ten editions in the course of twenty years. But these things are done in Germany, not in Britain; and besides, we must bear in mind that Uhland, besides being a pretty poet, is a man most universally beloved and respected, both as a private individual and as a public character.* If Byron's poetry owed perhaps one half of its vogue to the circumstance that he was a lord, and (we speak it with all respect) somewhat of a wild character, shall we wonder that Ludwig Uhland's poems are more popular than they otherwise might have chanced to be, because he is a stanch patriot and a good man?

We have only further to mention that, besides lyric poems, Uhland has written two plays, the names of which will be found heading this article. With regard to them we shall say, in one word, that we agree entirely with the generally-expressed opinion, that they are complete failures. The genius of this gentle singer is very very undramatic. The pomp and spectacle of historic show have helped him on a little; coronations, conferences, and imperial knight-dubbings, are useful aids to a writer whose forte is not to give either energy to character or interest to action; but such a writer should never attempt the drama. Formal declamation is not impassioned speech; solemn show is one thing, scenic effect is another.

We shall now bring these remarks to a close, by shortly characterizing two poets who are generally classed with Uhland, and who seem to recognize him as their head, in the great work of reviving the lyric poetry of the middle ages. These two are Justinus Kerner and Gustav Schwab. The most Uhlandic of Uhland's followers is decidedly Justinus Kerner. This man has been much praised by a critic, for whose opinions we in general entertain no small respect; but in this case, we are sorry to say, that party feeling, and, what is worse, local partiality, seem to have led his strong manly judgment astray. Indeed it has always grieved us much, to think that a writer of such high powers as Wolfgang Menzel should, by standing forward continually as the champion of a party and a school, have narrowed and distorted

* We feel much pleasure in here transcribing Professor Wolfe's kind remarks on Ubland, from the Athenæum, May 30, 1835.-"I could write of him through whole pages, and yet not praise him thoroughly to my own satisfaction, for his patriotism, "his love of mankind, his noble nature, and all the beautiful qualities of his character. Never has a man been so universally beloved and revered in Germany; and I never "read or heard his name mentioned without demonstrations of respect, and declara"tions of sincerest affection." This is cheering; and we will add, that this is not the only passage of that admirable discourse on German literature, in which Professor Wolfe has shown a heart as kind as his head is clear. We must say, however, that his estimate of Uhland's literary merit goes far above any thing that an English taste will ever be willing to allow.

his views so much in some important matters of literary opinion. That he should have consistently followed up his vocation to beat down the idol of Göthelatria, before which he found his country in shameful prostration, was to be forgiven; but the fact that Göthe was an anti-romanticist, and Schiller a Swabian, should not have led him into a canonization of Tieck, much less into a foolish bepraising of such a puling Werther of romance as Justinus Kerner. But we are willing to make every allowance for the Stuttgart critic. The warfare of literature in Germany stands somewhat in the same situation as the political warfare of our own country. Impartiality is out of the question, where parties are judges in their own cause. We can see these matters much more clearly in England. We are Adam Smith's impartial spectator, and have moreover the peculiar advantage, that we do not look at any thing, (as people in Germany are wont to do,) not even at poetry, through a mist.

We have, therefore, no hesitation in saying, in accordance with the spirit of the remarks which we have had already occasion to make, that the poems of Justinus Kerner are of no value whatever to the English reader, except as a mere psychological curiosity. Kerner is merely a sort of dripping from Uhland's reservoir; a melancholy straining, where every thing bad comes out, and every thing good is left behind. Uhland, however he wants strength and nerve, has at least one indispensable qualification of an ancient minstrel—he is, in spite of his pious moonshine, habitually cheerful and blithe, a genuine disciple of the "gay saber,” a "gleeman," in the bonâ fide old Saxon meaning of the term. But Kerner is all tears; scarcely one blink of fitful joy is sent, at distant intervals, through the misty waters of that woe. He has not merely a wicked trick of painting foreign sorrows as a sort of agreeable foil to his own spiritual self-complacency (as we have seen poetesses with a step like winged Mercury, and a verse as slow as a death-march); he lives in the very atmosphere of poetic woe, and has joined himself, by anticipation, in mystic wedlock, to death and the grave. It is needless to say to a sound-hearted Englishman (however gravely a German might Kantianize or Hegelize upon the theme), that this whining and whimpering in verse is a thing in every way most unnatural and most unpoetical. The disease is not in nature, but in the sicklier vision of those spoiled children of whim that gaze upon her.

For

“If the sun breeds maggots in a dead dog,

Being a god kissing carrion,"

why should not the spirit of nature's glee, passing through the watery souls of these men, be distilled into tears by the act of

versifying, and each solid and substantial body of existence be evaporated into a cloud? But it is useless to speak of such things. We make one remark only on the wo-begone piety with which Kerner, and other such pitiful poetlings, choose to garnish out their puling sentimentalities. There are many in these times (not in Germany only), who, like our poet, cradle themselves in the consolations, but gird not themselves round with the strength, of Christianity. With them religion is a nerveless elf, misbegotten between a sigh and a dream. These men will sing with David, when he calls forth in wailing, "De profundis clamavi," but they will not act with him when he goes forth in faith to smite the giant of the Philistines. Their life is an eternal rainbow of tears; and Christianity is not the sun-but the moon, that casts a sickly rainbow of hope upon its span. They have changed the soldier of Christ into a weeping damsel; and, instead of God, they worship only the Madonna. Their soul can be compared to nothing but a spunge, that sucks in the sorrows of existence; and, when these are squeezed out again, they call it devotion.

