goners and pedlars and potters-when the aristocracy of almost all literature ancient and modern was to give way to a vulgar democracy-how could it have been otherwise than that some mad and unmannered excesses should have been committed, and not a few sublime capers most ludicrously performed by men in the general most dignified and most respectable? The hero of the drawing-room, with all his point and polish and parade of fine feeling, was now deserted for a common boor; but the boor, with all his bluntness and honesty and simpleheartedness, was still a boor. Even with the pencil of a Teniers, or an Ostade, with all their humour and keen eye for character-what else could you have made of him? But when, with all the gravity of a Greek philosopher, and all the deep devotion of an Indian Yogee, you fall down in worship before the meaningless smirk of an unmeaning milk-maid, risum teneatis amici?

Was a certain clever critic in this case altogether to be blamed, who was wont to complain in your compositions of "an extreme simplicity and lowliness of tone which wavers so prettily between silliness and pathos." The clever critic was not altogether wrong; he only mistook (what an acute lawyer should not have done) the accessory for the principal; an adventitious yellowness in a few stray leaves for an inherent sickliness of the whole plant. Multiply every fault by + 10, and every beauty by-10, and, mutatis mutandis, the remarks which the Edinburgh reviewer made upon William Wordsworth, not altogether with injustice, apply to Justinus Kerner with the most perfect justice. Had Germany had a Jeffray, many of those consumptive mushrooms called "Naturdichter," some of whom we are this day reviewing, might never have had an existence.

Thus much for the re-action of the natural against the refined, and its contemporaneous working on the national poetry both of England and Germany. Let us now inquire into the operation of the French revolution, and the re-action which arose out of it. Before the violent political outbreaking of that mighty mindmovement, there had been in Germany several poetical manifestations of the same spirit; the "Stürmer und Dränger" (stormers and throngers) had had their day. These men were Titans; sons of earth, they aspired to climb heavenward and take the citadel of the gods by storm. But Jove sat quietly on his empyrean throne, and did not even deign to answer their vain railings with thunder. Schubart, Lentz, and, in his younger days, Schiller, belonged to this school. These men, however, were but individuals; wandering stars that men gazed at and passed on; signs of the times, fearful and foreboding to those who could read them, but such were few. Neither had these men any immediate and direct con

nection with the romantic school. Before the leaders of that school stood prominently forward to direct the public mind, the first fearful shock of the French revolution had already passed, and with it the first mad intoxication that had seized so many poetic brains in Germany as well as England; a violent collision had taken place between France and Germany; and things had been enacted in Frankfurt by the disciples of French liberty, calculated for any thing rather than to gather the young poets of Germany under the banner of the tri-coloured republic.

We shall not therefore be surprised to find that, as in England, the leaders of the Lake school, however they might begin, all ended in the quiet repose of absolutism, so in Germany, (where, from the vicinity of France, the re-action was naturally much stronger,) the preachers of poetical romance were at the same time zealous apostles of political absolutism. Not that they all began with literary Toryism any more than Coleridge or Southey with us. Some of them (Görres, for instance) were one day burning republicans; but the manhood of most, and the old age of all, was made up of most steady and consistent conservatism.* We say consistent, because, unlike the Protestant conservatives of the present day and of our own country, the Germans of that time made an unqualified protest against the whole system of modern movement from Martin Luther to this present hour, and while they looked on the Emperor as by the grace of the Pope the only legitimate head of the state, so they also acknowledged the Pope as by the grace of God the only legitimate head of the church. A mind like that of Frederick Schlegel was not made to trifle with principles; and half measures, whether in poetry, in philosophy, or in politics, could not satisfy him. What an earnest, restless, wrestling, truth-seeking soul was his! How many mutations of thought (an epitome of philosophical and religious history) did his single mind work itself through! And yet what did he arrive at, what conclusion did he reach, with all his striving and with all his restlessness? Was his spiritual metamorphosis that from grub to grub, or did he ever emerge as the perfect butterfly? These are questions which cannot be answered, for, as we have often been told, he ended his life and his writings with a " but ;" and, as to the Catholicism in which he at last found shelter, or rather fortified himself with most gigantic learning against the blasts of change, what was it—as some one beautifully said-but a throwing himself in despair upon the milkless breasts of his dead mother? The truth of the matter is, that the mind of Frederick

*To this rule, however, Uhland himself forms an honourable exception. The patriotic impulse of 1813 has, as we shall presently see, ripened in him to a healthy practical activity in the cause of liberty.

Schlegel was too deeply shaken by the spiritual agitation of the age in which he lived ever to recover its proper poise and balance. It was not given to every one to come out of that ordeal unscathed. The man who seriously proposed to bring back the palmy days of Gregory, Innocent, and Boniface, with all their orthodox appendages of priestly despotism and rustic serfage, must have been, to all practical purposes, neither more nor less than mad. But Frederick Schlegel was certainly one of the most honest, earnest, zealous, laborious apostles of the Romantic school, and therefore he must be mentioned here with due honour. He laid the foundation of that temple; his hands hewed many gigantic blocks from the living rock with which the mystic edifice was afterwards closely compacted. Round the fairy region of romance he erected an iron wall, and drew a double circumvallation of philosophic inquiry and historic research. "Molliter ossa quiescant!" As to his brother, August Wilhelm, we agree with Heine, that it does not appear certain whether he ever was serious in his advocacy of romance; and as to what he now is, according to all the testimonies that have recently reached us, we only know that he is a most inimitable coxcomb.

