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HERMANN AND DOROTHEA.

the other jug and dips it also, and they see the image of themselves mirrored in the wavering blue of the reflected heavens, and they nod and greet each other in the friendly mirror. "Let me drink," says the joyous youth. And she holds the jug for him. Then they rest leaning upon the jugs in sweet confidence.

She then asks him what has brought him here. He looks into her eyes and feels happy, but dares not trust himself with the avowal. He endeavours to make her understand it in an indirect recital of the need there is at home for a young and active woman to look after the house and his parents. She thinks he means to ask her to come as servant in his house, and, being alone in the world, gladly consents. When he perceives her mistake he is afraid to undeceive her, and thinks it better to take her home and gain her affection there. "But let us go," she exclaims, "girls are always blamed who stay long at the fountain in gossip." They stand up, and once more look back into the well to see their images meeting in its water, and "sweet desires possess them."

He accompanies her to the village, and witnesses, in the affection all bear to Dorothea, the best sign that his heart has judged aright. She takes leave of them all, and sets forth with Hermann, followed by the blessings and handkerchief-wavings of the emigrants. In silence they walk towards the setting sun, which tinges the storm-clouds threatening in the distance. On the way she asks him to describe the characters of those she is going to serve. He sketches father and mother. "And how am I to treat you, you the only son to my future master?" she asks. By this time they have reached the pear-tree, and the moon is shining overhead. He takes her hand, answering, "Ask your heart, and follow all it tells you." But he can go no further in his declaration, fearing to draw upon himself a refusal. In silence they sit awhile and look upon the moon. She sees a window-it is Hermann's, who hopes it will soon be hers. They rise to continue their course, her foot slips, she falls into his arms; breast against breast, cheek against cheek, they remain a moment, he not daring to press her to him, merely supporting her. In a few minutes more they enter the house.

The charm of these cantos, as indeed of the whole poem, cannot of course be divined from the analysis I am making; the perfume of a violet is not to be found in the description of the violet. But with all drawbacks, the analysis enables a reader of imagination to

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form a better conception of the poem than he would form from an aesthetical discussion such as philosophical criticism indulges in. With this caveat let our analysis proceed. The mother is uneasy at this long absence of Hermann; comes in and out, noting the appearances of the storm, and is rather sharp in her blame of the two friends for leaving him without securing the maiden. The apothecary narrates how he was taught patience in youth; and, the door opening, presents the young couple to their glad eyes. Hermann introduces her, but tells the pastor aside that as yet there has been no talk of marriage; she only sup poses her place to be that of servant. The host, wishing to be gallant, goes at once to the point, treats her as his daughter, and compli ments her on her taste in having chosen his She blushes, is pained, and replics with some reproach that for such a greeting she was unprepared. With tears in her eyes she paints her forlorn condition, and the secret escapes her, that, touched by Hermann's generosity and noble bearing, she really has begun to feel the love for him they twit her with; but having made that confession, of course she can no longer stay; and she is departing with grief in her heart when the mistake is cleared up; she is accepted, dowerless, by them all, and Hermann, in pressing her to his heart, feels prepared for the noble struggle of life.

son.

Such is the story of Hermann und Dorothea, which is written in Homeric hexameters, with Homeric simplicity. In the ordinary course of things, I should be called upon to give some verdict on the much-vexed question as to whether, properly speaking, this poem is an epic or an idyll, or, by way of compromise, an idyllic epic. The critics are copious in distinctions and classifications. They tell us in what consists the epos proper, which they distinguish from the romantic epos, and from the bourgeois epos; and then these heavy batteries are brought to bear on Hermann und Dorothea. Well! if these discussions gratify the mind, and further any of the purposes of literature, let those whose bent lies that way occupy themselves therewith. To me it seems idle to trouble oneself whether Hermann und Dorothea is or is not an epic, or what kind of epic it should be called. It is a poem. One cannot say more for it. If it be unlike all other poems, there is no harm in that; if it resemble some other poems, the resemblance does not enhance its charm. Let us accept it for what it is, a poem full of life, character, and beauty; simple in its materials, astonish

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"NIGHT TEACHETH KNOWLEDGE.”

ingly simple in its handling; written in obvious imitation of Homer, and yet preserving throughout the most modern colour and sentiment. Of all idylls, it is the most truly idyllic. Of all poems describing country life and country people, it is the most truthful; and on comparing it with Theocritus or Virgil, with Guarini or Tasso, with Florian or Delille, with Gesner or Thomson, the critic will note with interest its absence of poetic ornamentation, its freedom from all "idealization." Its peasants are not such as have been fashioned in Dresden china, or have solicited the palette of Lancret and Watteau; but are as true as poetry can represent them. The characters are wonderfully drawn, with a few decisive unobtrusive touches. Shakspeare himself is not more dramatic in the presentation of character. The host, his wife, the pastor, the old cautious apothecary, stand before us in all their humours. Hermann, the stalwart peasant, frank, simple, and shy, and Dorothea, the healthy, affectionate, robust, simple peasant girl, are ideal characters in the best sense, viz. in the purity of nature. Those "ideal peasants" with Grecian features and irreproachable linen, so loved of bad painters and poor poets, were not at all the figures Goethe cared to draw; he had faith in nature, which would not allow him to idealize.

