such loving strictness: the mimic, the pictorial, the musical arts, all modes of representing or addressing the highest nature of man, are acknowledged as younger sisters of Poetry, and fostered with like care. Winkelmann's History of Plastic Art is known by repute to all readers: and of those who know it by inspection, many may have wondered why such a work has not been added to our own literature, to instruct our own statuaries and painters. On this subject of the plastic arts, we cannot withhold the following little sketch of Göthe's, as a specimen of pictorial criticism in what we consider a superior style. It is of an imaginary landscape-painter, and his views of Swiss scenery; it will bear to be studied minutely, for there is no word without its meaning:

'He succeeds in representing the cheerful repose of lake prospects, where houses in friendly approximation, imaging themselves in the clear wave, seem as if bathing in its depths; shores encircled with green hills, behind which rise forest mountains, and icy peaks of glaciers. The tone of coloring in such scenes is gay, mirthfully clear; the distances as if overflowed with softening vapor, which from watered hollows and river valleys mounts up grayer and mistier, and indicates their windings. No less is the master's art to be praised in views from valleys lying nearer the high Alpine ranges, where declivities slope down, luxuriantly overgrown, and fresh streams roll hastily along by the foot of rocks.

'With exquisite skill, in the deep shady trees of the foreground, he gives the distinctive character of the several species; satisfying us in the form of the whole, as in the structure of the branches, and the details of the leaves; no less so, in the fresh green with its manifold shadings, where soft airs appear as if fanning us with benignant breath, and the lights as if thereby put in motion.

'In the middle-ground, his lively green tone grows fainter by degrees; and at last, on the more distant mountain-tops, passing into weak violet, weds itself with the blue of the sky. But our artist is above all happy in his paintings of high Alpine regions; in seizing the simple greatness and stillness of their character; the

wide pastures on the slopes, where dark solitary firs stand forth from the grassy carpet; and from high cliffs, foaming brooks rush down. Whether he relieve his pasturages with grazing cattle, or the narrow winding rocky path with mules and laden pack-horses, he paints all with equal truth and richness; still, introduced in the proper place, and not in too great copiousness, they decorate and enliven these scenes, without interrupting, without lessening their peaceful solitude. The execution testifies a master's hand; easy, with a few sure strokes, and yet complete. In his later pieces, he employed glittering English permanent-colors on paper: these pictures, accordingly, are of preeminently blooming tone; cheerful, yet, at the same time, strong and sated.

'His views of deep mountain-chasms, where, round and round, nothing fronts us but dead rock, where, in the abyss, overspanned by its bold arch, the wild stream rages, are, indeed, of less attraction than the former: yet their truth excites us; we admire the great effect of the whole, produced at so little cost, by a few expressive strokes, and masses of local colors.

'With no less accuracy of character can he represent the regions of the topmost Alpine ranges, where neither tree nor shrub any more appears; but only amid the rocky teeth and snow summits, a few sunny spots clothe themselves with a soft sward. Beautiful, and balmy and inviting as he colors these spots, he has here wisely forborne to introduce grazing herds; for these regions give food only to the chamois, and a perilous employment to the wild-hay

We have extracted this passage from Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, Göthe's last Novel. The perusal of his whole Works would show, among many other more important facts, that Criticism also is a science of which he is master; that if ever any man had studied Art in all its branches and bear

*The poor wild-hay-man of the Rigiberg,

Whose trade is, on the brow of the abyss,

To mow the common grass from nooks and shelves,
To which the cattle dare not climb.

SCHILLER'S Wilhelm Tell.

ings, from its origin in the depths of the creative spirit, to its minutest finish on the canvass of the painter, on the lips of the poet, or under the finger of the musician, he was that man. A nation which appreciates such studies, nay, requires and rewards them, cannot, wherever its defects may lie, be defective in judgment of the arts.

