genial insight into Nature; and the living harmony in which he renders back what is highest and grandest in Nature, no reader of his works need be reminded. In whatever belongs to the pathetic, the heroic, the tragically elevating, Schiller is at home; a master; nay perhaps the greatest of all late poets. To the assiduous student, moreover, much else that lay in Schiller, but was never worked into shape, will become partially visible deep, inexhaustible mines of thought and feeling; a whole world of gifts, the finest produce of which was but beginning to be realised. To his high-minded, unwearied efforts what was impossible, had length of years been granted him! There is a tone in some of his later pieces, which here and there breathes of the very highest region of Art. Nor are the natural or accidental defects we have noticed in his genius, even as it stands, such as to exclude him from the rank of great Poets. Poets whom the whole world reckons great have, more than once, exhibited the like. Milton, for example, shares most of them with him: like Schiller, he dwells, with full power, only in the high and earnest; in ail other provinces exhibiting a certain inaptitude, and clephantine unpliancy: he too has little Humour; his coarse invective has in it contemptuous emphasis enough, yet scarcely any graceful sport. Indeed, on the positive side also, these two worthies are not without a resemblance. Under far other circumstances, with less massiveness and vehement strength of soul, there is in Schiller the same intensity; the same concentration, and towards similar objects, towards whatever is Sublime in Nature and in Art; which sublimities they both, each in his several way, worship with undivided heart. There is not in Schiller's nature the same rich complexity of rhythm as in Milton's, with its depths of linked sweetness; yet in Schiller too there is something of the same pure swelling force, some tone which, like Milton's, is deep, majestic, solemn. -M.

Schiller.

GOETHE AND SCHILLER.

AMONG younger students of German Literature, the question often arises, and is warmly mooted: Whether Schiller or Goethe is the greater Poet? Of this question we must be allowed to say that it seems rather a slender one, and for two reasons. First, because Schiller and Goethe are of totally dissimilar endowments and endeavours, in regard to all matters intellectual, and cannot well be compared together as Poets. Secondly, because if the question mean to ask, which Poet is on the whole the rarer and more excellent, as probably it does, it must be considered as long ago abundantly answered. To the clear-sighted and modest Schiller, above all, such a question would have appeared surprising. No one knew better than himself, that as Goethe was a born Poet, so he was in great part a made Poet; that as the one spirit was intuitive, all-embracing, instinct with melody, so the other was scholastic, divisive, only partially and as it were artificially melodious. Besides, Goethe has lived to perfect his natural gift, which the less happy Schiller was not permitted to do. The former accordingly is the national Poet; the latter is not and never could have been. We once heard a German remark that readers till their twenty-fifth year usually prefer Schiller; after their twenty-fifth year, Goethe. This probably was no unfair illustration of the question. Schiller can seem higher than Goethe only because he is narrower. Thus to unpractised eyes, a Peak of Teneriffe, nay a Strasburg Minster, when we stand on it, may seem higher than a Chimborazo; because the former rise abruptly, without abutment or environment; the latter rises gradually, carrying half a world aloft with it; and only the deeper azure of the heavens, the widened horizon, the 'eternal sunshine,' disclose to the geographer that the Regions of Change' lies far below him. M. Schiller.

MEPHISTOPHELES.

MEPHISTOPHELES comes before us, not arrayed in the terrors of Cocytus and Phlegethon, but in the natural indelible deformity of Wickedness; he is the Devil, not of Superstition, but of Knowledge. Here is no cloven. foot, or horns and tail: he himself informs us that, during the late march of intellect, the very Devil has participated in the spirit of the age, and laid these appendages. aside. Doubtless, Mephistopheles 'has the manners of a gentleman'; he knows the world'; nothing can exceed the easy tact with which he manages himself; his wit and sarcasm are unlimited; the cool heart-felt contempt with which he despises all things, human and divine, might make the fortune of half a dozen 'fellows about town.' Yet, withal he is a devil in very deed; a genuine Son of Night. He calls himself the Denier, and this truly is his name; for, as Voltaire did with historical doubts, so does he with all moral appearances; settles them with a N'en croyez rien. The shrewd, all-informed intellect he has, is an attorney intellect: it can contradict, but it cannot affirm. With lynx vision, he descries at a glance the ridiculous, the unsuitable, the bad; but for the solemn, the noble, the worthy, he is blind as his ancient Mother. Thus does he go along, qualifying, confuting, despising; on all hands detecting the false, but without force to bring forth, or even to discern, any glimpse of the true Poor Devil! what truth should there be for him? To see Falsehood is his only Truth: falsehood and evil are the rule, truth and good the exception which confirms it. He can believe in nothing but in his own self-conceit, and in the indestructible baseness, folly and hypocrisy of men. For him, virtue is some bubble of the blood: 'it stands written on his face that he never loved a living soul.' Nay, he cannot even hate: at Faust himself he has no grudge; he merely tempts him by way of experiment, and to pass the time scientifically. Such a combination of perfect Understanding

