and seldom writes without a meaning far be- | glimpses of which look forth on us from almos yond the sphere of common romancers. Hes- every one of his writings. He died while en perus and Titan themselves, though in form gaged, under recent and almost total blindness, nothing more than "novels of real life," as the in enlarging and remodelling this Campaner Minerva Press would say, have solid metal Thul: the unfinished manuscript was borne i enough in them to furnish whole circulating upon his coffin to the burial vault; and Klop ibaries, were it beaten into the usual filigree; stock's hymn, Auferstehen wirst du, "Thou shalt and much which, attenuate it as we might, no arise, my soul," can seldom have been sung quarterly subscriber could well carry with him. with more appropriate application than over Amusement is often, in part almost always, a the grave of Jean Paul. mean with Richter; rarely or never his high- We defy the most careless or prejudiced ast end. His thoughts, his feelings, the creations reader to peruse these works without an im of his spirit, walk before us imbodied under pression of something splendid, wonderful, and ondrous shapes, in motley and ever-fluctuat-daring. But they require to be studied as well g groups; but his essential character, how- as read, and this with no ordinary patience, if ever he disguise it, is that of a Philosopher and the reader, especially the foreign reader, wishes moral Poet, whose study has been human to comprehend rightly either their truth or their nature, whose delight and best endeavour are want of truth. Tried by many an accepted with all that is beautiful, and tender, and mys- standard, Richter would be speedily enough teriously sublime, in the fate cr history of man. disposed of; pronounced a mystic, a German This is the purport of his writings, whether dreamer, a rash and presumptuous innovator; their form be that of fiction or of truth; the spirit and so consigned, with equanimity, perhaps that pervades and ennobles his delineations of with a certain jubilee, to the Limbo appointed common life, his wild wayward dreams, allego- for all such wind-bags and deceptions. Oriries, and shadowy imaginings, no less than his ginality is a thing we constantly clamour for, disquisitions of a nature directly scientific. and constantly quarrel with; as if, obscrves our author himself, any originality but our own could be expected to content us! In fact, all strange things are apt, without fault of theirs, to estrange us at first view, and unhappily scarcely any thing is perfectly plain, but what is also perfectly common. The current coin of the realm passes into all hands; and be it gold, silver, copper, is acceptable and of known value: but with new ingots, with foreign bars, and medals of Corinthian brass, the case i widely different.

But in this latter province also, Richter has accomplished much. His Vorschule der Aesthetik (Introduction to Esthetics*) is a work on poetic art, based on principles of no ordinary depth and compass, abounding in noble views, and, notwithstanding its frolicsome exuberance, in sound and subtile criticism; esteemed even in Germany, where criticism has long been treated of as a science, and by such persons as Winkelmann, Kant, Herder, and the Schlegels. Of this work we could speak long, did our limits allow. We fear it might astonish many an There are few writers with whom deliberahonest brother of our craft, were he to read it; tion and careful distrust of first impressions and altogether perplex and dash his maturest are more necessary than with Richter. He counsels, if he chanced to understand it. is a phenomenon from the very surface; he Richter has also written on education, a work presents himself with a professed and deterentitled Levana; distinguished by keen prac-mined singularity: his language itself is a stone tical sagacity, as well as generous sentiment, of stumbling to the critic; to critics of the and a certain sober magnificence of speculation; grammarian species, an unpardonable, often the whole presented in that singular style which an insuperable, rock of offence. Not that he characterizes the man. Germany is rich in is ignorant of grammar, or disdains the sciences works on Education; richer at present than of spelling and parsing; but he exercises both any other country: it is there only that some in a certain latitudinarian spirit; deals with echo of the Lockes and Miltons, speaking of astonishing liberality in parentheses, dashes, this high matter, may still be heard; and speak- and subsidiary clauses; invents hundreds of ing of it in the language of our own time, with new words, alters old ones, or by hyphen insight into the actual wants, advantages, chains, pairs, and packs them together into perils, and prospects of this age. Among most jarring combination; in short, produces writers on this subject, Richter holds a high sentences of the most heterogeneons, lumberplace; if we look chiefly at his tendency and ing, interminable kind. Figures without limit aims, perhaps the highest.-The Clavis Fichti- indeed the whole is one tissue of metaphors, una is a ludicrous performance, known to us and similes, and allusions to all the provinces only by report; but Richter is said to possess of Earth, Sea, and Air, interlaced with epithe merit, while he laughs at Fichte, of under-grammatic breaks, vehement bursts, or sarstanding him; a merit among Fichte's critics, which seems to be one of the rarest. Report alsu, we regret to say, is all that we kaow of the Campaner Thal, a Discourse on the Immortality of the Soul; one of Richter's beloved topics, or rather the life of his whole philosophy, From aicávopat, to feel. A word invented by Baumgarten, (some eighty years ago,) to express generally the Science of the Fine Arts; and now in universal use among the Germans. Perhaps we also might as well adopt it; at least if any such science should ever arise among us.

