tion in the most liberal way; but, through many pages of metrical lecturing, he does little to satisfy us. What was more to his purpose, he partly succeeds in satisfying Robert d'Heredon; who, after due preparation, Molay being burnt like a martyr, under the most promising omens, and the Pope and the King of France struck dead, or nearly so,sets out to found the order of St. Andrews in his own country, that of Calatrava in Spain, and other knightly Missions of the Heiland aus den Wassern elsewhere; and thus, to the great satisfaction of all parties, the Sons of the Valley terminates, "positively for the last time." our readers may be disposed to hold his reve lations on this subject rather cheap. Nevertheless, taking up the character of Vates in its widest sense, Werner earnestly desires not only to be a poet, but a prophet; and, indeed, looks upon his merits in the former province as altogether subservient to his higher purposes in the latter. We have a series of the most confused and long-winded letters to Hitzig, who had now removed to Berlin; setting forth, with a singular simplicity, the mighty projects Werner was cherishing on this head. He thinks that there ought to be a new Creed promulgated, a new Body of Religionists established; and that, for this purpose, not writing, but actual preaching, can avail. He detests common Protestantism, under which he seems to mean a sort of Socinianism, or diluted French Infidelity; he talks of Jacob Bohme, and Luther, and Schleiermacher, and a new Trinity of "Art, Religion, and Love." All this should be sounded in the ears of men, and in a loud voice, that so their torpid slumber, the harbinger of spiritual death, may be Our reader may have already convinced himself that in this strange phantasmagoria there are not wanting indications of very high poetic talent. We see a mind of great depth, if not of sufficient strength; struggling with objects which, though it cannot master them, are essentially of richest significance. Had the writer only kept his piece till the ninth year; meditating it with true diligence and unwearied will! But the weak Werner was not a man for such things: he must reap the har-driven away. With the utmost gravity he vest on the morrow after seed-day, and so stands before us at last, as a man capable of much, only not of bringing aught to perfection. Of his natural dramatic genius, this work, ill-concocted as it is, affords no unfavourable specimen; and may, indeed, have justified expectations which were never realized. It is true, he cannot yet give form and animation to a character, in the genuine poetic sense; we do not see any of his dramatis persona, but only hear of them: yet, in some cases his endeavour, though imperfect, is by no means abortive; and here, for instance, Jacques Molay, Philip Adalbert, Hugo, and the like, though not living men, have still as much life as many a buff-and-scarlet Sebastian or Barbarossa, whom we find swaggering, for years, with acceptance, on the boards. Of his spiritual beings, whom in most of his plays he introduces too profusely, we cannot speak in commendation they are of a mongrel nature, neither rightly dead nor alive; in fact, they sometimes glide about like real, though rather singular mortals, through the whole piece; and only vanish as ghosts in the fifth act. But, on the other hand, in contriving theatrical incidents and sentiments; in scenic shows, and all manner of gorgeous, frightful, or as tonishing machinery, Werner exhibits a copious invention, and strong though untutored feeling. Doubtless, it is all crude enough; all illuminated by an impure, barbaric splendour; not the soft, peaceful brightness of sunlight, but the red, resinous glare of playhouse torches. Werner, however, was still young; and had he been of a right spirit, all that was impure and crude might in time have become ripe and clear; and a poet of no ordinary excellence would have been moulded out of him. But as matters stood, this was by no means the thing Werner had most at heart. It is not the degree of poetic talent manifested in the Sons of the Valley that he prizes, but the religious truth shadowed forth in it. To judge from the parables of Baffometus and Phosphoros, commissions his correspondent to wait upon Schlegel, Tieck, and others of a like spirit, and see whether they will not join him. For his own share in the matter, he is totally indifferent; will serve in the meanest capacity, and rejoice with his whole heart, if, in zeal and ability as poets and preachers, not some only, but every one, should infinitely outstrip him. We suppose, he had dropped the thought of being "One and Somewhat;" and now wished, rapt away by this divine purpose, tc be "Nought and All." On the Heiland aus den Wassern this corre spondence throws no further light: what the new Creed specially was, which Werner felt so eager to plant and propagate, we nowhere learn with any distinctness. Probably, he might himself have been rather at a loss to explain it in brief compass. His theogony, we suspect, was still very much in posse; and perhaps only the moral part of this system could stand before him with some degree of clearness. On this latter point, indeed, he