with perfect Selfishness, of logical Life with moral Death; so universal a Denier, both in heart and head,-is undoubtedly a child of Darkness, an emissary of the primeval Nothing: and coming forward as he does, like a person of breeding, and without any flavour of brimstone, may stand here, in his merely spiritual deformity, at once potent, dangerous and contemptible, as the best and only genuine Devil of these latter times. -M. Goethe's Helena.

FAUST.

IN strong contrast with this impersonation of modern. worldly-mindedness, stands Faust himself, by nature the antagonist of it, but destined also to be its victim. If Mephistopheles represent the spirit of Denial, Faust may represent that of Inquiry and Endeavour: the two are, by necessity, in conflict; the light and the darkness of man's life and mind. Intrinsically, Faust is a noble being, though no wise one. His desires are toward the high and true; nay, with a whirlwind impetuosity he rushed forth over the Universe to grasp all excellence; his heart yearns towards the infinite and the invisible: only that he knows not the conditions under which alone this is to be attained. Confiding in his feeling of himself, he has started with the tacit persuasion, so natural to all men, that he at least, however it may fare with others, shall and must be happy; a deep-seated, though only half-conscious conviction lurks in him, that wherever he is not successful, fortune has dealt with him unjustly. His purposes are fair, nay generous: why should he not prosper in them? For in all his lofty aspirings, his strivings after truth and more than human greatness of mind, it has never struck him to inquire how he, the striver, was warranted for such enterprises: with what faculty Nature had equipped him; within what limits she had hemmed him in; by what right he pretended to be happy, or could, some short space ago, have pretended to be at all. Experience, indeed, will teach him, for 'Experience is the best of

schoolmasters; only the school-fees are heavy.' As yet, too, disappointment, which fronts him on every hand, rather maddens than instructs. Faust has spent his youth and manhood, not as others do, in the sunny crowded paths of profit, or among the rosy bowers of pleasure, but darkly and alone in the search of Truth; is it fit that Truth should now hide herself, and his sleepless pilgrimage towards Knowledge and Vision end in the pale shadow of Doubt? To his dream of a glorious higher happiness, all earthly happiness has been sacrificed; friendship, love, the social rewards of ambition were cheerfully cast aside, for his eye and his heart were bent on a region of clear and supreme good; and now, in its stead, he finds isolation, silence and despair. What solace remains? Virtue once promised to be her own reward; but because she does not pay him in the current coin of worldly enjoyment, he reckons her too a delusion; and, like Brutus, reproaches as a shadow, what he once worshipped as a substance. Whither shall he now tend? For his loadstars have gone out one by one; and as the darkness fell, the strong steady wind has changed into a fierce and aimless tornado. Faust calls himself a monster, 'without object, yet without rest.' The vehement, keen and stormful nature of the man is stung into fury, as he thinks of all he has endured and lost; he broods in gloomy meditation, and, like Bellerophon, wanders apart, eating his own heart'; or, bursting into fiery paroxysms, curses man's whole existence as a mockery; curses hope and faith, and joy and care, and what is worst, 'curses patience more than all the rest.' Had his weak arm the power, he could smite the Universe asunder, as at the crack of Doom, and hurl his own vexed being along with it into the silence of Annihilation.

Thus Faust is a man who has quitted the ways of vulgar men, without light to guide him on a better way. No longer restricted by the sympathies, the com