donic turns, interjections, quips, puns, and
even oaths! A perfect Indian jungle it seems
a boundless, unparalleled imbroglio; nothing
on all sides but darkness, dissonance, confusion
worse confounded! Then the style of the
whole corresponds, in perplexity and extrava
gance, with that of the parts. Every work, be at
in fiction or serious treatise, is embaled in some
fantastic wrappage, some mad narrative ac
counting for its appearance, and connecting it
with the author, who generally becon.es a per

Richte

more then
rhapsodist.

JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER.

11

n of the drama himself, before all is over. | from its proper centre, his intellectual universe He has a whole imaginary geography of Europe no longer a distorted, incoherent series of air in his novels; the cities of Flachsen fingen, landscapes, coalesces into compact expansion Haarhaar, Scheerau, and so forth, with their a vast, magnificent, and variegated scene; full, princes, and privy-councillors, and serene indeed, of wondrous products, and rude, it highnesses; most of whom, odd enough fel- may be, and irregular; but gorgeous, and lows every way, are Richter's private acquaint- varied, and ample; gay with the richest ver ances, talk with him of state matters, (in the dure and foliage, and glittering in the brightest purest Tory dialect,) and often incite him to get and kindest sun. en with his writing. No story proceeds without the must erratic digressions, and voluminous tagrags rolling after it in many a snaky twine. Ever and anon there occurs some "Extra-leaf," with its satirical petition, programme, or other wonderful intercalation, no mortal can foresee on what. It is, indeed, a mighty maze; and often the panting reader toils after him in vain, or, baffled and spent, indignantly stops short, and retires perhaps for ever.

Richter has been called an intellectual Colossus; and in truth it is still somewhat in this light that we view him. His faculties are all of gigantic mould; cumbrous, awkward in their movements; large and splendid rather than harmonious or beautiful; yet joined in living union, and of force and compass altogether extraordinary. He has an intellect vehement, rugged, irresistible; crushing in pieces the hardest problems; piercing into the most hidAll this, we must admit, is true of Richter; den combinations of things, and grasping the bat much more is true also. Let us not turn most distant: an imagination vague, sombre, from him after the first cursory glance, and splendid, or appalling; brooding over the imagine we have settled his account by the abysses of Being; wandering through Infiniwords Rhapsody and Affectation. They are tude, and summoning before us, in its dim recheap words we allow, and of sovereign po-ligious light, shapes of brilliancy, solemnity, tency; we should see, therefore, that they be or terror: a fancy of exuberance literally unnot rashly applied. Many things in Richter exampled; for it pours its treasures with a accord ill with such a theory. There are rays lavishness which knows no limit, hanging, like of the keenest truth, nay, steady pillars of the sun, a jewel on every grass-blade, and scientific light rising through this chaos: Is it sowing the earth at large with orient pearl. But in fact a chaos, or may it be that our eyes are deeper than all these lies Humour, the ruling not of infinite vision, and have only missed the quality with Richter; as it were the central fire (plan Few rhapsodists are men of science, that pervades and vivifies his whole being. He of solid learning, of rigorous study, and ac- is a humorist from his inmost soul; he thinks curate, extensive, nay, universal knowledge; as a humorist, he feels, imagines, acts as a as he is. With regard to affectation, also, there humorist: Sport is the element in which his is much to be said. The essence of affecta- nature lives and works. A tumultuous element tion is that it be assumed: the character is, as for such a nature, and wild work he makes in it were, forcibly crushed into some foreign it! A Titan in his sport as in his earnestness, mould, in the hope of being thereby reshaped he oversteps all bound, and riots without law and beautified; the unhappy man persuades or measure. He heaps Pelion upon Ossa, and himself that he is in truth a new and wonder-hurls the universe together and asunder like a folly engaging creature, and so he moves about case of playthings. The Moon "bombards" with a conscious air, though every movement the Earth, being a rebellious satellite; Mars betrays not symmetry, but dislocation. This it is" preaches” to the other planets very singular o be affected, to walk in a vain show. But the strangeness alone is no proof of the vanity. Many men that move smoothly in the old established railways of custom will be found to have their affectation; and perhaps here Yet the anarchy is not without its purpose; and there some divergent genius be accused these vizards are not mere hollow masks; but of it unjustly. The show, though common, may there are living faces beneath them, and this not cease to be vain; nor become so for being mumming has its significance. Richter is a man ancommon. Before we censure a man for of mirth, but he seldom or never conuescards to seeming what he is not, we should be sure that be a merry-andrew. Nay, in spite of its extrava we know what he is. As to Richter in parti-gance, we should say that his humour is of all calar, we think it but fair to observe, that his gifts intrinsically the finest and most genu strange and tumultuous as he is, there is a ine. It has such witching turns; there is somecertain benign composure visible in his thing in it so capricious, so quaint, so heartfelt. writings; a mercy, a gladness, a reverence, united in such harmony, as we cannot but think tespeaks not a false, but a genuine state of mind; not a feverish and morbid, but a healthy and robust state.

