etic strings with so rich and jewel-loaded a hand, that the sparkling mass disturbs, if not the playing, yet our hearing of it."-Vorschule, s. 545. That Richter's own playing and painting differed widely from all of these, the reader has already heard, and may now convince himself. Take, for example, the following of a fairweather scene, selected from a thousand such that may be found in his writings; nowise as the best, but simply as the briefest. It is in the May season, the last evening of Spring: "Such a May as the present, (of 1794,) Nature has not in the memory of man-begun; for this is but the fifteenth of it. People of reflection have long been vexed once every year, that our German singers should indite Maysongs, since several other months deserve such a poetical Night-music better; and I myself have often gone so far as to adopt the idiom of our market-women, and instead of May butter to say June butter, as also June, March, April songs. But thou, kind May of this year, thou deservest to thyself all the songs which were ever made on thy rude namesakes!-By Heaven! when I now issue from the wavering chequered acacia-grove of the Castle, in which I am writing this Chapter, and come forth into the broad living light, and look up to the warming Heaven, and over its Earth budding out beneath it, the Spring rises before me like a vast full cloud, with a splendour of blue and green. I see the Sun standing amid roses in the western sky, into which he has thrown his ray-brush wherewith he has to-day been painting the Earth ;—and when I look round a little in our picture exhibition, his enamelling is still hot on the mountains; on the moist chalk of the moist earth, the flowers, full of sap-colours, are laid out to dry, and the forget-me-not with miniature colours; under the varnish of the streams the skyey Painter has pencilled his own eye; and the clouds like a decoration-painter, he has touched off with wild outlines, and single tints; and so he stands at the border of the Earth, and looks back on his stately Spring, whose robefolds are valleys, whose breast-bouquet is gardens, and whose blush is a vernal evening, and who, when she rises, will be-Summer!"Fixlein, z. 11. Or the following, in which moreover are two happy living figures, a bridegroom and a a bride on their marriage-day: "He led her from the crowded dancingroom into the cool evening. Why does the evening, does the night, put warmer love in our hearts? Is it the nightly pressure of helplessness; or is it the exalting separation from the turmoils of life, that veiling of the world, in which for the soul nothing then remains but souls is it, therefore, that the letters in which the loved name stands written in our spirit, appear, like phosphorus writing, by night, on fire, while by day in their cloudy traces they but smoke ? : "He walked with his bride into the Castlegarden she hastened quickly through the Castle, and past its servant's-hall, where the fair flowers of her young life had been crushed broad and dry, under a long dreary pressure; and her soul expanded, and breathed in the free open garden, on whose flowery soil Destiny had cast forth the first seeds of the blossoms which to-day were gladdening her existence. Still Eden! Green, flower-chequered chiaroscuro !-The moon is sleeping under ground, like a dead one, but beyond the garden, the sun's red evening-clouds have fallen down like roseleaves; and the evening-star, the brideman of the sun, hovers like a glancing butterfly above the rosy red, and, modest as a bride, deprives no single starlet of its light. "The wandering pair arrived at the old gardener's-hut; now standing locked and dumb, with dark windows in the light garden, like a fragment of the Past surviving in the Present. Bared twigs of trees were folding, with clammy half-formed leaves, over the thick intertwisted tangles of the bushes. The Spring was standing, like a conqueror, with Winter at his feet. In the blue pond now bloodless, a dusky evening-sky lay hollowed out; and the gushing waters were moistening the flowerbeds. The silver sparks of stars were rising on the altar of the East, and falling down extinguished in the red-sea of the West." "The wind whirred, like a night-bird, louder through the trees; and gave tones to the aca-, cia-grove, and the tones called to the pair who had first become happy within it: Enter, new mortal pair, and think of what is past, and of my withering and your own; and be holy as Eternity, and weep, not for joy only, but for gratitude also!'* * * "They reached the blazing, rustling marriage-house, but their softened hearts sought stillness; and a foreign touch, as in the blossoming vine, would have disturbed the flowernuptials of their souls. They turned rather, and winded up into the churchyard, to preserve their mood. Majestic on the groves and mountains stood the Night before man's heart, and made it also great. Over the white steeple-obelisk the sky rested bluer and darker; and behind it wavered the withered summit of the Maypole with faded flag. The son no ticed his father's grave, on which the wind was opening and shutting, with harsh noise, the small lid on the metal cross, to let the year of his death be read on the brass plate within. An overpowering grief seized his heart with violent streams of tears, and drove him to the sunk hillock; and he led his bride to the grave, and said: Here sleeps he, my good father: in his thirty-second year he was carried hither to his long rest. O thou good dear father, couldst thou but see the happiness of thy son, like my mother! But thy eyes are empty, and thy breast is full of ashes, and thou seest us not.'