Very noteworthy is it that he, like Walter Scott, could find a real pleasure in talking with the common people, such as astonished his daughter-in-law (from whom, among others, I learned the fact), who could not comprehend what pleasure this great intellect found in conversation with an old woman baking her bread, or an old carpenter planing a fir-plank. He would talk with his coachman, pointing out to him the peculiarities of the scenery, and delighting in his remarks. Stately and silent as he often was to travelling bores, and to literary men with no ideas beyond the circle of books, he was loquacious and interested whenever one of the people came in his way; and the secret of this was his abiding interest in every individuality. A carpenter, who was a carpenter, interested him; but the carpenter in Sunday clothes, aping the bourgeois, would have found him as silent and stately as every other pretender found him. What Scott gathered from his intercourse with the people, everyone knows who has noticed the rich soil of humour on which Scott's antiquarian fancies are planted; what Goethe gathered from the same source may be read in most of his works, especially in Hermann und Dorothea, Faust, and Wilhelm Meister.

"NIGHT TEACHETH KNOWLEDGE"

When I survay the bright
Coelestiall spheare:

So rich with jewels hung, that night
Doth like an Ethiop bride appeare:

My soule her wings doth spread, And heaven-ward flies, The Almighty's mysteries to read In the large volumes of the skies.

For the bright firmament Shootes forth no flame So silent, but is eloquent In speaking the Creator's name.

No unregarded star

Contracts its light

Into so small a character,
Removed far from our humane sight;

But if we stedfast looke

We shall discerne

In it, as in some holy booke,

How man may heavenly knowledge learne.

It tells the conqueror,

That farre-stretcht powre, Which his proud dangers traffique for, Is but the triumph of an houre.

That from the farthest North,
Some nation may,

Yet undiscovered, issue forth,
And ore his new got conquest sway.

Some nation yet shut in

With hils of ice

May be let out to scourge his sinne, Till they shall equall him in vice.

And then they likewise shall
Their ruine have;

For as your selves your empires fall,
And every kingdome hath a grave.

Thus those cœlestiall fires, Though seeming mute, The fallacie of our desires And all the pride of life confute.

For they have watcht since first
The world had birth:
And found sinne in it selfe accurst,
And nothing permanent on earth.

WILLIAM HABINGTON (1685)

GUESSES AT TRUTH.

GUESSES AT TRUTH.

BY TWO BROTHERS.

[Augustus William Hare, born in Rome, 17th November, 1792; died there, 18th February, 1834. Edu ated at Oxford; appointed in 1829 to the living of Alton Barnes, Wiltshire.—Sermons to a Country Congre

gation.

Julius Charles Hare, born near Vicenza, 13th September, 1795; died at Hurstmonceux, Sussex, 23d January, 1855. Educated at Cambridge, and became rector of Hurstmonceux and archdeacon of Lewes. He trans

lated, in conjunction with Thirlwall, Niebuhr's History of Rome; he contributed to the principal reviews, and edited the Essays and Tales of John Sterling, who was his curate for a short time. His most successful works were his sermons and charges, and the Guesses at Truth,

written in conjunction with his brother Angustus. This book maintains extensive popularity: the "Guesses"

of the archdeacon are signed U. (Macmillan & Co., publishers.)]

Were we merely the creatures of outward impulses, what would faces of joy be but so many glaciers, on which the seeming smile of happiness at sunrise is only a flinging back of the rays they appear to be greeting, from frozen and impassive heads?

It is with flowers, as with moral qualities: the bright are sometimes poisonous; but, I believe, never the sweet.

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The apparent and the real progress of human affairs are both well illustrated in a waterfall; where the same noisy, bubbling eddies continue for months and years, though the water which froths in them changes every moment. But as every drop in its passage tends to loosen and detach some particle of the channel, the stream is working a change all the time in the appearance of the fall, by altering its bed, and so subjecting the river during its descent to a new set of percussions and reverberations.

And what, when at last effected, is the consequence of this change? The foam breaks the bubbling, and the eddies are just as violent into shapes somewhat different: but the noise,

as before.