The secret of the matter, perhaps, is that Hicbter requires more study than most readers care to give; for, as we approach more closely, many things grow clearer. In the man's own sphere there is consistency; the farther we advance into it, we see confusion more and more fold itself int> order till at last, viewed

doctrine; nay, we have Time and Space them. selves playing fantastic tricks: it is an infinite masquerade; all Nature is gone forth mumming in the strangest guises.

From his Cyclopean workshop, and its fuligi nous limbecs, and huge unwieldy machinery, the little shrivelled, twisted figure comes forth at last, so perfect and so living, to be for ever laughed at and for ever loved! Wayward as he seems, he works not without forethought; like Rubens, by a single stroke, he can change a laughing face into a sad one. But in his smile itself, a touching pathos may lie hidden, a pity too deep for tears. He is a man of feeling, in the noblest sense of that word; for he loves all living with the heart of a brother; his

cul rushes forth, in sympathy with gladness | but in still smiles, which ie far deeper. It

is a sort of inverse sublinity; exalting, as it were, into our affections what is below us, while sublimity draws down into our affections what is above us. The former is scarcely less precious or heart-affecting than the latter; per haps it is still rarer, and, as a test of genius, still more decisive. It is, in fact, the bloom and

and sorrow, with goodness or grandeur, over all creation. Every gentle and generous affection, every thrill of mercy, every glow of nobleness, awakens in his bosom a response, nay, strikes his spirit into harmony; a wild music as of wind-harps, floating round us in fitful swells, but soft sometimes, and pure and soul-entrancing as the song of angels! Aver-perfume, the purest effluence of a deep, fine, sion itself with him is not hatred; he despises much, but justly, with tolerance also, with placidity, and even a sort of love. Love, in fact, is the atmosphere he breathes in, the medium through which he looks. His is the spirit which gives life and beauty to whatever it embraces. Inanimate Nature itself is no longer an insensible assemblage of colours and perfumes, but a mysterious Presence, with which he communes in unutterable sympathies. We might call him, as he once called Herder," a Priest of Nature, a mild Bramin," wandering amid spicy groves, and under benignant skies. The infinite Night with her solemn aspects, Day, and the sweet approach of Even and Morn, are full of meaning for him. He loves the green Earth with her streams and forests, her flowery leas and eternal skies; loves her with a sort of passion, in all her vicissitudes of light and shade; his spirit revels in her grandeur and charms; expands like the breeze over wood and lawn, over glade and dingle, stealing and giving odours.

and loving nature; a nature in harmony with itself, reconciled to the world and its stintedness and contradiction, nay, finding in this very contradiction new elements of beauty as well as goodness. Among our own writers, Shakspeare in this as in all other provinces, must have his place: yet not the first; his humour is heartfelt, exuberant, warm, but seldom the tenderest or most subtile. Swift inclines more to simple irony; yet he had genuine humour too, and of no unloving sort, though cased, like Ben Jonson's, in a most bitter and caustic rind. Sterne follows next; our last specimen of humour, and, with all his faults, our best; our finest, if not our strongest, for Yorick, and Corporal Trim, and Uncle Toby, have yet no brother but in Don Quixote, far as he lies above them. Cervantes is indeed the purest of all humourists; so gentle and genial, so full yet so ethereal, is his humour, and in such ac cordance with itself and his whole noble nature. The Italian mind is said to abound in humour; yet their classics seem to give us no right emblem of it: except, perhaps, in Ariosto, there appears little in their current poetry that reaches the region of true humour. In France, since the days of Montaigne it seems to be nearly extinct. Voltaire, much as he deal in ridicule, never rises into humour; and eveu with Molière, it is far more an affair of the understanding than of the character.