Besides lyric poems and ballads, Kerner has written what he calls " Flittings of Travel," a sort of irregular wandering sketches in poetic prose. Menzel has praised this silly phantasmagoria very much, and he has compared the writer of them to Jean Paul! Kerner like Jean Paul! an honest likeness truly! as like as a cloud is to a whale; and there may be some people who, like Polonius, do not think there is much difference. But Wolfgang Menzel is no dotard; and we can only account for this striking aberration from his usual sound sense on the principle stated before-that he is the living head and champion of the coterie of Swabian romancers to which Kerner belongs.

For ourselves, after much reflection, we have been unable to find any classical English word by which the character of most of these strange compositions can be expressed. Twaddle is too good for them; they are sheer and absolute drivel. We do not deny that there are a few dreamy imaginings here shadowed forth; some strange voices and sounds of unearthly music are here heard; but Fancy has evidently been drinking intoxicating gas, and it is impossible to shape either man, god, devil, or beast, out of her fumy creations. The most cunning hand of the harper cannot bring forth an intelligible melody out of these lispings and gaspings of preternatural tune. But we will not waste words on such a theme. We declare, once for all, an unmitigated hostility to this truly German madness. Away with these substanceless shadows of existence! these misty, bodiless anticipations of an undefined something, and a definite nothing! these abortive împs of an unstable fancy, begotten between the wish to be every thing, and the incapacity to be any thing! Give us a solid earth

based poetical existence, that can bear to be looked upon by sunlight;-no ovap nμepopavτov-no day-walking dream-but a fleshand-blood reality of life, weighty with all the mass of earthly being, but pregnant also and buoyed with something which is nothing less than divine.

Gustav Schwab is another poet who has manufactured many ballads; and to him our principal objections are, that he has manufactured so many, and that he has manufactured them. He has, however, some virtues, and these all his own; for he is by no means a mere imitator of Uhland, as Kerner must be held to be, but has a style and fashion of his own. Swabia owes much to him, for he has hung a tale by almost every one of its old castles, and turned whole sections of its history into verse. This prosiness, this dilution, this smack of the old chronicler, is his great fault. He wants the neatness, the point, the elegant simplicity, the happy tact of Uhland. He has a most fatal facility of rhyming; and, like a good easy pedestrian, he jogs along without counting the mile-stones, happily assured that, by putting one foot regularly before the other, he must sooner or later arrive at his journey's end. The babbling brook of a summer-day does not run on with more pleasant self-complacency than the narrative verse of Gustav Schwab. But this is a vice of all your ballad-mongers. Scott himself could not escape it; Uhland alone has known to be short. Scott, however, knew how to sustain interest, and he could paint both gorgeously and truly. Not so Schwab. Many of his ballads are merely histories turned into verse; in our opinion, a mongrel species of composition that ought altogether to be discouraged. It is a something that stretches itself out more formally than a ballad, only to court curious comparison with an Epos-an easy arm-chair Iliad, that a weary old harper, half asleep, might hum over to a drowsy congregation of heavy boors and listless boys.

We must not omit to mention one great virtue of Schwab, which places him far above Kerner, and even gives him a superiority over Uhland. He does not indulge in poetic tears; he has thrown aside that aspect of sadness which so many romancers think essential to the complete minstrel; he shows his pictures by daylight, and the sun shines even upon his cloisters. He is healthy, and sound, and natural, so far as a German romancer can be so.

In conclusion, we take the liberty to offer one word of advice to our poetical friends beyond the Rhine; and, if our humble voice reach so far, we hope they will take it as kindly as it is meant. Let them study reality; let them seek for poetry neither in the world before the Flood, nor in the world before the Reformation, nor in the peaceful millennium of Roman Catholic unity

that is to succeed the present strife and war of the Protestant church, but in the living actual luxuriance of existence before their eyes. A poetical tree is not of more slim and fairy fabric than any other tree; its leaves are not made of silk; it is not tinted in gold or silver; nor vocal with Dodonean prophecy; it is merely a sound, healthy tree, more exuberant in vitality, more symmetrical in form, than its leafy brothers. A Gainsborough does not require to go beyond the precincts of his native woods to paint the trunk of some venerable oak, which every one shall instantly recognize as a piece of the most beautiful vegetable poetry. Why should the artist who paints with words have farther to travel in search of the poetical? Is there no religion except before the altar of a Madonna? -no love except in the songs of the Troubadours?

It is no doubt true, that we English are deficient in the higher or ideal department of art; but that is our affair. To the Germans we say, study reality, keep your eyes open, and be not afraid to look at things exactly as they are. This your great master Göthe was continually inculcating on you; and yet, such is the influence of national atmosphere so deeply rooted is the disease of mystification in the German mind, that even he-even the clear, calm, most anti-romantic Göthe-was continually deviating from his own rule, till at last he made it a matter of systematic boast, an exoteric doctrine which he was not afraid to promulgate to the uninitiated, that "the world of art is essentially distinct, and ought to be kept, as much as possible, apart from the living world, in which common men dwell." The secret working of this great fallacy is to be traced in many even of his earlier works; but in the Second Part of Faust it has celebrated an ovation which future ages will look upon and wonder. In this work we are puzzled throughout by an utter want of reality; the very same fault, though in a different shape, which we complain of so much in Ludwig Uhland, and in the whole school of German romancers.

We say therefore again, to these poets, study reality, study human life, study human interest. There is a bracing strength in this atmosphere, for which no artistical gymnastics, no rubbing with the sacred oil of the Muses, can compensate. We are not called upon to write poetry for angels, or even for saints, but for men. We have no vocation to vapour it with eagles and condors; terra firma is our sphere. And if Ludwig Tieck and his disciples will allow us to crown our admonition with an allegory after their own most approved fashion, we shall give them a very cheap one. Poetry is like the wonderful bean-stalk in the fairy tale, the top of which mingles with the clouds, but the root is firmly grown into the earth.