At the head of these aspirations stands M. Charles de Rémusat's "La Politique Libérale," M. Duvergier de Hauranne's "Histoire du Gouvernement Parlementaire," M. Jules de Lasteyrie's "Histoire de la Liberté Politique en France," and M. Ferrari's "Histoire de la Raison d'Etat." Even history itself, as treated by Thiers in his seventeenth volume, by M. Guizot in his third, by Messrs. Iranyi and Chassin in their "Histoire de la Révolution de Hongrie," and by M. Louis Blanc in his "Histoire de la Révolution, a work of infinite study and most conscientious narrative, rushes almost involuntarily into the same forbidden track. This unanimous tendency of the whole serious literature of an epoch may have had something to do with the movement recently made by the imperial government in a new direction.

HOLGER DANSKE AND STÆRK DIDERIK.*

TRANSLATED FROM THE DANISH.

BY MRS. BUSHBY.

STÆRK DIDERIK dwells outside of Bern,
With eighteen brothers bold;

And each of these has twelve stout sons,
Whom men as valiant hold.

There is strife to the north in Jutland.

Stærk Diderik has of sisters plenty,
Fifteen they are in all,

And each twelve goodly sons can show,
To the youngest thirteen fall.

There is strife to the north in Jutland.

And Diderik he was proud in sooth
Such heroes to command;
Over the highest beech-tree tops
They looked, that giant band.

There is strife to the north in Jutland.

"In battle with us, through many a year,
Have steel-clad warriors died;

And now we hear on Jutland's plains
Holger Danske has us defied."

There is strife to the north in Jutland.

Of his haughty bearing we have heard,
And all that he will dare.

He crowns himself with bright red gold,

But nought to us will spare."

There is strife to the north in Jutland.

"Holger the Dane, and Diderik the Strong." From a volume of ancient Scandinavian ballads, entitled, "Danske Kæmpeviser." Collected by N. F. S. Grundtvig. Copenhagen.

"Holger Danske" is a very prominent character in the traditions and old legends of Denmark; and "Dietrich von Bern"-the name in song of a prince and warrior-is celebrated in many old German ballads, a collection of which was first made by Charlemagne.-TRANS.

And Sverting took a mighty spear
And brandished it full high-
"A hundred of King Holger's men
I deem not worth a fly.'

There is strife to the north in Jutland.
"Nay, swarthy Sverting, surely thou
Doest err, and rate them wrong!
I tell thee that King Holger's men
Are active, brave, and strong."
There is strife to the north in Jutland.
Then answered the tall Bæmeris,

After a moment's thought

"We'll visit in Denmark King Holger's self,

At home he shall be sought."

There is strife to the north in Jutland.

Stærk Diderik sent King Holger word
That a choice before him lay-
"Whether wilt thou do battle with us,

Or a tribute wilt thou pay?
There is strife to the north in Jutland.

King Holger a speedy answer sent,
His wrath, it was not dumb-
"Who tribute dares from Danes demand,
To seek it himself must come."

There is strife to the north in Jutland.

King Holger and Stærk Diderik
Upon the heath they met;

They fought with right good-will, as if
On war their hearts were set.
There is strife to the north in Jutland.

Of blood there ran a rapid stream
Into the deep dales near,
And they who to levy tribute came
Themselves had to pay dear.

There is strife to the north in Jutland.

And there lay horse, and there lay man,
Severed was friend from friend;
They laughed not after that hot bath,
Their fun was at an end.

There is strife to the north in Jutland.

And there was the tall Bæmeris,

His boasting he forgot.

"Not half our men are living now

Conquest for us is not."

There is strife to the north in Jutland.

Stærk Diderik's self, he took to his heels

He ran o'er hill and dale;

And Sverting, who had talked so big,

To follow did not fail.

There is strife to the north in Jutland.

Then shouted Vidrik Velandsön,
His gauntlet drawing off-

"Ye'll never boast that here ye came
At Holger Danske to scoff!"

There is strife to the north in Jutland.

Mingle-Mangle by Monkshood.

but made a mingle-mangle and a hotch-potch of it-I cannot tell what.BP. LATIMER's Sermons.

