rather as being the most apposite to our immediate purpose. In this correspondence three of the most eminent of the congregation of St. Maur transmit from Italy such intelligence and remarks as appear to them best adapted to interest other three of the most eminent of their brotherhood at Paris. If the tabletalk of the refectory of St. Germain des Près was of the same general character, the monks there had no better title to the praise of an ascetic social intercourse, than the students or the barristers in the halls of Christ Church, or of Lincoln's Inn. It would be difficult to suppose an appetite for gossip more keen, or more luxuriously gratified. | bitter, and contumelious in denouncing Roman Catholic superstitions. It is a fault to be sternly rebuked. But how adequately censure these reverend members of that communion, who, without one passing sigh or indignant phrase, depict thic shameful abuses of the holiest offices of their Church, with cold sarcasms and heartless unconcern! Rome combatted her Protestant antagonists by the aid of the Jesuits in the world, and of the Benedictines in the closet. Yet to those alliances she owes much of the silent revolt against her authority which has characterized the last hundred years; and of which the progress is daily becoming more apparent. The Jesuits involved her in their own too well merited disesteem. The Benedictines have armed the philosophy both of France and Germany with some of the keenest weapons by which she has been assailed. It was an ill day for the papacy, when the con Benard, called the attention of their fellowcountrymen to the medieval history of the Church, and invited the most enlightened generations of men whom Europe had ever seen, to study and believe a mass of fables of which the most audacious Grecian mythologist would have been ashamed, and at which the the credulity of a whole college of augurs would have staggered. The writers and the receivers of these letters were all men devoted by the most sacred vows to the duties of the Christian priesthood; yet in a confidential epistolary intercourse, extending through eighteen suc-gregation of St. Maur, at the instance of cessive months, no one of them utters a sentiment, or discusses a question, from which it could be gathered that he sustained any religious office, or seriously entertained any religious belief whatever. It may be that our Protestant divines occasionally transgress the limits within which modesty should confine the disclosure, even to the most intimate friends, of the interior movements of a devout spirit. But all hail to our Doddridges and Howes, to our Venns and Newtons! whose familiar letters, if sometimes chargeable with a failure in that graceful reserve, yet always glow with a holy unction, and can at least never be charged with the frigid indifference which these learned Benedictines exhibit on the subjects to which they had all most solemnly devoted their talents and their lives. Visiting, for the first time, the places which they regard as the centre of Christian unity, as the seat of apostolic dominion, as the temple towards which all the churches of the earth should worship, as the ever-salient fountain of truth, and as the abode of him who impersonates to his brother men the Divine Redeemer of mankind, not a solitary word of awe or of tenderness falls from their pens-not a fold of those dark tunics is heaved by any throb of grateful remembrance or of exulting hope. They could not have traversed Moscow or Amsterdam with a more imperturbable phlegm; nor have sauntered along the banks of the Seine or the courts of the Louvre in a temper more perfectly debonnaire. Protestant zeal may be sometimes rude, It was but a too prolific soil on which this seed was scattered. At the moment when, in the integrity of his heart, Mabillon was propagating these legends, the walls of his monastery were often passed by a youth whose falcon eye illuminated with ceaseless change one of the most expressive countenances in which the human soul ever found a mirror. If the venerable old man had foreseen how that eye would one day traverse his Benedictine annals, in a too successful search for the materials of the most overwhelming ridicule of all which he held holy, he would cheerfully have consigned his unfinished volumes, and with them his own honored name, to oblivion. Not so would Michel Germain, Claude Estiennot, and the brethren for whose amusement they wrote, have comtemplated, if they could have foreknown, the approaching career of the young Alouet. Though they clung to the Church of Rome with all the ardor of partisans, and though their attachment to her was probably sincere, their convictions must have been faint, unripe, and wavering. The mists of doubt, though insufficient to deprive them of their faith in Christianity, had struck a damp and abiding chill into their hearts. If they had lived long enough to know the patriarch of Ferney, they would have been conscious of the close affinity between his spirit and their own. How could it have been otherwise? From disinterring legends and traditions revolting to their hearts and understandings, they passed to Rome, there to disinter foul masses of holy bones, to contemplate sacred processions of mules and asses, to find a corpulent, self-indulgent valetudinarian sustaining the character of the vicar of Christ, and to discover that the basest motives of worldly interest dictated to the papal court the decisions for which they dared to claim a divine impulse and a divine infallibility. From such follies and such pretensions these learned persons turned away with immeasurable contempt. The freedom of thought which unveiled to them these frauds, left them disgusted with error, but did not carry them forward to the pursuit of truth. Without the imbecility to respect such extravagances, they were also without the courage to denounce and repudiate them. Their superior light taught them to expose and ridicule religious error; it did not teach them to embrace unwelcome truth. In that book which is the "religion of Protestants," they might have read that "the light is the life of men"—that is, of men who obey and follow its guidance. There also they might have learned that "the light which is in us may be darkness," that is, may once illuminate the inquisitive intellect, and darken the insensible heart. The letters which they have be queathed to us, interesting as they are in other respects, afford melancholy proof how deeply the younger Benedictines of the congregation of St. Maur were already imbued with the spirit of that disastrous philosophy which was destined, before the lapse of another century, to subvert the ancient institutions of their native land, and, with them, the venerable fabric of their own illustrious Order. From the People's Journal. BY HENRY LESTAR HARRISON. ONCE MORE! Once more! dear words, a rainbow of sweet hope Ah! who shall count from memory's honey-store, All that the fond heart longs for, yet, once more! once more! NEVER MORE! Oh mockery of sunshine-dear eclipse Of joy! Words, trembling on the lover's lips Of woe, moan of the human when it sips Assuring thee of life, of "life for evermore!" From the People's Journal. THE MOTHER'S DREAM. BY MRS. NEWTON CROSLAND, (LATE CAMILLA TOULMIN.) By her Dead Child the Mother kneels, Laid in the grave-clothes, prim array! The day is chill with weeping clouds, The frenzy of her mad despair Has dashed away the power of prayer; A pitying Angel stooped his wing, Then, moulded from her tears, arose She and her Husband-they whose blooming days Have scarcely reached bright youth's meridian blaze Stand hand in hand, with wrinkled cheek and brow, Of harsh rebuke: "the fault it was her own; By her Dead Child she still is kneeling, The solemn bell has stayed its pealing; The clouds have wept themselves away, The sun resumed his gorgeous sway, And through the antique oriel pane Streams with a sapphire-emerald stain, And, falling as through ruby deep, Makes Death but seem a rosy sleep. The little hands so soft and fair No longer tears bedim her eyes; From the Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review. CONVERSATIONS WITH GOETHE. 3d vol. Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens. (Conversations with Goethe in the latter years of his life.) By JOHANN ECKERMANN. Magdeburg. 1848. WITH the general character of this work our readers are probably already acquainted, from that of the two preceding volumes, published some years ago. Mr. Eckermann is a biographer of the Boswell class, with the same unbounded and unquestioning admiration of his subject, and with fully as much natural simplicity, but with greater intellectual culture, and without the incomparable absurdity or the tendency to spite which our dear "Bozzy" occasionally exhibits. With his perfect surrender of himself to the influence of the more powerful mind round which he revolved, we are little disposed to quarrel; such devotion is in the present day but too rare; and in addition to the vast mental superiority of Goethe, his elaborate and comprehensive culture, and his free and noble position in the world, contrasted with the narrow circumstances and limited education of Eckermann, made it almost impossible that the attraction should not be overpowering. To have retained perfect freedom and independence of mind in such a case would have required very unusual strength of character and mental endowment. The relation in which they respectively stood, is not, for the work before us, without its advantages. The perfect transparency of the medium through which the master is exhibited, the almost total absence of character in the mind of the pupil, is in many instances favorable to the correctness of the representation. There is no attempt on the part of Eckermann to make the sayings of Goethe accommodate views and theories of his own, as a livelier biographer might have tried to do; but, on the other hand, it is difficult to acquit of occasional misconception, this appearing a more probable supposition than that Goethe should really have said all that is set down for him. In the former volume there are many such sayings, as, for instance, this Whether this saying has any meaning at all, and is not of that order of profundity in which no bottom can be found, we must leave our readers to determine; but to us it appears as if Goethe were often playing with the simple listener, and treating him to some such instruction as Mephistophiles gives to the young student who comes to consult Faust in his study. In another place Goethe is made to fall into one of the vulgarest errors of that class of his countrymen who take their views of English policy from the Parisian newspapers. "While we Germans,' said Goethe, 'arc tormenting ourselves with philosophical problems, the English, with their fine practical understanding, laugh at us and win the world. Everybody knows how they have declaimed against the slave trade; and, while they have made us believe they were actuated solely by motives of humanity, we at last discover that they have an object, such as they do nothing without, and this we should have known before. They themselves need the blacks in their extensive domain on the western coast of Africa, and they do not