Leaves are light, and useless, and idle, and wavering, and changeable: they even dance: yet God has made them part of the oak. In so doing he has given us a lesson not to deny the stout-heartedness within, because we see the lightsomeness without.

How disproportionate are men's projects and means! To raise a single church to a single apostle, the monuments of antiquity were ransacked, and forgiveness of sins was doled out at a price. Yet its principal gate has been left unfinished; and its holy of holies is encrusted with stucco.

Handsomeness is the more animal excellence, beauty the more imaginative. A handsome Madonna I cannot conceive, and never saw a handsome Venus: but I have seen many a handsome country girl, and a few very handsome ladies.

Picturesqueness is that quality in objects which fits them for making a good picture; and it refers to the appearances of things in form and colour, more than to their accidental associations. Rembrandt would have been right in painting turbans and Spanish cloaks, though the Cid had been a scrivener, Cortez had sold sugar, and Mahomet had been notorious for setting up a drug-shop instead doing right, but for the frequent occurrence

of a religion.

It is a proof of our natural bias to evil, that gain is slower and harder than loss, in all things good: but, in all things bad, getting is quicker and casier than getting rid of.

It is with great men as with high mountains. They oppress us with awe when we stand under them: they disappoint our insatiable imaginations when we are nigh, but not quite close to them: and then, the further we recede from them, the more astonishing they appear; until their bases being concealed by intervening objects, they at one moment seem miraculously lifted above the earth, and the next strike our fancies as let down from heaven.

There would not be half the difficulty in

of cases where the lesser virtues are on the side of wrong.

Curiosity is little more than another name for hope.

Since the generality of persons act from impulse, much more than from principle, men are neither so good nor so bad as we are apt to think them.

You want to double your riches, and without gambling or stock-jobbing. Share it. Whether it be material or intellectual, its rapid increase will amaze you. What would the sun have been, had he folded himself up in darkness? Surely he would have gone out. So would Socrates.

This road to wealth seems to have been dis

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covered some three thousand years ago. At

BY ALLAN CUNNINGHAM.

A wet sheet and a flowing sea,

least it was known to Hesiod, and has been A WET SHEET AND A FLOWING SEA. recommended by him in the one precious line he has left us. But even he complains of the fools, who did not know that half is more than the whole. And ever since, though mankind have always been in full chase after riches, though they have not feared to follow Columbus and Gama in chase of it, though they have waded through blood, and crept through falsehood, and trampled on their own hearts, and been ready to ride on a broomstick, in chase of it, very few have ever taken this road, albeit the easiest, the shortest, and the surest. U.

One of the first things a soldier has to do, is to harden himself against heat and cold. He must inure himself to bear sudden and violent changes. In like manner they who enter into public life should begin by dulling their sensitiveness to praise and blame. He who cannot turn his back on the one, and face the other, will probably be beguiled by his favourite into letting his enemy come behind him, and wound him when off his guard. Let him keep a firm footing, and beware of being lifted up, remembering that this is the commonest trick by which wrestlers throw their antagonists. U.

Gratification is distinct from happiness in the common apprehension of mankind; and so is selfishness from wisdom. But passion in its blindness disregards, or rather speaks as if it disregarded, the first distinction; and sophists, taking advantage of this, confound the last. Their confusion, however, is worse confounded. For it is not every gratification that is selfish, in the ordinary acceptation of the term, which implies blame and sin; but such only as is undue or inordinate, whether in kind or degree. Never was a man called selfish for quenching his thirst with water, where water was not scarce; many a man has been justly, for drinking champagne. The argument then, if unravelled into a syllogism, would hang together thus:

Some gratifications are selfish:

No gratification is happiness:
therefore,

All happiness is selfish.

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A wind that follows fast
And fills the white and rustling sail,
And bends the gallant mast!
And bends the gallant mast, my boys,
While, like the eagle free,
Away the good ship flies, and leaves
Old England on the lee.

O for a soft and gentle wind!
I heard a fair oue cry;

But give to me the swelling breeze,
And white waves heaving high:
The white waves heaving high, my lads,
The good ship tight and free;
The world of waters is our home,
And merry men are we.

There's tempest in yon horned moon,
And lightning in yon cloud;
And hark the music, mariners!

The wind is wakening loud.
The wind is wakening loud, my boys,
The lightning flashes free-
The hollow oak our palace is,
Our heritage the sea.

A PRAYER.

O beauteous God! uncircumscribed treasure
Of an eternal pleasure!

Thy throne is seated far

Above the highest star;

Where thou preparest a glorious place
Within the brightness of thy face,

For every spirit

To inherit,

That builds his hopes upon thy merit;
And loves thee with an holy charity.
What ravish'd heart, seraphic tongues, or eyes
Clear as the morning's rise,

Can speak, or think, or see
That bright eternity,

Where the great King's transparent throne

Is of an entire jasper-stone.