MIMETIC MUSIC.

WHEN Joseph Haydn, in his young days, was composing the music of Bernardoni's ballet, "Le Diable Boiteux," a sea storm, incidental to that piece, as Madame Dudevant tells us, cost him a world of pains, the remembrance of which would make him laugh at fourscore. Bernardoni wanted the tempest to be an out-and-outer-a regular high-flying hurricane-a witches' hurly-burly of thunder, lightning, wind, and rain-in the very best marine manner. But Joseph was no mariner, and felt as though any such marine piece was beyond him. He was at a loss how to describe in crotchets and quavers what he had never seen, and could only land-lubber-like guess about. So we read that his good friend and ally, the Porporina, pictured to honest Beppo the Adriatic in a storm, and sang the mournful plaint of the waves-those sad sea waves-not without laughing at the imitative harmonies which require to be aided by blue cloths, shaken from scene to scene by vigorous arms-a very sad sort of sea waves indeed. One night, however, the young German's perplexity was happily relieved by a colloquy on the subject with the experienced maestro, Porpora himself. That able authority assures Haydn that he might labour for a hundred years with the best instruments in the world, and the most intimate knowledge of wind and waters, without being able to translate the divine harmonies of nature. This, contends the master, is not the province of music, which is merely guilty of folly and conceit when it runs after noisy effects and endeavours to imitate the war of the elements. Its domain he affirms to be that of the emotions: its aim is to inspire them, as its origin is from their inspiration. What the young composer has to think of, then, is of a man abandoned to the fury of the waves, and a prey to the deepest terror: he is to imagine a scene at once frightful and sublime; the danger imminent; and then, placing himself in the midst of this distress, this disorder, this confusion and despair, to give expression to his anguishassured that his hearers, intelligent or not, will share it. They will imagine that they behold the sea, that they hear the groaning of the riven timbers, the shouts of the mariners, the despair of the hapless passengers. What would you say of a poet who, in order to depict a battle, should tell you in verse that the cannon uttered boom, boom, and the drums dub, dub? It would be a better imitation than any image, but it would not be poetry. Painting itself, that descriptive art par excel lence, does not consist in servile imitation. The artist would trace in vain the dull green sea, the dark and stormy skyscape, the shattered bark. If his feelings do not enable him to render the terrible and poetical whole, his picture will make as little impression as any alehouse sign." And therefore would old Porpora have young Haydn, on this tentative

* Consuelo.

occasion, seek to inspire his whole being with the idea of some great disaster; for thus, and only thus, would he make his storm-scene tell on the feelings of others. Thus, and only thus, might and must his seapiece

suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange,

instead of remaining poor and common.

Ariel's song reminds us, by the way, in connexion with the same subject, but in the case of another great German composer, that Beethoven is said to have hinted that Shakspeare's "Tempest" was in his mind when he composed his Sonata Appassionata (which has been described as shining resplendent among his other sonatas, like Sirius amongst the stars). And musical critics hold that the fancy will find much to support this derivative suggestion. The first movement, for instance, wild and gusty, has been compared to the course of a vessel over a boundless ocean, now pelted with storms, and anon scudding cheerily before the gale; while the second, "solemn and dirge-like, with its mysterious bass -in which certain singular retardations are introduced, giving an effect somewhat like a peal of bells-recals Ariel's song, 'Full fathom five thy father lies.' The depths of the ocean, with its hidden splendours, seem to be opened to us." The last movement is one prolonged storm-sug. gestive of a sea on which no ship can live-of powerless endeavour, and remorseless wreck.