is determined enough; well assured of his dogmas, and apparently waiting but for some proper vehicle in which to convey them to the minds of men. His fundamental principle of morals we have seen in part already: it does not exclusively or primarily belong to himself; being little more than that high tenet of entire Self-forgetfulness, that "merging of the Me in the Idea;" a principle which reigns both in Stoical and Christian ethics, and is at this day common, in theory, among all German philosophers, especially of the Transcendental class. Werner has adopted this principle with his whole heart and his whole soul, as the indispensable condition of all Virtue. He believes it, we should say, intensely, and without compromise, exaggerating rather than softening or concealing its peculi arities. He will not have Happiness, under any form, to be the real or chief end of man, this is but love of enjoyment, disguise it as we like; a more complex and sometimes more respectable species of hunger, he would sav long, to play fantastic tricks in abundance; and, at least, in his religious history, to set the world a-wondering. Conversion, not to Popery, but, if it so chanced, to Braminism, was a thing nowise to be thought impossible. Nevertheless, let his missionary zeal have justice from us! It does seem to have been grounded on no wicked or even illaudable motive: to all appearance, he not only believed what he professed, but thought it of the high to be admitted as an indestructible element in human nature, but nowise to be recognised as the highest; on the contrary, to be resisted and incessantly warred with, till it become obedient to love of God, which is only, in the truest sense, love of Goodness, and the germ of which lies deep in the inmost nature of man; of authority superior to all sensitive impulses; forming, in fact, the grand law of his being, as subjection to it forms the first and last condition of spiritual health. He thinks that to pro-est moment that others should believe it. And pose a reward for virtue is to render virtue impossible. He warmly seconds Schleiermacher in declaring that even the hope of Immortality is a consideration unfit to be introduced into religion, and tending only to pervert it, and impair its sacredness. Strange as this may seem, Werner is firmly convinced of its importance; and has even enforced it specifically in a passage of his Söhne des Thals, which he is at the pains to cite and expound in his correspondence with Hitzig. Here is another fraction of that wondrous dialogue between Robert d'Heredon and Adam of Valincourt, in the cavern of the Valley: ROBERT. And Death, so dawns it on me,--Death perhaps, That too must die ?-This shallow Self of ours, We can, we must be free of it, and then if the proselytizing spirit, which dwells in all men, be allowed exercise even when it only assaults what it reckons Errors, still more should this be so, when it proclaims what it reckons Truth, and fancies itself not taking from us what in our eyes may be good, but adding thereto what is better. Meanwhile, Werner was not so absorbed in spiritual schemes, that he altogether overlooked his own merely temporal comfort. In contempt of former failures, he was now courting for himself a third wife, "a young Poless of the highest personal attractions;" and this under difficulties which would have appalled an ordinary wooer: for the two had no language in common; he not understanding three words of Polish, she not one of German. Nevertheless, nothing daunted by this circumstance, nay, perhaps discerning in it an assurance against many a sorrowful curtain lecture, he prosecuted his suit, we sup pose by signs and dumb-show, with such ardour, that he quite gained the fair mute; wedded her in 1801; and soon after, in her company quitted Warsaw for Königsberg, where the helpless state of his mother re ADAM (calling joyfully into the interior of the Cavern.)quired immediate attention. It is from Königs Brethren, he has renounced! Himself has found it! Oh! praised be Light! He sees! The North is saved! ADAM (embracing Robert.) Come to my heart!—&c. &c. berg that most of his missionary epistles to Hitzig are written; the latter, as we have hinted above, being now stationed, by his official appointment, in Berlin. The sad duty of watching over his crazed, forsaken, and dying mother, Werner appears to have discharged with true filial assiduity: for three years she lingered in the most painful state, under his nursing; and her death, in 1804, seems not. withstanding to have filled him with the deepest sorrow. This is an extract of his letter to Hitzig on that mournful occasion: Such was the spirit of that new Faith, which, symbolized under mythuses of Baffometus and Phosphoros, and "Saviours from the Waters," and Trinities of Art, Religion, and Love," "I know not whether thou hast heard that on and to be preached abroad by the aid of Schlei- the 24th of February, (the same day when our ermacher, and what was then called the New excellent Mnioch died in Warsaw,) my mother Poetical School, Werner seriously purposed, like departed here, in my arms. My Friend! God another Luther, to cast forth, as good seed, knocks with an iron