far fewer points of comparison. If Schlegel's "Austrian Pensions," and the Kaiser's crown, Work is the apotheosis of Spiritualism; Hope's and Austria altogether, were but a light matte again is the apotheosis of Materialism: in the to the finding and vitally appropriating of one, all matter is evaporated into a Phenome- Truth. Let us respect the sacred mystery of non, and terrestrial Life itself, with its whole a Person; rush not irreverently into man's doings and showings, held out as a Disturbance Holy of Holies! Were the lost little one, as (Zerrüttung) produced by the Zeitgeist, (Spirit we said already, found "sucking its dead moof Time;) in the other, Matter is distilled and ther, on the field of carnage," could it be other sublimated into some semblance of Divinity: than a spectacle for tears? A solemn mournthe one regards Space and Time as mere forms ful feeling comes over us when we see this last of man's mind, and without external existence Work of Friedrich Schlegel, the unwearied or reality; the other supposes Space and Time seeker, end abruptly in the middle; and, as if to be "incessantly created," and rayed in he had not yet found, as if emblematically of upon us like a sort of "gravitation." Such is much, end with an “Aber-,” with a “But—!” their difference in respect of purport; no less This was the last word that came from the striking is it in respect of manner, talent, suc- Pen of Friedrich Schlegel: about eleven at cess, and all outward characteristics. Thus, night he wrote it down, and there paused if in Schlegel we have to admire the power of sick; at one in the morning, Time for him Words, in Hope we stand astonished, it might had merged itself in Eternity; he was, as we almost be said, at the want of an articulate say, no more. Language. To Schlegel his Philosophic Speech is obedient, dexterous, exact, like a promptly-ministering genius; his names are so clear, so precise and vivid, that they almost (sometimes altogether) become things for him: with Hope there is no Philosophical Speech; but a painful, confused stammering, and struggling after such; or the tongue, as in dotish forgetfulness, maunders low, longwinded, and speaks not the word intended, but another; so that here the scarcely intelligible, in these endless convolutions, becomes the wholly unreadable; and often we could ask, as that mad pupil did of his tutor in Philosophy, "But whether is Virtue a fluid, then, or a gas?" If the fact, that Schlegel, in the city of Dresden, could find audience for such high discourse, may excite our envy; this other fact, that a person of strong powers, skilled in English Thought and master of its Dialect, could write the Origin and Prospects of Man, may painfully remind us of the reproach, "that England has now no language for Meditation; that England, the most Calculative, is the least Meditative, of all civilized countries."

It is not our purpose to offer any criticism of Schlegel's Book; in such limits as were possible here, we should despair of communicating even the faintest image of its significance. To the mass of readers, indeed, both among the Germans themselves, and still more elsewhere, it nowise addresses itself, and may lie for ever sealed. We point it out as a remarkable document of the Time and of the Man; can recommend it, moreover, to all earnest Thinkers, as a work deserving their best regard: a work full of deep meditation, wherein the infinite mystery of Life, if not represented, is decisively recognised. Of Schlegel himself, and his character, and spiritual history, we can profess no thorough or final understanding; yet enough to make us view him with admiration and pity, nowise with harsh contemptuous censure; and must say, with clearest persuasion, that the outcry of his being "a renegade," and so forth, is but like other such outcries, a judgment where there was neither jury, nor evidence, nor judge. The candid reader, in this Book itself, to say nothing of all the rest, will find traces of a high, far-seeing, earnest spirit, to whom

Still less can we attempt any criticism of Mr. Hope's new Book of Genesis. Indeed, under any circumstances, criticism of it were now impossible. Such an utterance could only be responded to in peals of laughter; and laughter sounds hollow and hideous through the vaults of the dead. Of this monstrous Anomaly, where all sciences are heaped and huddled together, and the principles of all are, with a childlike innocence, plied hither and thither, or wholly abolished in case of need; where the First Cause is figured as a huge Circle, with nothing to do but radiate "gravitation" towards its centre; and so construct a Universe, wherein all, from the lowest cucumber with its coolness, up to the highest seraph with his love, were but, "gravitation," direct or reflex," in more or less central globes,"