Mr. Hogarth's Musical History contains an account of Haydn's early difficulty, in finding himself "at sea" (in a double sense), or in a composer's sea of troubles (in hardly a metaphorical one), which is more prosaic and less elegantly didactic than that introduced in George Sand's æsthetical romance. Haydn's own report of the matter, in after years, is that upon which our musical historian's narrative is based. Neither the librettist, Curtz by name, nor Joseph, had ever looked on the sea, so that their notions, individually and conjointly, of its appearance when tempest-tossed were necessarily somewhat vague. However, they must brew a storm between them, somehow: so Haydn sat at the harpsichord, while Curtz paced about the room, and tried to furnish the composer with ideas. "Imagine," said he, "a mountain rising, and then a valley sinking, and then another mountain and another valley ;-the mountains and valleys must follow each other every instant. Then you must have claps of thunder and flashes of lightning, and the noise of the wind; but, above all, you must represent distinctly the mountains and valleys." Haydn, meanwhile, kept trying all sorts of passages, ran up and down the scale, and exhausted his ingenuity in heaping together chromatic intervals and strange discords. Still Curtz was not satisfied. At last the musician, out of all patience, extended his hands to the two extremities of the keys, and bringing them rapidly together, exclaimed, “The deuce take the tempest, I can make nothing of it." "That is the very thing!" shouted Curtz, in rapture at this chance-medley solution of the problem. Curtz and Porpora had different ideas of high art and sound practice.

* See the Saturday Review, No. 80.

† See George Hogarth's Musical History, Biography, and Criticism, vol. i. pp. 292 sq.

That Haydn-despite the old maestro's supposed harangue on the imitative powers of music-cherished a certain weakness for mimetic effects in orchestral composition, more than one mature production of his will sufficiently prove. Madame de Staël records how her enjoyment of the performance of his "Creation," at Vienna, by a band of four hundred, was marred by some of the composer's crotchets (not technically speaking). How at the words, "Let there be light: and there was light," the instruments played at first very softly, so as scarcely to be heard, and then all of a sudden broke out into a tumultuous crash, to signify the genesis of daylight:-upon which stroke of art a certain wit, homme d'esprit, pleased madame by observing, that "à l'apparition de la lumière il fallait se boucher les oreilles."* Then again Staël the Epicene, as Byron rather ambidextrously than ambiguously styles her, noted with disapproval how the music trailed and dragged while the serpents were being created, and recovered its brilliancy and animation with the birthsong of the birds. In Haydn's "Seasons," she complains, these allusions are multiplied exceedingly; concetti she calls them, which a healthy taste would reject. Not but that certain combinations of harmony can recal some of nature's many marvels, but these analogies (she maintains) have no reference to imitation, which is never anything better than a jeu factice. The real resemblances among the fine arts one with another, and those which exist between the fine arts and nature, are dependent upon feelings of the same kind as those excited by them in our souls by a variety of means.† One cannot but agree with Lady Eastlake that Haydn's servile representations of the tiger's leaps, of the stag's branching horns, of the pattering hail-"why he gave a pert staccato triplet accompaniment to the rolling of awful thunders' is not so easily accounted for"-are so many blots on his glorious "Creation." The verdure-clad fields, the purling of the limpid brook, the mild light of the moon as she "glides through the silent night," delight us not so much from the correctness of the musical image, for the same music would express other words, as from the intrinsic sweetness of the melody, the exquisite song with which Haydn always overflows. But, as Lady Eastlake adds, his "rising sun with darting rays" is an utter failure—and is

* Compare, or contrast, with this cavil at Haydn's Fiat Lux, the following ardent tribute by the present King of Hanover:

"But, above all, how impressively, with all the powers of music, does the composer delineate the moment-And there was light-called forth by the creative words Let there be light! At these words the orchestra breaks out in a truly electrical manner, producing an entire bewilderment. The listener feels the full impression which the actual happening of this awe-inspiring miracle of the Almighty would make upon him, and that sublime achievement is thus most speakingly and convincingly brought home to the senses of the earthly man, through this picturing by tones, in the only mode in which a sensible image of it could be presented to him."-Ideen und Betrachtungen über die Eigenschaften der Musik. Hanover, 1839.

To which estimate of a musical Monarch may be here appended that of a critical Queen's Counsel:

"The burst of a fine orchestra will seldom fail to produce an electrical rush of feeling, faintly reflective of the actual occurrence of the miracle: but the sole resemblance will be found to consist in the fulness and suddenness of the shock." -Hayward's Biogr. and Crit. Essays, II. 223.

† De Stäel, Des Beaux-Arts en Allemagne.

See the eloquent essay on Music in Quarterly Review for September, 1848.