hammer at our hearts; among the ruins of decayed and down-trodden and we are duller than stone, if we do not feel Protestantism! Whether Hitzig was still young it; and madder than mad, if we think it shame enough to attempt executing his commission, to cast ourselves into the dust before the Alland applying to Schlegel and Tieck for help; powerful, and let our whole so highly miseraand if so, in what gestures of speechless asto- ble Self be annihilated in the sentiment of His nishment, or what peals of inextinguishable infinite greatness and long-suffering. I wish I laughter they answered him, we are not in-had words to paint how inexpressibly pitiful formed. One thing, however, is clear: that a my Söhne des Thals appeared to me in that hour, man with so unbridled an imagination, joined to when, after eighteen years of neglect, I again so weak an understanding, and so broken a voli- went to partake in the Communion! This tion, who had plunged so deep into Theoso-death of my mother, the pure, royal poet-andphy, and still hovered so near the surface in all practical knowledge of men and their affairs; who, shattered and degraded in his own private character, could meditate such apostolic enterprises, was a man likely, if he lived martyr spirit, who for eight years had lain continually on a sick-bed, and suffered unspeakable things,-affected me, (much as, for her sake and my own, I could not but wish it with altogether agonizing feelings.) Ah, Friend, how heavy do my youthful faults lie on me! How | charm of his conversation: for Werner many much would I give to have my mother-(though times could be frank and simple; and the true both I and my wife have of late times lived humour and abandonment with which he often wholly for her, and had much to endure on her launched forth into bland satire on his friends, account)-how much would I give to have her and still oftener on himself, atoned for many of back to me but one week, that I might dis- his whims and weaknesses. Probably the two burden my heavy-laden heart with tears of re- could not have lived together by themselves: pentance! My beloved Friend, give thou no but in a circle of common men, where these grief to thy parents! ah, no earthly voice can touchy elements were attempered by a fair adawaken the dead! God and Parents, that is dition of wholesome insensibilities and formalities, they even relished one another; and, the first concern; all else is secondary." indeed, the whole social union seems to have stood on no undesirable footing. For the rest, Warsaw itself was, at this time, a gay, picturesque, and stirring city; full of resources for spending life in pleasant occupation, either wisely or unwisely.* This affection for his mother forms, as it were, a little island of light and verdure in Werner's history, where, amid so much that is dark and desolate, one feels it pleasant to linger. Here was at least one duty, perhaps, indeed, the only one, which, in a wayward, It was here, that, in 1805, Werner's Kreuz wasted life, he discharged with fidelity: from an der Ostsee (Cross on the Baltic) was writhis conduct towards this one hapless being, we may, perhaps, still learn that his heart, how-ten: a sort of half-operatic performance, for ever perverted by circumstances, was not in- which Hoffmann, who to his gifts as a writer capable of true, disinterested love. A rich heart added perhaps still higher attainments, both as by Nature; but unwisely squandering its riches, a musician and a painter, composed the acA ridicuand attaining to a pure union only with this one companiment. He complains that, in this matneart; for it seems doubtful whether he ever ter, Werner was very ill to please. loved another! His poor mother, while alive, lous scene, at the first reading of the piece, the was the haven of all his earthly voyagings; and, same shrewd wag has recorded in his Serain after years, from amid far scenes, and crush-pions-Brudér; Hitzig assures us that it is liteing perplexities, he often looks back to her grave with a feeling to which all bosoms must respond. The date of her decease became a memorable era in his mind; as may appear from the title which he gave, long afterwards, to one of his most popular and tragical productions, Die Vier-und-zwanzigste Februar (The Twenty-fourth of February.) rally true, and that Hoffmann himself was the main actor in the business. "Our Poet had invited a few friends, to read to them, in manuscript, his Kreuz an der Ostsee, of which they already knew some fragments that had raised their expectations to the highest stretch. Planted, as usual, in the middle of the circle, at a little miniature table, on which After this event, which left him in posses- two clear lights, stuck in high candlesticks, sion of a small but competent fortune, Werner were burning, sat the poet: he had drawn the returned with his wife to his post at Warsaw. manuscript from his breast; the huge snuff-box, By this time, Hitzig, too, had been sent back, the blue-checked handkerchief, aptly reminding and to a higher post: he was now married you of Baltic muslin, as in use for petticoats and likewise; and the two wives, he says, soon be- other indispensable things, lay arranged in came as intimate as their husbands. In a lit-order before him.