But a weightier question still remains. What has been the fruit of this its high and just judgment on these matters ? What has criticism profited it, to the bringing forth of good works? How do its poems and its poets correspond with so lofty a standard ? We answer, that on this point also, Germany may rather court investigation than fear it. There are poets in that country who belong to a nobler class than most nations have to show in these days; a class entirely unknown to some nations; and, for the last two centuries, rare in all. We have no hesitation in stating, that we see in certain of the best German poets, and those too of our own time, something which associates them, remotely or nearly we say not, but which does associate them with the Masters of Art, the Saints of Poetry, long since departed, and, as we thought, without successors, from the earth; but canonized in the hearts of all generations, and yet living to all by the memory of what they did and were. Glances we do seem to find of that ethereal glory, which looks on us in its full brightness from the Transfiguration of Rafaelle, from the Tempest of Shakspeare; and in broken, but purest and still heart-piercing beams, struggling through the gloom of long ages, from the tragedies of Sophocles and the weatherworn sculptures of the Parthenon. This is that heavenly spirit, which, best seen in the aerial embodyment of poetry, but spreading likewise over all the thoughts and actions of an age, has given us Surreys, Sydneys, Raleighs in court and camp, Cecils in policy, Hookers in divinity, Bacons in philosophy, and Shakspeares and Spensers in song. All

hearts that know this, know it to be the highest; and that, in poetry or elsewhere, it alone is true and imperishable. In affirming that any vestige, however feeble, of this divine spirit, is discernible in German poetry, we are aware that we place it above the existing poetry of any other nation.

there

To prove this bold assertion, logical arguments were at all times unavailing; and, in the present circumstances of the case, more than usually so. Neither will any extract or specimen help us; for it is not in parts, but in whole poems, that the spirit of a true poet is to be seen. We can, fore, only name such men as Tieck, Richter, Herder, Schiller, and, above all, Göthe; and ask any reader who has learned to admire wisely our own literature of Queen Elizabeth's age, to peruse these writers also; to study them till he feels that he has understood them, and justly estimated both their light and darkness; and then to pronounce whether it is not, in some degree, as we have said. Are there Are there not glimpses

not tones here of that old melody? of that serene soul, that calm harmonious strength, that smiling earnestness, that Love and Faith and Humanity of nature ? Do these foreign contemporaries of ours still exhibit, in their characters as men, something of that sterling nobleness, that union of majesty with meekness, which we must ever venerate in those our spiritual fathers? And do their works, in the new form of this century, show forth that old nobleness, not consistent only, with the science, the precision, the skepticism of these days, but wedded to them, incorporated with them, and shining through them like their life and soul? Might it in truth almost seem to us, in reading the prose of Göthe, as if we were reading that of Milton; and of Milton writing with the culture of this time; combining French clearness with old English depth? And of his poetry may it indeed be said that it is poetry, and yet the poetry of our own generation; an ideal world, and yet

the world we even now live in? - These questions we must leave candid and studious inquirers to answer for them. selves; premising only, that the secret is not to be found on the surface; that the first reply is likely to be in the nega tive, but with inquirers of this sort, by no means likely to be the final one.

To ourselves, we confess, it has long so appeared. The poetry of Göthe, for instance, we reckon to be Poetry, sometimes in the very highest sense of that word; yet it is no reminiscence, but something actually present and before us; no looking back into an antique Fairy-land, divided by impassable abysses from the real world as it lies about us and within us; but a looking round upon that real world itself, now rendered holier to our eyes, and once more become a solemn temple, where the spirit of Beauty still dwells, and, under new emblems, to be worshipped as of old. With Göthe, the mythologies of bygone days pass only for what they are: we have no witchcraft or magic in the common acceptation; and spirits no longer bring with them airs from heaven or blasts from hell; for Pandemonium and the steadfast Empyrean have faded away, since the opinions which they symbolized no longer are. Neither does he bring his heroes from remote Oriental climates, or periods of Chivalry, or any section either of Atlantis or the Age of Gold; feeling that the reflex of these things is cold and faint, and only hangs like a cloud-picture in the distance, beautiful but delusive, and which even the simplest know to be delusion. The end of Poetry is higher: she must dwell in Reality, and become manifest to men in the forms among which they live and move. And this is what we prize in Göthe, and more or less in Schiller and the rest; all of whom, each in his own way, are writers of a similar aim. The coldest skeptic, the most callous worldling, sees not the actual aspects of life more sharply than they are here delineated: