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mines in Mexico, and, second, three tables of elevations measured by the barometer, filling thirteen pages. The first table gives the elevation of about 250 places in alphabetical order; the second, those of the sections from San Blas to Tampico, which table XI. above-mentioned represents; and the third the elevations of the mountains of Zacatecas. Besides the general road-map of Mexico, M. Burkart gives a special map of the district of Zacatecas from his own trigonometrical survey, which is further illustrated by a plate, with six different sections, coloured.

ART. III.-1. Gedichte, von Ludwig Uhland. 10te Auflage. Stuttgart und Tübingen, 1836.

2. Ernst Herzog von Schwaben. Trauerspiel in fünf Aufzügen, von Ludwig Uhland. Heidelberg, 1818.

3. Ludwig der Baier. Schauspiel in fünf Aufzügen, von Ludwig Uhland. Berlin, 1819.

4. Die Dichtungen, von Justinus Kerner: neue vollständige Sammlung in einem Bande. Stuttgart und Tübingen, 1834. 5. Gedichte, von Gustav Schwab. 2 Bände. Stuttgart und Tübingen, 1828-9.

6. Die Romantische Schule, von H. Heine. Hamburg, 1836.

HENRY HEINE has written a whole book against the modern Romanticists in Germany, a work most unnecessary, as we conceive, and most superfluous. Romance, even in its most palmy state, is a harmless affair; and in this unimaginative time there is more danger to be feared from the want than from the excess of it. A man must have very little to do who girds up his loins to make a formal crusade against a thing of such ephemeral and transitory existence; it dies soon enough of itself, and when once gone, the voice of the most cunning charmer often fails to recall even the shadow of what it was. There is, indeed, no serious cause to apprehend that the fairies and gnomes, the sylphs and salamanders, the dwarfs and giants, of our poetic creed, will ever wax so rampant in our imagination as to disturb and derange the regular doings of our daily prose; the broad day-light of modern utilitarianism is far too strong for the moon-light skirmishing of the wanton Pucks and tricksy elves of the olden time. And as for that fearful development of Christian spiritualism, which, according to Heine, tyrannizes, and has, for eighteen hundred years, tyrannized over the natural rights of the flesh, we look around anxiously, and seek in vain for the traces of it. Of the pious self-tormenting rites of Hindoo Fakirs and Christian Flagellants,

VOL. XIX. NO. XXXVIII.

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we have, indeed, heard, as of things that once were, or yet are afar off beyond the ocean; but we have met with nothing of this kind particularly offensive, in the life or literature of modern Eugland, Germany, or France. The true flagellants and self-tormentors of the present day are the poets; your Byrons and your Heines, who first raise devils out of their own minds, and then, like the man with the bottle-imp in the melodrama, seek to get rid of them, by communicating their particular evil humours to the general public. But is this crusade against the spirit, this homemission of the flesh, really seriously meant? Is Hamlet's wish turned into reality, and is "this too, too solid flesh" actually in danger of melting into the mist and vapour of a dreamy contemplativeness, at the call of some British Shelley or German Novalis? Has human nature inverted its hereditary character, and is the body now in danger of being enslaved by the soul-whereas formerly the soul was in danger of being enslaved by the body? What phantoms, Jewish, Heathenish, or merely new-modish Parisian, may have imposed strange illusions upon Henry Heine's brain, we know not; but of this we are certain, that no such radical revolution has taken place in the moral world with which we are conversant; the ancient history of Adam and Eve and the serpent is enacted every day before our eyes; the Flesh still knows how to maintain his own rights: he remains a despot as he was from the beginning; he requires no apostle to preach his mission; he is prophet, priest, and king to himself. The truth is,if it must be said,-that the present age might be more fitly accused of almost any other vice than of an excess of spiritualism. The prevailing philosophy of the time is too material, too mechanical; the general tone of our mind is too practical, too prosaic. Do we then require the rude laughter of a Heine to scare away the few innocent fancies of romance, that still kindly linger around us ?

It is not our intention on the present occasion to follow the German critic through the whole range of his anti-romantic evolutions. We have only alluded to him in so far as, within his general censure of romance and romancers, is comprehended a respectable bard, on whose genius we mean to allow ourselves a few remarks-Ludwig Uhland. To this poet, as being one of the last, and not the least, worthy of the Romantic school, Heine has condescended to dedicate a whole chapter, and that written in a spirit sufficiently kindly and affectionate, for he is not naturally unkind. Reckless he certainly is, and when he throws about fire, or bespatters with mud, it is a sorry excuse to say, "Am I not in sport?" But we do not think that he is without love, however much he has allowed himself to sin against the perfect law of charity. He is honest and true at heart, though,

we fear, after all that he has suffered and seen in the wicked Parisian world, not altogether sound; he is also radically defective in one essential quality of a great mind, which Professor Wolfe calls "mental chastity," but which we should rather choose to designate by the more comprehensive term "reverence." reverence." Henry Heine has no reverence either for himself or for those of whom he writes, or for those to whom he writes,-for gods above or for devils below. But this is not the place to make a public anatomy of so strange a character. What he says more particularly of Uhland, and his brother ballad-writers, shall be mentioned below. In the mean time we shall allow ourselves a hasty glance at the rise and progress of the romantic school in Germany; for without this it were impossible to understand who or what Ludwig Uhland is, and how he came to be what he is, being not (as Heine justly remarks) the father of a new school, but the last disciple of an old-a man of two centuries-a transition formation of intellect-growing out of the Romantic Catholic middleage soil which Frederick Schlegel had so carefully watered, and spreading out his upper leaves in that very atmosphere of modern political movement, to which Henry Heine and the heroes of Young Germany" owe their birth.