what can we say, except, with sorrow and shame, that it could have originated nowhere save in England? It is a general agglomerate of all facts, notions, whims, and observations, as they lie in the brain of an English gentleman; as an English gentleman, of unusual thinking power, is led to fashion them, in his schools and in his world: all these thrown into the crucible, and if not fused, yet soldered or conglutinated with boundless patience; and now tumbled out here, heterogeneous, amorphous, unspeakable, a world's wonder. Most melancholy must we rame the whole business; full of long-continued thought, earnestness, loftiness of mind; not without glances into the Deepest, a constant fearless endeavour af. ter truth; and with all this nothing accom. plished, but the perhaps absurdest Book written in our century by a thinking man. A shameful Abortion; which, however, need not now be smothered or mangled, for it is already dead; only, in our love and sorrowing reve rence for the writer of Anastasius, and the heroic seeker of Light, though not bringer thereof, let it be buried and forgotten.

For ourselves, the loud discord which jars in these two Works, in innumerable works of the like import, and generally in all the Thought and Action of this period, does not any longer utterly confuse us. Unhappy who, in such a time, felt not, at all conjunctures, ineradicably in his heart the knowledge that a God made this Universe, and a Demon not! And shall

Evil always prosper, then? Out of all Evil comes Good; and no Good that is possible but shall one day be real. Deep and sad as is our feeling that we stand yet in the bodeful Night; equally deep, indestructible is our assurance that the Morning also will not fail. Nay, already, as we look round, streaks of a dayspring are in the east it is dawning; when the time shall be fulfilled, it will be day. The progress of man towards higher and nobler Developments of whatever is highest and noblest in him, lies not only prophesied to Faith, but now written to the eye of Observation, so that he who runs may read.

|

Sad, truly, were our condition did we know but this, that Change is universal and inevi table. Launched into a dark shoreless sea of Pyrrhonism, what would remain for us but to sail aimless, hopeless; or make madly merry, while the devouring Death had not yet engulfed us? As, indeed, we have seen many, and still see many do. Nevertheless so stands it not. The venerator of the Past (and to what pure heart is the Past, in that "moonlight of me. mory," other than sad and holy?) sorrows not over its departure, as one utterly bereaved. The true Past departs not, nothing that was worthy in the Past departs; no Truth or Goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die; but is all still here, and recognised or not, lives and works through endless changes. If all things, to speak in the German dialect, are discerned by us, and exist for us, in an element of Time, and therefore of Mortality and Mutability; yet Time itself reposes on Eternity: the truly Great and Transcendental has its basis and substance in Eternity; stands revealed to us as Eternity in a vesture of Time. Thus in all Poetry, Worship, Art, Society, as one form passes into another, nothing is lost: it is but the superficial, as it were the body only, that grows obsolete and dies; under the mortal body lies a soul that is immortal; that anew incarnates itself in fairer revelation; and the Present is the living sum-total of the whole Past.

In Change, therefore, there is nothing terrible, nothing supernatural: on the contrary, it lies in the very essence of our lot, and life in this world. To-day is not yesterday: we ourselves change; how can our Works and Thoughts, if they are always to be the fittest, continue always the same? Change, indeed, is painful; yet ever needful: and if Memory have its force and worth, so also has Hope. Nay, if we look well to it, what is all Derangement, and necessity of great Change, in itself such an evil, but the product simply of in

One great step of progress, for example, we should say, in actual circumstances, was this same the clear ascertainment that we are in progress. About the grand-Course of Providence, and his final Purposes with us, we can know nothing, or almost nothing: man begins in darkness, ends in darkness; mystery is everywhere around us and in us, under our feet, among our hands. Nevertheless so much has become evident to every one, that this wondrous Mankind is advancing somewhither; that at least all human things are, have been, and for ever will be, in Movement and Change; -as, indeed, for beings that exist in Time, by virtue of Time, and are made of Time, might have been long since understood. In some provinces, it is true, as in Experimental Science, this discovery is an old one; but in most others it belongs wholly to these latter days. How often, in former ages, by eternal Creeds, eternal Forms of Government, and the like, has it been attempted, fiercely enough, and with destructive violence, to chain the Future under the Past; and say to the Providence, whose ways with man are mysterious, and through the great Deep: Hitherto shalt thou come, but no farther! A wholly insane attempt; and for man himself, could it prosper, the frightfullest of all enchantments, a very Lifein-Death. Man's task here below, the destiny of every individual man, is to be in turns Ap-creased resources which the old methods can no prentice and Workman; or say rather, Scholar, Teacher, Discoverer by nature he has a strength for learning, for imitating; but also a strength for acting, for knowing on his own account. Are we not in a World seen to be Infinite; the relations lying closest together modified by those latest-discovered, and lying farthest asunder? Could you ever spell-bind man into a Scholar merely, so that he had nothing to discover, to correct; could you ever establish a Theory of the Universe that were entire, unimprovable, and which needed only to be got by heart; man then were spiritually defunct, the species We now name Man had ceased to exist. But the gods, kinder to us than we are to ourselves, have forbidden such suicidal acts. As Phlogiston is displaced by Oxygen, and the Epicycles of Ptolemy by the Ellipses of Kepler; so does Paganism give place to Catholicism, Tyranny to Monarchy, and Feudalism to Representative Government, -where also the process does not stop. Perfection of Practice, like completeness of Opinion, is always approaching, never arrived; Truth, in the words of Schiller, immer wird, nie st; never is, always is a-being.