-He was silent. The bride wept aloud; she saw the mouldering coffins of her parents open, and the two dead arise, and look round for their daughter, who had stayed so long behind them, forsaken on the earth. She fell on his neck and faltered: O beloved, I have neither father nor mother, do not forsake me!" "O thou who hast still a father and a mother, thank God for it on the day when thy soul is full of glad tears, and needs a bosom wherein to shed them. . . . : "And with this embracing at a father's therein, and absolve from all, bachelorship grave, let this day of joy be holily concluded." -Fixlein, z. 9. only excepted. As a Natural-Philosopher, I have many times admired the wise methods of Nature for distributing daughters and plants: is it not a fine arrangement, said I to the Natural-Historian Goeze, that Nature should have bestowed specially on young women, who for their growth require a rich mineralogical soil, some sort of hooking apparatus, whereby to stick themselves on miserable marriage-cattle, that may carry them to fat places? Thus Linnæus,* as you know, observes that such seeds as can flourish only in fat earth are furnished with barbs, and so fasten themselves the better on grazing quadrupeds, which transport them to stalls and dunghills. Strangely does Nature, by the wind,-which father and mother must raise,scatter daughters and fir-seeds into the arable spots of the forest. Who does not remark the final cause here, and how Nature has equipped many a daughter with such and such charms, simply that some Peer, some mitred Abbot, Cardinal-deacon, appanaged Prince, or mere country Baron, may lay hold of said charmer, and in the character of Father or Brideman, hand over her ready-made to some gawk of the like sort, as a wife acquired by purchase? And do we find in bilberries a slighter attention on the part of Nature? Does not the same Linnæus notice, in the same treatise, that they, too, are cased in a nutritive juice to incite the Fox to eat them ; after which, the villain,-digest them he cannot,-in such sort as he may, becomes their sower? In such passages, slight as they are, we fancy an experienced eye will trace some features of originality, as well as of uncommonness: an open sense for Nature, a soft heart, a warm rich fancy, and here and there some under-current of Humour are distinctly enough discernible. Of this latter quality, which, as has been often said, forms Richter's grand characteristic, we would fain give our readers some correct notion; but see not well how it is to be done. Being genuine poetic humour, not drollery or vulgar caricature, it is like a fine essence, like a soul; we discover it only in whole works and delineations; as the soul is only to be seen in the living body, not in detached limbs and fragments. Richter's Humour takes a great variety of forms, some of them sufficiently grotesque and piebald; ranging from the light kindly-comic vein of Sterne in his Trim and Uncle Toby, over all intermediate degrees, to the rugged grim farce-tragedy often manifested in Hogarth's pictures; nay, to still darker and wilder moods than this. Of the former sort are his characters of Fixlein, Schmelzle, Fibel; of the latter his Vult, Giannozzo, Leibgebber, Schoppe, which last two are indeed one and the same. Of these, of the spirit that reigns in them, we should despair of giving other than the most inadequate and even incorrect idea, by any extracts or expositions that could possibly be furnished here. Not without reluctance we have accordingly renounced that enterprise; and must content ourselves with some "Extra-leaf," or "O, my heart is more in earnest than you other separable passage, which, if it afford no think; the parents anger me who are soulemblem of Richter's Humour, may be, in these brokers; the daughters sadden me, who are circumstances, our best approximation to such. made slave-Negresses.-Ah, is it wonderful Of the "Extra-leaves," in Hesperus itself, a that these, who in their West-Indian marketconsiderable volume might be formed, and place, must dance, laugh, speak, sing, till some truly one of the strangest. Most of them, lord of a plantation take them home with him, however, are national; could not be appre--that these, I say, should be as slavishly treathended without a commentary; and even then, ed, as they are sold and bought? much to their disadvantage, for Humour must lambs !—And yet ye, too, are as bad as your be seen, not through a glass, but face to face. sale-mothers and sale-fathers: what is one to The following is nowise one of the best; but do with his enthusiasm for your sex, when one it turns on what we believe is a quite Euro- travels through German towns, where every pean subject, at all events is certainly an Eng-heaviest pursed, every longest-tilled individual, lish one. Ye poor house, that I wed; open to customers are they all!-How, my girls, is your heart so little worth that you cut it, like old clothes, after any fashion, to fit any breast; and does it wax or shrink, then, like a Chinese ball, to fit itself into the ball-mould and marriage ring-case of· any male heart whatever? Well, it must; unless we would sit at home, and grow Old Maids,' answer they; whom I will not answer, but turn scornfully away from them to address that same Old Maid in these words: 6 were he second cousin to the Devil himself, can point with his finger to thirty houses, and Extra-leaf on Daughter-full Houses. say: 'I know not, shall it be from the pearl"The Minister's house was an open book-coloured, or the nut-brown, or the steel-green shop, the books in which (the daughters) you might read there, but could not take home with you. Though five other daughters were already standing in five private libraries, as wives, and one under the ground at Majenthal was sleeping off the child's-play of life, yet still in this daughter-warehouse there remained three gratis copies to be disposed of to good friends. The Minister was always prepared, in drawings from the office-lottery, to give his daughters as premiums to winners, and holders of the lucky ticket. Whom God gives an office, he also gives, if not sense for it, at least a wife. In a daughter-full house, there must, as in the Church of St. Peter's, be confessionals for all nations, for all characters, for all faults; that the daughters may sit as confessoresses Globe. "Forsaken, but patient one! misknown and mistreated! Think not of the times when thou hadst hope of a better than the present are, and *His Aman. Acad.