-Deep silence on all sides!tle while Hoffmann joined them; a colleague in Hitzig's office, and by him ere long introduced to Werner, and the other circle of Prussian men of law, who, in this foreign capital, formed each other's chief society; and, of course, cleave to one another more closely than they might have done elsewhere. Hoff* Hitzig has thus described the first aspect it presented mann does not seem to have loved Werner; as, indeed, he was at all times rather shy in to Hoffmann: "Streets of stately breadth, formed of pathreatened every moment to rush down over the heads his attachments; and, to his quick eye, and laces in the finest Italian style, and wooden huts which more rigid, fastidious feeling, the lofty theory of their inmates; in these edifices, Asiatic pomp comever-moving population, forming the sharpest contrasts, and low selfish practice, the general diffuse-bined in strange union with Greenland squalor. An ness, nay, incoherence of character, the pe-as in a perpetual masquerade: long-bearded Jews; dantry and solemn affectation, too visible in monks in the garb of every order; here veiled and deepsecluded and apart: there flights of young Polesses, in the man, could nowise be hidden. Neverthe-ly-shrouded nuns of strictest discipline, walking, selfless, he feels and acknowledges the frequent silk mantles of the brightest colours, talking and prome Not a breath heard!-The poet cuts one of those unparalleled, ever-memorable, altogether indescribable faces you have seen in him, and begins.-Now you recollect, at the rising of the curtain, the Prussians are assembled on the coast of the Baltic, fishing amber, and com See, for example, the Preface to his Mutter der Mak-red or yellow boots: the new generation equipt to the kabler, written at Vienna, in 1819. The tone of still, but deep and heartfelt sadness, which runs through the whole of this piece, cannot be communicated in extracts. We quote only a half stanza, which, except in prose, we shall not venture to translate: Ich, dem der Liebe Kosen Und alle Freudenrosen, Am Muttergrab' entflohn. nading over broad squares. The venerable ancient Polish noble, with moustaches, caftan, girdle, sabre, and utmost pitch as Parisian Incroyables; with Turks, Greeks, Russians, Italians, Frenchmen, in ever-changing throng. Add to this a police of inconceivable tolerance, disturbing no popular sport; so that little puppettheatres, apes, camels, dancing bears, practised inces santly in open spaces and streets; while the most elegant equipages, and the poorest pedestrian bearers of burden, stood gazing at them. Further, a theatre in the national language; a good French company; an Italian opera; German players of at least a very passable sort; mask "I, for whom the caresses of love and all roses of joy ed-balls on a quite original but highly entertaining plan; &c.-Hoffmann's Leben und Nachlass, b. i. p. 287. withered away, as the first shovel with its mould sound-places for pleasure-excursions all round the city," &c. ed on the coffin of my mother." mence by calling on the god who presides over gerations are softened into something which this vocation.-So-begins: Bangputtis! Bangputtis! Bangputtis! -Brief pause!-Incipient stare in the audience!-and from a fellow in the corner comes a small clear voice: 'My dearest, most valued friend! my best of poets! If thy whole dear opera is written in that cursed language, no soul of us knows a syllable of it; and I beg, in the Devil's name, thou wouldst rather have the goodness to translate it first!"'"* Of this Kreuz an der Ostsee our limits will permit us to say but little. It is still a fragment; the Second Part, which was often promised, and, we believe, partly written, having never yet been published. In some respects, it appears to us the best of Werner's dramas: there is a decisive coherence in the plot, such as we seldom find with him; and a firmness, a rugged nervous brevity in the dialogue, which is equally rare. Here, too, the mystic dreamy agencies, which, as in most of his pieces, he at least resembles poetic harmony. We give this drama a high praise, when we say that more than once it has reminded us of Cal deron. The "Cross on the Baltic" had been bespoke by Iffland for the Berlin theatre; but the complex machinery of the piece, the "little flames" springing, at intervals, from the heads of certain characters, and the other supernatural ware with which it is replenished, were found to transcend the capabilities of any merely Germany, was himself a dramatist, and a man terrestrial stage. Ifland, the best actor in of talent, but in all points differing from Werner, as a stage-machinist may differ from a man with the second-sight. Hoffmann chuckles in secret over the perplexities in which the have found himself, when he came to the shrewd prosaic manager and playwright must little flames." Nothing remained but to write back a refusal, full of admiration and expostulation: and Imland wrote one which, says Hoffmann, " passes for a master-piece of theatrical diplomacy." In this one respect, at least, Werner's next play was happier, for it actually crossed the