the charm of History lay chiefly in gratifying our common appetite for the wonderful, for the unknown; and her office was but as that of a Minstrel and Story-teller, she has now farther become a Schoolmistress, and professes to instruct in gratifying. Whether, with the stateliness of that venerable cha- Neither will it adequately avail us to assert racter, she may not have taken up something that the general inward condition of Life is of its austerity and frigidity; whether, in the the same in all ages; and that only the relogical terseness of a Hume or Robertson, the markable deviations from the common endowgraceful ease and gay pictorial heartiness of a ment, and common lot, and the more importHerodotus or Froissart may not be wanting, is ant variations which the outward figure of not the question for us here. Enough that all Life has from time to time undergone, deserve learners, all inquiring minds of every order, memory and record. The inward condition are gathered round her footstool, and reve- of life, it may rather be affirmed, the conscious rently pondering her lessons, as the true basis or half-conscious aim of mankind, so far as of Wisdom. Poetry, Divinity, Politics, Physics, men are not mere digesting machines, is the have each their adherents and adversaries; same in no two ages; neither are the more each little guild supporting a defensive and important outward variations easy to fix on, offensive war for its own special domain; or always well capable of representation. while the domain of History is as a Free Em- Which was the greater innovator, which was porium, where all these belligerents peaceably the more important personage in man's hismeet and furnish themselves; and Sentiment- tory, he who first led armies over the Alps, alist and Utilitarian, Skeptic and Theologian, and gained the victories of Cannæ and Thrawith one voice advise us: Examine History, symene; or the nameless boor who first hamfor it is "Philosophy teaching by Experience." mered out for himself an iron spade? When the Far be it from us to disparage such teaching, oak tree is felled, the whole forest echoes with the very attempt at which must be precious. it; but a hundred acorns are planted silently Neither shall we too rigidly inquire, how much by some unnoticed breeze. Battles and warit has hitherto profited? Whether most of tumults, which for the time din every ear, and what little practical wisdom men have, has with joy or terror intoxicate every heart, pass come from study of professed History, or from | away like tavern-brawls; and, except some ON HISTORY. few Marathons and Morgartens, are remem- tion, but only some more or less plausible bered by accident, not by desert. Laws them- scheme and theory of the Transaction, or the selves, political Constitutions, are not our Life, harmonized result of many such schemes, but only the house wherein our life is led: each varying from the other, and all varying nay, they are but the bare walls of the house; from Truth, that we can ever hope to behold. Nay, were our faculty of insight into passing all whose essential furniture, the inventions and traditions, and daily habits that regulate things never so complete, there is still a fatal and support our existence, are the work not discrepancy between our manner of observing of Dracos and Hampdens, but of Phoenician these, and their manner of occurring. The mariners, of Italian masons and Saxon metal-most gifted man can observe, still more can lurgists, of philosophers, alchemists, prophets, record, only the series of his own impressions: and all the long forgotten train of artists and his observation, therefore, to say nothing of artisans; who from the first have been jointly its other imperfections, must be successive, teaching us how to think and how to act, how while the things done were often simultaneous; to rule over spiritual and over physical Na- the things done were not a series, but a group. ture. Well may we say that of our History It is not in acted, as it is in written History: acthe more important part is lost without reco- tual events are nowise so simply related to very, and, as thanksgivings were once wont each other as parent and offspring are; every to be offered for unrecognised mercies,-look single event is the offspring not of one, but of with reverence into the dark untenanted all other events prior or contemporaneous, places of the past, where, in formless obli- and will in its turn combine with all others to vion, our chief benefactors, with all their se- give birth to new: it is an ever-living, everdulous endeavours, but not with the fruit of working Chaos of Being, wherein shape after shape bodies itself forth from innumerable these, lie entombed. elements. And this Chaos, boundless as the habitation and duration of man, unfathomable as the soul and destiny of man, is what the historian will depict, and scientifically gauge, we may say, by threading it with single lines of a few ells in length! For as all Action is, by its nature, to be figured as extended in breadth, and in depth, as well as in length; that is to say, is based on Passion and Mystery, if we investigate its origin; and spreads abroad on all hands, modifying and modified; as well as advances towards completion, so,all Narrative is, by its nature, of only one dimension; only travels forward towards one, or towards successive points: Narrative is linear, Action is solid. Alas, for our "chains," or chainlets, of "causes and effects," which we so assiduously track through certain handbreadths of years and square miles, when the whole is a broad, deep, Immensity, and each atom is "chained" and complected with all! Truly, if History is Philosophy teaching by Experience, the writer fitted to compose history is hitherto an unknown man. The Experience itself would require All-knowledge to record it, were the All-wisdom needful for such Philosophy as would interpret it, to be had for asking. Better were it that mere earthly Historians should lower such pretensions, more suitable for Omniscience than for human science; and aiming only at some picture of the things acted, which picture itself will at best be a poor approximation, leave the inscrutable purport of them an acknowledged secret; or, at most, in reverent Faith, far different from that teaching of Philosophy, pause over the mysterious vestiges of Him, whose path is in the great deep of Time, whom History indeed reveals, but only all History, and in Eternity will clearly reveal. So imperfect is that same Experience, by which Philosophy is to teach. Nay, even with regard to those occurrences that do stand recorded, that, at their origin, have seemed worthy of record, and the summary of which constitutes what we now call History, is not 'our understanding of them altogether incomplete; it is even possible to represent them as they were? The old story of Sir Walter Raleigh's looking from his prison window, on some street tumult, which afterwards three witnesses reported in three different ways, himself differing from them all, is still a true lesson for us. Consider how it is that historical documents and records originate; even honest records, where the reporters were unbiassed by personal regard; a case which, where nothing more were wanted, must ever be among the rarest. The real leading features of an historical transaction, those movements that essentially characterize it, and alone deserve to be recorded, are nowise the foremost to be noted. At first, among the various witnesses, who are also parties interested, there is only vague wonder, and fear or hope, and the noise of Rumour's thousand tongues; till, after a season, the conflict of testimonies has subsided into some general issue; and then it is settled, by a majority of votes, that such and such a "Crossing of the Rubicon," an "Impeachment of Stafford," a "Convocation of the Notables," are epochs in the world's history, cardinal points on which grand world-revolutions have hinged. Suppose, however, that the majority of votes was all wrong; that the real cardinal points lay far deeper, and had been passed over unnoticed, because no Seer, but only mere OnOur clock lookers, chanced to be there! strikes when there is a change from hour to Such considerations truly were of small prohour; but no hammer in the Horologe of Time peals through the universe, when there fit, did they, instead of teaching us vigilance is a change from Era to Era. Men under- and reverent humility in our inquiries into stand not what is among their hands: as History, abate our esteem for them, or discalmness is the characteristic of strength, so courage us from unweariedly prosecuting them. the weightiest causes may be the most silent. Let us search more and more into the Past; iet T2 It is, in no case, the real historical Transac-all men explore it as the true fountain of |