longer administer; of new wealth which the old coffers will no longer contain? What is it, for example, that in our own day bursts asunder the bonds of ancient Political Systems, and perplexes all Europe with the fear of Change, but even this: the increase of social resources, which the old social methods will no longer sufficiently administer? The new omnipotence of the Steam-engine is hewing asunder quite other mountains than the physical. Have not our economical distresses, those barnyard Conflagrations themselves, the frightfullest madness of our mad epoch, their rise also in what is a real increase: increase of Men; of human Force; properly, in such a Planet as ours, the most precious of all increases? It is true again, the ancient methods of administration will no longer suffice. Must the indomitable millions, fuli of old Saxon energy and fire, lie cooped up in this Western Nook, choking one another, as in a Blackhole of Calcutta, while a whole fertile untenanted Earth, desolate for want of the ploughshare, cries: Come and till me, come and reap me? If the ancient Captains can no longer yield guidance, new must be sought after: for the

difficulty lies not in nature, but in artifice: the | in the higher Literature of Germany, there European Calcutta-Blackhole has no walls but already lies, for him that can read it, the be air ones, and paper ones.—So, too, Skepticism ginning of a new revelation of the Godlike; itself, with its innumerable mischiefs, what is as yet unrecognised by the mass of the world; it but the sour fruit of a most blessed increase, but waiting there for recognition, and sure to that of Knowledge; a fruit, too, that will not find it when the fit hour comes. This age also always continue sour? is not wholly without its Prophets.

In fact, much as we have said and mourned Again, under another aspect, if Utilitarianabout the unproductive prevalence of Meta- ism, or Radicalism, or the Mechanical Philo physics, it was not without some insight into sophy, or by whatever name it is called, has the use that lies in them. Metaphysical Specu- still its long task to do; nevertheless we can lation, if a necessary evil, is the forerunner of now see through it and beyond it: in the betmuch good. The fever of Skepticism must ter heads, even among us English, it has beneeds burn itself out, and burn out thereby the come obsolete; as in other countries it has Impurities that caused it; then again will there been, in such heads, for some forty or even be clearness, health. The principle of Life, fifty years. What sound mind among the which now struggles painfully, in the outer, French, for example, now fancies that men thin, and barren domain of the Conscious or can be governed by "Constitutions;" by the Mechanical, may then withdraw into its inner never so cunning mechanizing of Self-inteSanctuaries, its abysses of mystery and mi-rests, and all conceivable adjustments of racle; withdraw deeper than ever into that checking and balancing: in a word, by the domain of the Unconscious, by nature infinite best possible solution of this quite insoluble and inexhaustible; and creatively work there. From that mystic region, and from that alone, all wonders, all Poesies, and Religions, and Social Systems have proceeded: the like wonders, and greater and higher, lie slumbering there; and, brooded on by the spirit of the waters, will evolve themselves, and rise like exhalations from the Deep.

and impossible problem, Given a world of Knaves, to produce an Honesty from their united action? Were not experiments enough of this kind tried before all Europe, and found wanting, when, in that doomsday of France, the infinite gulf of human Passion shivered asunder the thin rinds of Habit; and burst forth all-devouring, as in seas of Nether Fire! Which cunningly-devised "Constitution," constitutional, republican, democratic, sans-culottic, could bind that raging chasm together! Were they not all burnt up, like Paper as they were, in its molten eddies; and still the fire-sea raged fiercer than before? It is not by Mechanism, but by Religion; not by Selfinterest, but by Loyalty, that men are governed or governable.