and reached, though in a maimed state, the Stygian marsh" of green-room hesitations, Elysium of the boards; and this to the great joy, as it proved, both of Iffland and all other parties interested. We allude to the Martin Luther, oder die Weihe der Kraft, (Martin Luther, or the Consecration of Strength,) Werner's Berlin in 1807, and soon spread over all Germost popular performance, which came out at has interwoven with the action, harmonize more than usually with the spirit of the whole. It is a wild subject, and this helps to give it a corresponding wildness of locality. The first planting of Christianity among the Prussians, by the Teutonic Knights, leads us back of itself into dim ages of antiquity, of superstitious barbarism, and stern apostolic zeal: it is a scene hanging, as it were, in half-ghastly chiaroscuro, on a ground of primeval Night: where the Cross and St. Adalbert come in contact with the Sacred Oak and the Idols of Romova, we are not surprised that spectral shapes peer forth on us from the gloom. In the constructing and depicting of charac-many, Catholic as well as protestant, being acted, it would seem, even in Vienna, to overflowing and delighted audiences. ters, Werner, indeed, is still little better than a mannerist: his persons, differing in external figure, differ too slightly in inward nature; and no one of them comes forward on us with a rightly visible or living air. Yet, in scenes and incidents, in what may be called the general costume of his subject, he has here attained a really superior excellence. The savage Prussians, with their amber-fishing, their bearhunting, their bloody idolatry, and stormful untutored energy, are brought vividly into view; no less so the Polish Court of Plozk, and the German Crusaders, in their bridal-feasts and battles, as they live and move, here placed on the verge of Heathendom, as it were, the vanguard of Light in conflict with the kingdoms of Darkness. The nocturnal assault on Plozk by the Prussians, where the handful of Teutonic Knights is overpowered, but the city saved from ruin by the miraculous interposition of the "Harper," who now proves to be the spirit of St. Adalbert; this, with the scene which follows it, on the Island of the Vistula, where the dawn slowly breaks over doings of wo and horrid cruelty, but of wo and cruelty atoned for by immortal hope,-belongs undoubtedly to Werner's most successful efforts. With much that is questionable, much that is merely common, there are intermingled touches from the true Land of Wonders; indeed, the whole is overspread with a certain dim religious light, in which its many pettinesses and exag *Hoffmann's Serapions-Brüder, b. iv. s. 240. If instant acceptance, therefore, were a measure of dramatic merit, this play should rank high among that class of works. Neverthe sober reader of Martin Luther will be far theless, to judge from our own impressions, from finding in it such excellence. It cannot be named among the best dramas: it is not much scenic exhibition, many a "fervid sentieven the best of Werner's. There is, indeed, all its mixture of coarseness, here and there ment," as the newspapers have it; nay, with a glimpse of genuine dramatic inspiration; but, as a whole, the work sorely disappoints us; it is of so loose and mixed a structure and falls asunder in our thoughts, like the iron and clay in the Chaldean's Dream. There is an in the First Act; but, unhappily, it goes on deinterest, perhaps of no trivial sort, awakened might almost say, it expires. The story is too clining, till, in the Fifth, an ill-natured critic wide for Werner's dramatic lens to gather into a focus; besides, the reader brings with him an image of it, too fixed for being so boldly metamorphosed, and too high and august for being ornamented with tinsel and gilt pasteplentifully furnished as it is with sceptres and board. Accordingly, the Diet of Worms, armorial shields, continues a much grander Neither, with regard to the persons of the play, scene in History, than it is here in Fiction. excepting those of Luther and Catharine, the Nun whom he weds, can we find much scope for praise. Nay, our praise even of these two must have many limitations. Catharine, though carefully enough depicted, is, in fact, little more than a common tragedy-queen, with the storminess, the love, and other stage-heroism, which belong prescriptively to that class of dignitaries. With regard to Luther himself, it is evident that Werner has put forth his whole strength in this delineation; and, trying him by common standards, we are far from saying that he has failed. Doubtless it is, in some respects, a significant and even sublime delineation: yet must we ask whether it is Luther, the Luther of History, or even the Luther proper for this drama; and not rather some ideal portraiture of Zacharias Werner himself? Is not this Luther, with his too assiduous flute-playing, his trances of three days, his visions of the Devil, (at whom, to the sorrow of the housemaid, he resolutely throws his huge ink-bottle,) by much too spasmodic and brainsick a personage? We cannot but question the dramatic beauty, whatever it may be in history, of that three days' trance; the hero must