I has sometimes been made a wonder that things so discordant should go together; that men of humour are often likewise men of sensibility. But the wonder should rather be to see them divided; to find true genial humour dwelling in a mind that was coarse or callous. The essence of humour is sensibility; warm, tender fellow-feeling with all forms of existence. Nay, we may say that unless seasored and That in this point, Richter excels all German purified by humour, sensibility is apt to run authors, is saying much for him, and may be wild; will readily corrupt into disease, false- said truly. Lessing has humour,-of a sharp, hood, or, in one word, sentimentality. Wit-rigid, substantial, and on the whole, genial sort: ness Rousseau, Zimmermann, in some points yet the ruling bias of his mind is to logic. So also St. Pierre: to say nothing of living in-likewise has Wieland, though much diluted by stances; or of the Kotzebues, and other pale the general loquacity of his nature, and impohosts of wobegone mourners, whose wailings, verished still farther by the influences of a like the howl of an Irish wake, from time to cold, meagre, French skepticism. Among the time cleft the general ear. The last perfection Ramlers, Gellerts, Hagedorns, of Frederick the of our faculties, says Schiller with a truth far Second's time, we find abundance, and delicate deeper than it seems, is that their activity, with- in kind too, of that light matter which the out ceasing to be sure and earnest, become sport. French call pleasantry; bu little or nothing True humour is sensibility, in the most catholic that deserves the name of humour. In the and deepest sense; but it is this sport of sensi-present age, however, there is Goethe, with a bility; wholesome and perfect therefore; as it were, the playful teasing fondness of a moth to her child.

That faculty of irony, of caricature, which often passes by the name of humour, but consists chiefly in a certain superficial distortion or reversal of objects, and ends at best in laughter, bears no resemblance to the humour of Richter. A shallow endowment this; and often more a habit than an endowment. It is out a poor fraction of humour; or rather, it is the body to which the soul is wanting; any life it has being false, artificial, and irrational. True numour springs not more from the head han from the heart; it is not contempt, its essence is love; it issues not in laughter,

rich true vein; and this sublimated, as it were, to an essence, and blended in still union with his whole mind. Tieck also, among his many fine susceptibilities, is not without a warm keen sense for the ridiculous; and a humour rising, though by short fits, and from a much lower atmosphere, to be poetic. But of all these men, there is none that, in depth, copiousness, and intensity of humour, can be compared with Jean Paul. He alone exists in humour; lives. moves, and has his being in it. With him it is not so much united to his other : nlities, of intellect, fancy, imagination, mora. feeling, av these are united to it; or rather unite them selves to it, and grow under its warmth, as in their proper temperature and climate.

Not as

If we meant to assert that his humour is in all in sincerity of heart, joyfully, and with undi cases perfectly natural and pure; nay, that it|vided will. A harmonious development of being is not often extravagant, untrue, or even ab- the first and last object of all true culture, has pard: but still, on the whole, the core and life of therefore been attained; if not completely, at it are genuine, subtile, spiritual. Not without least more completely than in one of a thousand reason have his panegyrists named him Jeun ordinary men. Nor let us forget, that in such a Paul der Einzige," Jean Paul the Only:" in nature, it was not of easy attainment; that one sense or the other, either as praise or cen- where much was to be developed, some imper. sure, his critics also must adopt this epithet; fection should be forgiven. It is true, the for surely, in the whole circle of literature, beaten paths of literature lead the safeliest to we look in vain for his parallel. Unite the the goal; and the talent pleases us most, which sportfulness of Rabellais, and the best sensibi-submits to shine with new gracefulness through lity of Sterne, with the earnestness, and, even in slight portions, the sublimity of Milton; and and let the mosaic brain of old Burton give forth the workings of this strange union, with the pen of Jeremy Bentham!

and warm, generous helpfulness of women; fearlessness, but also with the martyr reve or white, half-angelic creatures, meek, still, rence, of men that love Truth, and will not ac long-suffering, high-minded, of tenderest affec- cept a lie. A frank, fearless, honest, yet truly tions, and hearts crushed yet uncomplaining. spiritual faith is of all things the rarest in our Supernatural figures he has not attempted; titne. and wisely, for he cannot write without belief. Of writings which though with many reser Yet many times he exhibits an imagination of vations, we have praised so much, our hesitat a singularity, nay, on the whole, of a truth anding readers may demand some specimen. To grandeur, unexampled elsewhere. In his dreams unbelievers, unhappily, we have none of there is a mystic complexity, a gloom, and amid convincing sort to give. Ask us not to repre the dim, gigantic, half-ghastly shadows, gleam-sent the Peruvian forests by three twigs pluck ings of a wizard splendour, which almost recalled from them; or the cataracts of the Nile by to us the visions of Ezekiel. By readers who a handful of its water! To those, meanwhile, have studied the Dream in the New-year's Eve who will look on twigs as mere dissevered we shall not be mistaken. twigs, and a handful of water as only so many drops, we present the following. It is a sum mer Sunday night; Jean Paul is taking leave of the Hukelum Parson and his wife; like him we have long laughed at them or wept for them; like him, also, we are sad to part from them.

"We were all of us too deeply moved. Wel at last tore ourselves asunder from repeated embraces; my friend retired with the soul whom he loves. I remained alone behind with the Night.

"And I walked without aim through woods, through valleys, and over brooks, and through sleeping villages, to enjoy the great Night, like a Day. I walked, and still looked, like the magnet, to the region of midnight, to strengthen my heart at the gleaming twilight, at this upstretching aurora of a morning beneath our feet. White night-butterflies flitted, white blos soms fluttered, white stars fell, and the white snow-powder hung silvery in the high Shadow of the Earth, which reaches beyond the Moon, and which is our Night. Then began the Eolian Harp of the Creation to tremble and to sound, blown on from above; and my immor

Richter's Philosophy, a matter of no ordinary interest, both as it agrees with the common philosophy of Germany, and disagrees with it, must not be touched on for the present. One only observation we shall make it is not mechanical, or skeptical; it springs not from the forum or the laboratory, but from the depths of the human spirit; and yields as its fairest product a noble system of morality, and the firmest conviction of religion. In this latter point we reckon him peculiarly worthy of study. To a careless reader he might seem the wildest of infidels; for nothing can exceed the freedom with which he bandies to and fro the dogmas of religion, nay, sometimes, the highest objects of Christian reverence. There are passages of this sort, which will occur to every reader of Richter; but which, not to fall into the error we have already blamed in Madame de Staël, we shall refrain from quoting. More light is in the following: "Or," inquires he, in his usual abrupt way, (Note to Schmelzle's Journey,) "Or are all your Mosques, Episcopal Churches, Pagodas, Chapels of Ease, Tabernacles, and Pantheons, any thing else but the Ethnic Fore-tal Soul was a string in this harp.-The bear court of the Invisible Temple and its Holy of of a brother, everlasting Man, swelled under Holies?" Yet, independently of all dogmas, the everlasting heaven, as the seas swell under nay, perhaps in spite of many Richter is, in the sun and under the moon.-The distan the highest sense of the word religious A village clocks struck midnight, mingling, as it reverence, not a self-interested fear, but a noble were, with the ever-pealing tone of ancient reverence for the spirit of all goodness, forms Eternity. The limbs of my buried ones the crown and glory of his culture. The fiery touched cold on my soul, and drove away its elements of his nature have been purified blots, as dead hands heal eruptions of the skin under holy influences, and chastened by a-I walked silently through little hamlets, and principle of mercy and humility into peace and well-doing. An intense and continual faith in man's immortality and native grandeur accompanies him; from amid the vortices of life he looks up to a heavenly loadstar; the solution of what is visible and transient, he finds in what is invisible and eternal. He has doubted, he denies, yet he believes. "When, in your last hour," says he, (Levana, p. 251,) "when, in your last hour, (think of this,) all faculty in the broken spirit shall fade away and die into inanity,-imagination, thought, effort, enjoyment, then at last will the nightflower of Belief alone continue blooming, and refresh with its perfumes in the last darkness." To reconcile these seeming contradictions, to explain the grounds, the manner, the congruity of Richter's belief, cannot be attempted bere. We recommend him to the study, the olerance, and even the praise, of all men who have inquired into this highest of questions with a right spirit; inquired with the martyr Fixlein.

close by their outer church-yards, where crumbled upcast coffin-boards were glimmering, while the once bright eyes that had lain in them were mouldered into gray ashes. Cold thought! clutch not like a cold spectre at my heart: I look up to the starry sky, and an everlasting chain stretches thither, and over, and below; and all is Life and Warmth, and Light, and all is Godlike or God...

"Towards morning, I described thy late lights, little city of my dwelling, which I be long to on this side the grave; I returned to the Earth; and in thy steeples, behind the byadvanced great midnight, it struck half-past two: about this hour, in 1794, Mars went down in the west, and the Moon rose in the east; and my soul desired, in grief for the noble warlike blood which is still streaming on the blossoms of spring: Ah, retire, bloody War, like red Mars: and thou, still Peace, come forth like the mild divided Moon!"-End of Quintu