Of our modern Metaphysics, accordingly, may not this already be said, that if they have produced no Affirmation, they have destroyed much Negation? It is a disease expelling a disease: the fire of Doubt, as above hinted, consuming away the Doubtful; that so the Certain come to light, and again lie visible on the surface. English or French Metaphysics, in reference to this last stage of the speculative process, are not what we allude to here; but Remarkable it is, truly, how everywhere only the Metaphysics of the Germans. In the eternal fact begins again to be recognised, France or England, since the days of Diderot that there is a Godlike in human affairs; that and Hume, though all thought has been of a God not only made us and beholds us, but is skeptico-metaphysical texture, so far as there in us and around us; that the Age of Mirawere any Thought, we have seen no Meta- cles, as it ever was, now is. Such recogniphysics; but only more or less ineffectual tion we discern on all hands, and in all counquestionings whether such could be. In the tries: in each country after its own fashion. Pyrrhonism of Hume and the Materialism of In France, among the younger nobler minds, Diderot, Logic had, as it were, overshot itself, strangely enough; where, in their loud conoverset itself. Now, though the athlete, to use tention with the Actual and Conscious, the our old figure, cannot, by much lifting, lift up Ideal or Unconscious is, for the time, without his own body, he may shift it out of a laming exponent; where Religion means not the paposture, and get to stand in a free one. Such rent of Polity, as of all that is highest, but a service have German Metaphysics done for Polity itself; and this and the other earnest man's mind. The second sickness of Specula- man has not been wanting, who could whisper tion has abolished both itself and the first. audibly: "Go to, I will make a religion." In Friedrich Schlegel complains much of the England still more strangely; as in all things, fruitlessness, the tumult and transiency of worthy England will have its way: by the German as of all Metaphysics; and with rea- shrieking of hysterical women casting out of son: yet in that wide-spreading, deep-whirling devils, and other "gifts of the Holy Ghost" vortex of Kantism, so soon metamorphosed Well might Jean Paul say, in this his twelfth into Fichteism, Schellingism, and then as hour of the Night, "the living dream;" well Hegelism, and Cousinism, perhaps finally might he say, "the dead walk." Meanwhile evaporated, is not this issue visible enough, let us rejoice rather that so much has been that Pyrrhonism and Materialism, themselves seen into, were it through never so diffracting necessary phenomena in European culture, have disappeared; and a Faith in Religion has again become possible and inevitable for the scientific mind; and the word Free-thinker no longer means the Denier or Caviller, but the Believer, or the Ready to believe? Nay,

media, and never so madly distorted; that in all dialects, though but half-articulately, this high Gospel begins to be preached: "Man is still Man." The genius of Mechanism, as was once before predicted, will not always sit like a choking incubus on our soul; but at

length, when by a new magic Word the old | Soldiers, fighting in a foreign land; that unspell is broken, become our slave, and as fa- derstand not the plan of the campaign, and miliar-spirit do all our bidding. "We are near awakening when we dream that we dream."

have no need to understand it; seeing well
what is at our hand to be done. Let us do it
like Soldiers, with submission, with courage,
with a heroic joy. "Whatsoever thy hand
findeth to do, do it with all thy might." Be-
hind us, behind each one of us, lie Six Thou-
sand years of human effort, human conquest:
before us is the boundless Time, with its as
yet uncreated and unconquered Continents
and Eldorados, which we, even we, have to
conquer, to create: and from the bosom of
Eternity shine for us celestial guiding stars.
"My inheritance how wide and fair!

Time is my fair seed-field, of Time I'm heir."

GOETHE'S PORTRAIT.*

[FRASER'S MAGAZINE, 1832.]