-The Treatise on the Habitable 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.” "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 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 enter-enjoyments. A man may, for twenty years, tained, 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. 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 "The stones and rocks, which two veiled thereof: the whole Spiritual Universe is dashed Figures, (Necessity and Vice,) like Deucalionasunder by the hand of Atheism, into numberand Pyrrha, are casting behind them, at Good-less quicksilver-points of Me's, which glitter, ness, will themselves become men. run, waver, fly together or asunder, without "And on the Western Gate (Abendthor, eve- unity or continuance. No one in Creation is so ning-gate) of this century stands written: Here alone, as the denier of God; he mourns, with is the way to Virtue and Wisdom; as on the an orphaned heart that has lost its great Father, Western-Gate at Cherson stands the proud In-by the corpse of Nature, which no World-spirit scription: 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 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 "The passage of Shakspeare," says he, night of the soul. Crush not these flickering "rounded with a sleep, (mit Schlaf umgeben,) in | 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?— "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 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 iron fell down molten. The net of the mist, and the tottering Earth brought me into that hideous Temple; at the door of which, in two poison-bushes, two glittering Basilisks lay brooding. I passed through unknown Shadows, on whom ancient centuries were impressed.— All the Shadows were standing round the empty Altar; and in all, not the heart, but the 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. "Now sank from aloft a noble, high Form, with a look of uneffaceable sorrow, down to the Altar, and all the Dead cried out, 'Christ! is there no God?' He answered There is none!' The whole Shadow of each then shuddered, not the breast alone; and one after the other, all, in this shuddering, shook into pieces. : 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, the quivering walls of the Temple parted 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. "And as he saw the grinding press of Worlds, the torch-dance of celestial wildfires, and the coral-banks of beating hearts; and as he saw how world after world shook off its glimmering souls upon the Sea of Death, as a water-bubble scatters swimming lights on the waves, then majestic as the Highest of the Finite, he raised his eyes towards the Nothingness, and towards the void Immensity, and 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?' "Christ continued: "I went through the Worlds, I mounted into the Suns, and flew with the Galaxies through the wastes of Hea- "Here Christ looked down, and his eye filled ven; but there is no God! I descended as far with tears, and he said: 'Ah, I was once there; as Being casts its shadow, and looked down | I was still happy then; I had still my Infinite into the Abyss and cried, Father, where art Father, and looked up cheerfully from the thou? But I heard only the everlasting storm mountains, into the immeasurable Heaven, which no one guides, and the gleaming Rainbow 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 Probably enough, our readers, in considerclosest them all!" Unhappy creatures, ating these strange matters, will too often bedeath they will not be closed! Ah, when the think them of that "Episode concerning Paul's sorrow-laden lays himself, with galled back, Costume;" and conclude that, as in living, so into the Earth, to sleep till a fairer Morning in writing, he was a Mannerist, and man of full of Truth, full of Virtue and Joy, he awakens continual Affectations. We will not quarrel in a stormy Chaos, in the everlasting Midnight, with them on this point; we must not venture -and there comes no Morning, and no soft among the intricacies it would lead us into. healing hand, and no Infinite Father!—Mortal, At the same time, we hope, many will agree beside me! if thou still livest, pray to Him; with us in honouring Richter, such as he was; else hast thou lost him for ever!" 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 ble, and published tidings of it to his fellow hour of Time, and shiver the Universe asunder, men. This one virtue, the foundation of all ર WHEN I AWOKE, 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. CLIO was figured by the ancients as the eld- and inevitable, in the Time come: and only est daughter of Memory, and chief of the by the combination of both is the meaning of Muses; which dignity, whether we regard the either completed. The Sibylline Books, though essential qualities of her art, or its practice | old, are not the oldest. Some nations have and acceptance among men, we shall still find prophecy, some have not: but, of all manto have been fitly bestowed. History, as it lies kind, there is no tribe so rude that it has not at the root of all science, is also the first dis- attempted History, though several have not tinct product of man's spiritual nature; his arithmetic enough to count Five. History has earliest expression of what can be called | been written with quipo-threads, with featherThought. It is a looking both before and after; pictures, with wampum-belts; still oftener as, indeed, the coming Time already waits, with earth-mounds and monumental stoneunseen, yet definitely shaped, predetermined, heaps, whether as pyramid or cairn; for the |