before this have been in want of mere victuals; and there, as he sits deaf and dumb, with his eyes sightless, yet fixed and staring, are we not tempted less to admire, than to send in all haste for some officer of the Humane Society? Seriously, we cannot but regret that these and other such blemishes had not been avoided, and the character, worked into chasteness and purity, been presented to us in the simple grandeur which essentially belongs to it. For, censure as we may, it were blindness to deny that this figure of Luther has in it features of an austere loveliness, a mild, yet awful beauty: undoubtedly a figure rising from the depths of the poet's soul; and, marred as it is with such adhesions, piercing at times into the depths of ours! Among so many poetical sins, it forms the chief redeeming virtue, and truly were almost in itself a sort of atone ment. As for the other characters, they need not detain us long. Of Charles the Fifth, by far the most ambitious,-meant, indeed, as the counterpoise of Luther, we may say, without hesitation, that he is a failure. An empty Gascon this; bragging of his power, and honour, and the like, in a style which Charles, even in his nineteenth year, could never have used. "One God, one Charles," is no speech for an emperor; and, besides, is borrowed from some panegyrist of a Spanish opera-singer. Neither can we fall in with Charles, when he tells us, that "he fears nothing,-not even God." We humbly think he must be mistaken. With the old Miners, again, with Hans Luther and his Wife, the Reformer's parents, there is more reason to be satisfied; yet in Werner's hands simplicity is always apt, in such cases, to become too simple, and these honest peasants, like the honest Hugo in the "Sons of the Valley," are very garrulous. This drama of "Martin Luther" is named likewise the "Consecration of Strength;" that is, we suppose, the purifying of this great theologian from all remnants of earthly passion, into a clear heavenly zeal; an operation which is brought about, strangely enough, by two half-ghosts and one whole ghost,—a little fairy girl, Catharine's servant, who impersonates Faith; a little fairy youth, Luther's servant, who represents Art; and the "Spirit of Cotta's wife," an honest housekeeper, but defunct many years before, who stands for Purity. These three supernaturals hover about in very whimsical wise, cultivating flowers, playing on flutes, and singing dirge-like epithalamiums over unsound sleepers: we cannot see how aught of this is to "consecrate strength;" or, indeed, what such jack-o'-lantern personages have in the least to do with so grave a business. If the author intended by such machinery to elevate his subject from the Common, and unite it with the higher region of the Infinite and the Invisible, we cannot think that his contrivance has succeeded, or was worthy to succeed. These half-allegorical, half-corporeal beings yield no contentment anywhere: Abstract Ideas, however they may put on fleshly garments, are a class of characters whom we cannot sympathize with or delight in. Besides, how can this mere imbodyment of an allegory be supposed to act on the rugged materials of life, and elevate into ideal grandeur the doings of real men, that live and move amid the actual pressure of worldly things? At best, it can stand but like a hand in the margin: it is not performing the task proposed, but only telling us that it was meant to be performed. To our feelings, this entire episode runs like straggling bindweed through the whole growth of the piece, not so much uniting as encumbering and choking up what it meets with; in itself, perhaps, a green and rather pretty weed; yet here superfluous, and, like any other weed, deserving only to be altogether cut away. Our general opinion of "Martin Luther," it would seem, therefore, corresponds ill with that of the "overflowing and delighted audiences" over all Germany. We believe, however, that now, in its twentieth year, the work may be somewhat more calmly judged of even there. As a classical drama it could never pass with any critic; nor, on the other hand, shall we ourselves deny that, in the lower sphere of a popular spectacle, its attractions are manifold. We find it, what, more or less, we find all Werner's pieces to be, a splendid, sparkling mass; yet not of pure metal, but of manycoloured scoria, not unmingled with metal; and must regret, as ever, that it had not been refined in a stronger furnace, and kept in the crucible till the true silver-gleam, glancing from it, had shown that the process was complete. Werner's dramatic popularity could not remain without influence on him, more especially as he was now in the very centre of its brilliancy, having changed his residence from Warsaw to Berlin, some time before his Weihe der Kraft was acted, or indeed written. Von Schrötter, one of the state-ministers, a man harmonizing with Werner in his " zeal both for religion and freemasonry," had been persuaded by some friends to appoint him his secretary. Werner naturally rejoiced in such promotion; yet, combined with his theatrical success, it perhaps, in the long run, did him more harm than good. He might now, for the first time, |