like the trade which carries them off. 666 They have large colonies of negroes in America, which are very profitable. From these they can supply the demand from North America, and if slaves are brought from other places it injures their trade-so they preach against the inhuman African slave trade (!)'" Again the conversation had one day fallen on the relative value of the observations of nature, made by scientific and unscientific persons; and Goethe had asserted that the perceptions of the unlearned were often the truer. "You would seem to infer,' said I, 'that the more one knows, the worse one observes.' As "If our acquired knowledge is much mingled with error, certainly I do,' answered Goethe. soon as we have joined any narrow, scientific sect, all true and simple observation is over for us. The decided Vulcanist will always look through Vulcanian spectacles, and the Neptunist and the partisan of the new elevation theory through his. The vision of such theorists, turned always in one direction, loses its clearness, and objects no longer appear to them in their native purity. When these men give us an account of their observations, we receive, notwithstanding the highest regard for truth in the individual-by no means the truth as it is in nature; all objects have a strong subjective tinge. I am far, however, from meaning to maintain that a true unbiassed knowledge would be any hinderance to observation; much more does the old truth retain its force, that we in fact have only eyes and ears for what we know. "The musician hears every instrument in the orchestra, and every tone in each, whilst the unlearned ear perceives only the mass of sound. So also an ignorant man will see nothing but the agreeable surface of a green or flowery meadow, where the observant botanist will be struck by the vast variety of grasses and other plants. my "But everything has its limits; and, as in Gotz it is said that a son from sheer learning does not know his own father, so in science we meet with people who can neither see nor hear for erudition. They are so preoccupied with hypotheses that, like a man in a violent passion, they may run against their nearest friend in the street without knowing it. For the observation of nature, a certain simplicity and tranquillity of mind is desirable. The child sees the flower and the insect, and has all his senses awake to a simple and single interest. It does not occur to him that there may be, at the same time, in the formation of the cloud something remarkable, so that he should turn his eyes also in that direction.' "In that case,' said I, 'children, and people resembling them, might be good assistants in sci ence.' "Would to heaven,' said Goethe, ' that we were all nothing more than good assistants! It is just by wishing to be more, and carrying about with us a great apparatus of philosophy and hypotheses, that we spoil all.'” Now it is certainly no very uncommon case to find half instructed scientific people possessed by an exclusive theory, distorting their views of fact to accommodate it, and seeing all things through a colored medium: but perhaps the error is less occasioned, even in this case, by their learning than by their ignorance. They have made themselves masters of one side of a question, and looked hastily, or not at all, at the other; and their mistakes are not in consequence of what they know, but of what they do not know. 66 Mr. Eckermann asks, "Do you mean to say, that the more one knows, the worse one observes ?" (Dass man um so schlechter beobachte jemehr man wisse?) To which Goethe replies, Certainly I do, if our acquired knowledge is much mingled with error;" which is as much as if one were to ask, "Do you think we are likely to be poisoned by bread and butter?" and the reply were, Certainly I do, if the bread and butter has which we may readily admit, without at all been spread with arsenic"-a conclusion thereby calling in question the wholesomeness of bread and butter. It may be very true that, as soon as we have joined any narrow scientific sect, (beschränkte confession,) tion;" but it is not the science, but its narwe have "lost the faculty of just observabeschränktheil"-that row limitation—its makes the danger. It appears also to be quite an unfounded assumption that the observations of unlearned persons concerning facts cognizable by the senses are always, or usually, correct. Most people who have ever tried the experiment will be aware how difficult, how almost impossible it is to obtain from them observations unmixed with inferences; and that no small amount of scientific training is requisite to enable any one to give a really true and accurate account of the simplest phenomenon passing daily before his eyes. There is doubtless some truth in what is said of the observations of children; but it is not because they know less, but because they attend more, that their observations have sometimes greater value. The learned observer whose attention is divided between the garden and his meteorological inquiries, may easily overlook the flower or the insect; but it does not follow that if he looked at it, he would not see more in it than the child saw. But it is not surprising that a German should be perhaps over-sensitive to the evils of "much learning;" and to the clear, healthy, eminently practical mind of Goethe, nothing could be more distasteful than the sickly, factitious, unhealthy aspect of body and soul, not uncommon in those who, like so many of his countrymen, have been nourished too exclusively on books. "You know,' he says on one occasion, that scarcely a day passes in which I do not receive a |