By Stieler of Munich; the copy in Fraser's Maga-Waterloos, and Borodinos, is quite gone-all zine proved a total failure and involuntary caricature, resembling, as was said at the time, a wretched oldclothesman carrying behind his back a hat which he seemed to have stolen.

in living hearts, as the life and inspiration of one counsel to give, the secret of his whole thinkers, born and still unborn. Some fifty poetic alchymy: GEDENKE ZU LEBEN. Yes, years hence, his thinking will be found trans-"think of living!" Thy life, wert thou the lated, and ground down, even to the capacity" pitifullest of all the sons of earth," is no idle of the diurnal press; acts of parliament will dream, but a solemn reality. It is thy own; it be passed in virtue of him:-this man, if we is all thou hast to front eternity with. Work, well consider of it, is appointed to be ruler of then, even as he has done, and does—“LIKE A the world. STAR UNHASTING, YET UNRESTING."-Sic va

Reader to thee thyself, even now, he has leas.

BIOGRAPHY.*

[FRAZER'S MAGAZINE, 1832.]

scientific and poetic; or, if you will, both natural and magical;-from which one would so gladly draw aside the gauze veil; and, peering therein, discern the image of his own natural face, and the supernatural secrets that prophetically lie under the same!

MAN'S sociality of nature evinces itself, in | his own. Of these millions of living men each spite of all that can be said, with abundant individual is a mirror to us: a mirror both evidence by this one fact, were there no other: the unspeakable delight he takes in Biography. It is written, "The proper study of mankind is man;" to which study, let us candidly admit, he, by true or by false methods, applies himself, nothing loath. "Man is perennially interesting to man; nay, if we look strictly to it, Observe, accordingly, to what extent, in the there is nothing else interesting." How inex- actual course of things, this business of Biopressibly comfortable to know our fellow-graphy is practised and relished. Define to creature; to see into him, understand his goings forth, decipher the whole heart of his mystery: nay, not only to see into him, but even to see out of him, to view the world altogether as he views it; so that we can theoretically construe him, and could almost practically personate him; and do now thoroughly discern both what manner of man he is, and what manner of thing he has got to work on and live on!

A scientific interest and a poetic one alike inspire us in this matter. A scientific: because every mortal has a Problem of Existence set before him, which, were it only, what for the most it is, the Problem of keeping soul and body together, must be to a certain extent original, unlike every other; and yet, at the same time, so like every other; like our own, therefore; instructive, moreover, since we also are indentured to live. A poetic interest still more for precisely this same struggle of human Free-will against material Necessity, which every man's Life, by the mere circumstance that the man continues alive, will more or less victoriously exhibit,-is that which above all else, or rather inclusive of all else, calls the Sympathy of mortal hearts into action; and whether as acted, or as represented and written of, not only is Poetry, but is the sole Poetry possible. Borne onwards by which two all-embracing interests, may the earnest Lover of Biography expand himself on all sides, and indefinitely enrich himself. Looking with the eyes of every new neighbour, he can discern a new world different for each: feeling with the heart of every neighbour, he lives with every neighbour's life, even as with

The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. including a Tour to the Hebrides: By James Boswell, Esq. A new Edition, with numerous Additions and Notes. By John Wilson Croker, LL.D., F. R. S. 5 vols. London, 1831.

thyself, judicious Reader, the real significance of these phenomena, named Gossip, Egotism, Personal Narrative, (miraculous or not,) Scandal, Raillery, Slander, and such like; the sumtotal of which (with some fractional addition of a better ingredient, generally too small to be noticeable) constitutes that other grand phenomenon still called "Conversation." Do they not mean wholly: Biography and Autobiography? Not only in the common Speech of men; but in all Art, too, which is or should be the concentrated and conserved essence of what men can speak and show, Biography is almost the one thing needful.

Even in the highest works of Art our interest, as the critics complain, is too apt to be strongly or even mainly of a Biographic sort. In the Art, we can nowise forget the Artist: while looking on the Transfiguration, while studying the Iliad, we ever strive to figure to ourselves what spirit dwelt in Raphael; what a head was that of Homer, wherein, woven of Elysian light and Tartarian gloom, that old world fashioned itself together, of which these written Greek characters are but a feeble though perennial copy. The Painter and the Singer are present to us; we partially and for the time become the very Painter and the vcry Singer, while we enjoy the Picture and the Song. Perhaps, too, let the critic say what he will, this is the highest enjoyment, the clearest recognition, we can have of these. Art indeed is Art; yet Man also is Man. Had the Trans figuration been painted without human hand, had it grown merely on the canvas, say by atmospheric influences, as lichen-pictures do on rocks, it were a grand Picture doubtless; yet nothing like so grand as the Picture, which, on opening our eyes, we everywhere in Heaven and in Earth see painted; and every