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What is classical? What is romantic? Not every one will be able, on the instant, to give a satisfactory answer to these questions in the shape of a definition, but he who casts one eye in thought upon the Strasburg minster, and another upon the three temples of Pæstum, will understand the difference. Or, if he rather chooses to borrow an illustration from the world of books, he will think now on Shakspeare's Tempest, and now on Talfourd's Ion, and he will say this is classical, that is romantic. The wild, the exuberant, the unbounded in fancy, the pure, the lovely, the holy in feeling, are characteristic of the one; whatever is simple, regular, beautiful in form, or calm, subdued, and chastened in emotion, belongs to the other. To attempt to draw a regular historical boundary line between these two classes of poetry were vain. Each has its seat deeply rooted in human nature: and as you will find chaste self-contained shapes of placid beauty every where embosomed amid the dark groves and solemn temples of modern Romanticism, so on the walls of Pompeii are at this day to be seen many whimsical touches of the fanciful pencil of some Greek Ariosto. But there is one influence which has worked mightily in forming the distinguishing character of modern romance,—and on this it is especially necessary that the student of German poetry should keep an attentive eye, we mean the Christian religion, and more particularly that form of it which we are accustomed to call Roman Catholic.

It is true, indeed, that the art of the ancients was most intimately connected with, or more properly an essential part of, the national religion; but that religion has more of an historical nature, is more a religion of heroes and heroic deeds, of outward shapes and figures of divinity, than ours; and herein lies one great essential and pervading distinction between the romanticism of the moderns, and the classicism of the ancients. Christianity is a religion drawn out of the most holy depths of human feeling; Heathenism-Greek Heathenism we mean-was merely copied down from the most beautiful manifestations of human action.

Christianity occupied itself with the solution of the deepest mysteries of human thought, God, virtue, immortality; Heathenism partly worshipped, partly sported with the mere outward shows of terrestrial nature. Christianity searched and probed with reverential eye, into the wonders of soul; Heathenism revelled amid the beauties of luxuriant creation. Keeping this distinction in view, we shall have no difficulty in perceiving how something of the incomprehensible, the mysterious, the infinite, must necessarily form a distinguishing trait of every poetry that is based upon the Christian religion; and this principle at once affords us a key to understand the intellectual genesis of such minds as Frederick Schlegel, Novalis, Görres, and other prominent heads of the romantic school in Germany. The vague, the misty, the dreamy, the unintelligible, which has been so often complained of in these writers, is not altogether a fault. It is the legitimate product of that profound meditation on things infinite and eternal, on which Christianity is based; and do not even our own divines, so dexterous to measure all things with a square logical understanding, nevertheless delight to tell us, and tell us truly, that there is something mysterious, unfathomable, infinite, in the Christian religion? What is God? What is heaven? What is hell? What is immortality? Are these ideas borrowed from the outer senses which we can lay out before us in a tangible shape, as a heathen sculptor chiselled out the strength of his Hercules, the cunning of his Mercury, the beauty of his Apollo? Look we at the whole history of Christian art, and, instead of a Juno, a Venus, a Minerva, whom the disciple of the beautiful may worship while he works, we have only one goddess-and that too now rejected by nearly one-half of Christendom-Raphael's Madonna. Let us then give due weight to the spiritual, we had almost said the metaphysical, the transcendental element of Christianity, or we shall altogether fail to comprehend the spirit of German literature, the philosophy of the Romantic

school.

We English, indeed, have a natural instinct against all meta

physics-we are Lockists ready made from nature's hand, and argue against innate ideas with a zeal sufficient to make us all thorough-going disciples of Helvetius, had not the same bountiful mother that gave us English blood in our veins given us a certain English common sense along with it ;- -we are most excellent mechanics in things spiritual-we build rail-roads to heaven, and bind down the unfathomable mysteries of God by an act of parliament. But the Germans have looked deeper into this matter. True it is that too much learning hath made not a few of them mad; but, that some of them understand the philosophy of Christianity better than we do, there can be little doubt.

But we feel that by these observations we have only explained, or attempted to explain, one feature in the character of the Romanticists of modern Germany. We have shown how they are Christians, and in what manner Christianity affects their poetry and their philosophy, but we have not shown how they are Catholics. We have an honest rule in this country that, in whatsoever religion a man's parents have brought him up, therewith he shall remain content. And there is no doubt that, for all practical purposes, and more especially for attaining the high and important ends of" church and state," the rule is a very good one. But, in Germany, where so many strange things happen, they sin too against this venerable maxim. Ludwig Tieck, the great head of the Catholicizing Romantic school, is a born Protestant-a dry arid plant, sprung from the sandy Mark of Brandenburg; and he is but one of the many enthusiastic German poets and painters, who, at the end of the last and the beginning of the present century, of their free and voluntary choice, returned with most pious, child-like confidence into the warm bosom of mother church.

We do not require to search far for the cause of this phenomenon. It lies on the surface. We Protestants must confess that our religion is too much a religion of the understanding. How indeed could it be otherwise? Protestantism was a triumph of reasoning intellect over the inferior powers of feeling and fancy. But, as Martin Luther himself said, human nature is a drunken boor, who, when you set him up on one side, straightway falls down on the other. And thus our worthy Reformers-as has been often said and often lamented-while they overturned the altars of the saints, pulled down the church of God along with them;-while they forbade us to chant masses to the dead, they declared that the very presence of an organ in a church was a profanation;—while they allowed us no longer to feed our fancy and our feeling on the lovely legends of a gracious Madonna, they taught us to harass our brains in vain with tormenting questions of faith and works, of free will and fate;-while they awoke us to a sense of our true dignity

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