Frederick Schlegel was, as we have said, that one of the Romantic school, whose mind seems to have been most deeply shaken by the spiritual fermentation of the age, and in whom the consequent re-action was most strongly and most consistently developed. A spirit of the same brotherhood, not less earnest or less consistent, but more solemn, more self-sustained, more quietly stable, was Novalis. This man was the holy temple of middleage mysticism, rising up strangely amid the bustle and strife of this modern time. We have been much struck with a peculiar feature in this man's mind, and mention it here particularly with reference to some of the Swabian poets; he seems absolutely in love with death. This trick Uhland, as we shall see below, seems to have borrowed from him; somewhat affectedly, however, we must say, for Uhland can be cheerful enough except when he enters a nunnery; he can smile without always looking like an amiable young lady in a consumption; and he sometimes frisks like a lamb. Kerner again has taken up the whole black mantle of Novalis, and enveiled himself with it; but he is a most unworthy wearer. That strange peculiarity of feeling which manifested itself in the one as a most sublime disease, (for there may be sublimity even in disease,) shows itself here as a most silly sickliness. The seer-like eye which looked forth from the solemn chambers of thought, while the rapt tongue sang "Hymns to the Night," is no longer visible. A sorrowful youth (consumptive or perhaps only dyspeptic) walks forth into the gloomy groves to

hold converse with a nightingale, whom he vainly imagines to be as sorrowful as himself, and, having nothing better to do, he pens most tearful verses in which the world is told that every deal board is a coffin, and every saw-pit a grave. Such a youth is Doctor Justinus Kerner.

It is not our intention, in these remarks, to characterize the individual poets of the Romantic school further than such characteristics bear upon the general theme, and tend to give us some idea of what sort of atmosphere we are breathing. Had our space permitted, we should nevertheless have stopt short to look upon Tieck, the only poet of European reputation that the school of German romance has produced. He is the very fairy hall of the romantic, where all that it possesses of beautiful and chivalrous, of tender and sportive, resides, with just enough of the dreadful behind to make an effective back-ground-a winter without, which makes the fire seem to blaze more merrily within. From this man Ludwig Uhland borrowed his smile; and with that, doubtless, the best part of romance.

But there is another element besides the romantic, which gives a peculiar tone to the poetry of the Swabian school,—the element of the patriotic and the political; and on this, also, we must be allowed to cast a hasty glance, before we can put our readers upon the proper position, from which this poetry, and indeed a great part of the living poetry of Germany, is to be viewed. The reader is aware, that the first blast of patriotism that wakened the sleeping soul of German poetry came from Klopstock; but this was merely the voice of one man, and of a solemn ode-builder, who, even had he not been so serious as we believe he was, could hardly have done without the theme. The patriotic spirit of the German people did not, however, awake till after the electric shock of the battle of Jena. The palsied old dotard of aristocratic soldiership fell with that stroke; the monopoly of stars and crosses that decked his vain breast was found to be of no avail against the bullets of Napoleon; an army of young hardy warriors was raised from the people, and with this army arose a new national enthusiasm, and a new national poetry.

The heart of every man that feels and acts with his kind must beat in proud sympathy with the great movement of the German people in 1813, commonly called the Liberation war. That was a movement of deep import, of pregnant consequence, to the political condition of all the Teutonic tribes; but it was a movement, perhaps, of yet deeper import, of more pregnant consequence, to the poetry of Germany. That uprising, indeed, was a living poem, which did more for the patriotism of the Germans

than the odes of a thousand Klopstocks, or the middle age dreaming of a thousand Schlegels could have effected. The venerable old "Master of the Beautiful" might, perhaps, not altogether understand it; a man may discourse most wisely on the metamorphosis of a primrose leaf, on the playful changes of light on a piece of Labrador spar, on the neat chiseling of an old Greek marble, and yet be deaf to the voice of the morally sublime. But there were many, very many (all the young vigorous spirits of the time), who did understand it; and amongst these was Ludwig Uhland.

This man felt, and practically acknowledged, the great truth, that mere versifying can hardly ever be made a separate occupation, without to a certain extent weakening and even frivolizing the character; and that there are certain great occasions in life when a poet can never hope to remain a mere poet, without giving up all claim to the character of a man; as it is told of a certain English lawyer, who, out of an exceeding love of justice, forbade a harmless wanderer to trespass upon his green fields, whose simple errand there was to visit his father's grave. The poet, as well as the lawyer, must be given up at times; for they exist for the sake of the man, not the man for the sake of them. Ludwig Uhland knew also very well-what the great Göthe did not know that the attempt to build up a temple of art altogether insulated from the spirit of the age, altogether apart from religion and politics-from church and state, is vanity. He knew well that the artificial atmosphere of such a building could never be so strong, so bracing, so salubrious, as the natural air which common mortals breathe. He knew more than this: he knew that, do what we may, we can never remove ourselves altogether from the influence of those political institutions under which we grow up. Church and state are a common atmosphere in which all breathe, partly including, and partly intermingling with the particular atmosphere which poets, philosophers, and men of original minds never fail to create for themselves. Such were the views that possessed the breast of our young romancer,—such views made him a patriot in the war of 1813; and, since the constitutional changes effected by the treaty of Vienna, have made him a politician. He has been an active and useful member of the house of representatives in Wurtemberg, and has gained honourable civic laurels in co-operation with a man whose good sound stamina we have had frequent occasion to laud-Wolfgang Menzel. Possibly this political activity may have had an unfavourable influence upon his poetical powers; for we do not find that he has, of late years, been so fruitful as his early promise gave reason to expect. If so, Göthe was not