When thou dost bind thy jewels up, that day
Remember us, we pray;

That where the beryl lies,

And the crystal 'bove the skies,
There thou may'st appoint us place,
Within the brightness of thy face;

And our soul

In the scroul

Of life and blissfulness enroul,
That we may praise thee to eternity.
JEREMY TAYLOR.

GIL BLAS AND THE ROBBERS.

GIL BLAS AND THE ROBBERS.

[Alain Rene Le Sage, born near Vannes, Brittany, 1668; died at Boulogne, 1746-7. He wrote a number

of comedies and farces, chiefly adaptations from the Spanish; he earned an undying reputation by two works-Le Diable Boiteux ("The Devil on Two Sticks"), and Gil Blas of Santillane. They were translated into English by Smollet, and it is from his version that the following adventure is quoted. Gil Blas, on his way to Salamanca in search of fortune, was alarmed at an inn by a rascally carrier, who declares he has been robbed and that he will have everybody arrested. Gil Blas and several others took to flight in different directions.]

I arrived at last at the border of a wood, and was just going into it when all of a sudden two men on horseback appeared before me and called, "Who goes there?" As my surprise hindered me from making immediate answer, they advanced; and each clapping a pistol to my throat, commanded me to tell who I was, whence I came, my business in the forest, and, above all things, to hide nothing from them. To these interrogations, the manner of which seemed to me equal to the rack with which the carrier had threatened us, I replied, that I was a lad of Oviedo, going to Salamanca; recounted the alarm we had undergone, and confessed that the fear of being put to the torture had induced me to run away. They burst out into a loud laugh at this discovery, which manifested the simplicity of my heart, and one of them said, "Take courage, friend; come along with us, and fear nothing; we will put thee in a place of safety." So saying he made me get up behind him, and then we retreated into the wood.

Though I did not know what to make of this rencontre, I did not presage anything bad from it; "for," said I to myself, "if these people were thieves, they would have robbed, and perhaps murdered me at once; they must certainly be honest gentlemen, who live hard by, and who, secing me in a panic, have pity on my condition, and carry me home with them out of charity."

But I did not long remain in suspense; for, after several windings and turnings, which we performed in great silence, we came to the foot of a hill, where we alighted, and one of the horsemen said to me

"This is our dwelling-place."

I looked around, but could perceive neither house, hut, nor the least appearance of any habitation; nevertheless, these two men lifted up a huge wooden trap-door, covered with earth and brambles, which concealed the en

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trance of a long shelving passage under ground, into which the horses went of themselves, like beasts that were used to it; while the cavaliers, taking the same path, made me follow them; then lowering the cover, with cords fastened to the inside for that purpose, behold the worthy kinsman of my uncle Perez caught like a mouse in a trap!

I now discovered my situation, and any one may easily believe that this discovery effectually dispelled my former fear: a terror more mighty and better founded took possession of my soul! I laid my account with losing my life as well as my ducats; and looking upon myself as a victim led to the altar, walked (more dead than alive) between my two conductors, who, feeling me tremble, exhorted me in vain to fear nothing. When we had gone about two hundred paces, turning and descending all the way, we entered into a stable, lighted by two great iron lamps hanging from the arch above. Here I saw plenty of straw, and a good many casks full of provender: there was room enough for twenty horses, but at that time there were only the two that we brought along with us, which an old negro, who seemed vigorous for his years, was tying to a rack. We went out of the stable, and by the dismal glimmer of some lamps, that seemed to enlighten the place only to show the horrors of it, came to a kitchen, where an old cookmaid was busy in broiling steaks and providing for supper. The kitchen was adorned with all necessary utensils; and hard by there was a larder stored with all sorts of provisions. The cook (for I must draw her picture) was a person somewhat turned of sixty: in her youth the hair of her head had been red as a carrot, for time had not as yet so much bleached it, but that one might still perceive some shades of its primitive colour; she had an olive complexion, a chin pointed and prominent, with lips fallen in, a huge aquiline nose that hung over her mouth, and eyes that flamed in purple.

"Well, Dame Leonarda," said one of the gentlemen, presenting me to this fair angel of darkness, "here's a young man we have brought for you." Then turning to me, and observing me pale and dismayed-"Friend," said he, "banish thy fear, we will do thee no harm. Having occasion for a servant to assist our cook-maid, we met with thee, and happy it is for thee we did thou shalt here supply the place of a young fellow who let himself die about fifteen days ago; he was a lad of a very delicate complexion, but thou seemest to be more robust, and wilt not die so soon; indeed, thou wilt never see the light of the sun again;

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