he never commenced against the warnings of the barometer,for, like Goethe, he was a confident meteorological observer,— he took with him in the carriage piles of books, and writing materials, continuing on the journey his daily work of reading and composing. For the conduct during his absence of his department of the household, he left always minute directions, prescribing to his youngest daughter the course to be daily pursued with his tree-frogs, canary birds, spiders, and other zoological pets, and writing down for his wife's guidance a set of orders, may we venture to call them, in the following form.

"1. In case of fire, the black-bound excerpt books to be saved first then in the black trunk the money and box containing papers.

2. Keep all my windows closed on account of flies: open them only a day before my expected return.

3. Have the window curtain fastened.

4. Lend no book out without writing it down.

5. Have the hair in the sofa on the sunken side made firm.

6. Be sure to keep both doors of my room always shut: nor must the squirrel go into it.

7. Break open all packages, and send me the letters.

8. Note down only each dollar that you take out, without any further account of the expenditure.

9. The wine that arrives during my absence to be treated according to Otto's rules.

10. Send me immediately the newspaper."

Of these visits we will let himself describe the one which seems to have been the most fruitful of enjoyment.

"Heidelberg, July 18th. 1817. "The day, my beloved wife, on which I have become Doctor of Philosophy, will I write to you. My prognostications, from the difficulties on setting out, of my happiness here, heaven has most richly verified. Only with the endless visits and visitors, there are too many things to write about. On Tuesday I was at Consistorial Counsellor Schwartz's, with whom I am going to lodge on condition of my being permitted to pay; on Wednesday at Madame von Ende's, whose kindness, refinement and originality, I cannot enough praise; in the evening at Dr. Ditmar's, who, like Voss, loads me with kindness and attention. On Saturday noon Madame Ende gave a party in the beautiful castle-garden to fifty persons; and in the evening she hired a room in the tavern to witness the procession of students who came to salute me. On Sunday a pleasureboat, with eighty persons, made an excursion on the Neckar as far as Hirshe, for a description of which I refer you to a letter I shall

write to Emanuel. I am out every evening at the houses of Schwartz, Paullus, Hegel, Thibaut and his singing academy, and to-day at Kreutzer's. How shall I describe the love and respect I experience here to overflowing? My dog only could do it, for he never was so well fed from beautiful hands as here.

"To-day Professors Hegel and Kreutzer, with the beadles behind them, brought me, in the name of the University, the parchment Doctor's Diploma* in a long red case. Max [his son] must translate it for you: you can then show it about to our friends.

"I have lived here hours such as I never experienced in the happiest days of my life, particularly the excursion on the water, the salute of the students, and the songs yesterday from the old Italian music. But I thank the All-bountiful as much as I can, by mildness, calmness, modesty, love, and right feeling towards every

one.

"Ease, propriety, and mirth, constitute the tone of society here. Four bowls of punch emptied at Voss's, and a hundred bottles of wine on the pleasure boat, did not destroy this tone. Don't ask me

to say any thing of the country around here, except in the evenings when I shall be once more seated opposite to you.

"With the German-souled Voss, whose heart is so full of love and healthy vigor, I gave up the "You" on the boat; and thus have I in my old days made a new "thou."t

"Max must study in Heidelberg: he will be surrounded by tutelar angels in the form of my friends. I am uncommonly well, and drink, talk, and sit up as much as I please.

"What a splendid evening circle and rainbow around the dinnertable yesterday, formed entirely by professors and artists, physicians, philosophers, philologists, theologians, jurists, naturalists, connoisseurs and owners of works of art, and the mirthful Kreutzer.

"Whether I go to Frankfort or not is still, on account of the expense, undecided; your wish that I should, and the good roads tempt me strongly. I shall travel to Manheim with a party.

66

Enjoy yourself as much as you can, so that I may not be happy alone.

"R."

In this diploma Richter is addressed as,-"Poetam immortalem; lumen et ornamentum sæculi; decus virtutum; principem ingenii, doctrinæ, sapientiæ, Germanorum libertatis assertorem acerrimum; debellatorem fortissimum mediocritatis, superbiæ, Virum qualem non candidiorem terra tulit; ut dotibus ejus omni concentu Consensuque laudis nostræ sublimioribus, tribuerimus amorem, pietatem, reverentiam. Doctoris Philosophiæ et liberalium Artium magistri nomen, privilegia et jura íte honorisque causa contulimus," &c.

+ It is the custom in Germany for brothers and sisters, husband and wife, parents to children, and intimate friends, to use the second person singular in addressing one another. The adoption of this affectionate form by persons not related generally takes place in the presence of Bacchus, who presides over the ceremony, which consists in the two interlocking their right arms, and in this corporeal union emptying a bumper.

VOL. I.NO. II.

36

We could fill pages with similar letters, exhibiting a sage in the hearty enjoyment of social pleasure, and of the happiness which flows from warm and wide sympathies. But we find that although many passages marked for translation have been omitted, we have already exceeded the limits we prescribed to ourselves.

The interesting character of the man, not less than the celebrity of the author, induced us to make Richter the subject of the first of the papers on German literature, which we propose occasionally to offer to our readers. In our purpose with these we shall succeed, if by the views they shall open into the rich domain of German Art and Literature, they stimulate curiosity in some students, and encourage the growing disposition among us to make the study of the German language a branch of a liberal education. Although the design of the present article excludes any thing like an elaborate critical analysis of Richter's works and genius, we will, before closing it, say a few words, and they shall be very few,--on the general character of his writings.

In one of his letters, Richter describes the aim of his literary efforts to be "To point out to men resting places this side of the final one; to reconcile them to fools at the expense of folly; to show them flowers in the desert, virtue at courts, happiness in sorrow, wealth in poverty; and, in short, two heavens on earth, a present and a future one." This high aim,proposed through the impulses of ardent fellow-feeling deepened by faith in man, and of a religion in which hope shines through the moistened eye of humility,-is pursued with the vigorous movement of an intellect, broad, profound, and subtle, to which learning and meditation furnished weapons to be polished by humour and pointed by wit. Such a mind, shorn of its fervor, would exhibit the dry cogent argumentation of the uncompromising logician: lowered in intellectual endowment, its wealth of feeling would be wasted in the shallow efforts of the zealot, or the enervating rhapsodies of the sentimentalist. It is the alliance between strength in thought and fullness in sentiment, that gives to his pages their fascination. The heart and head pour ever their united volume upon the reader, who, not to be overpowered, must brace to their highest tension his best faculties.

The impression at first produced by his writings, not upon the defenceless multitude merely, but upon the small class of well-equipt scholars and thinkers, is strikingly exemplified in the excuse given by Wieland in 1796 for not writing to him. "Give me," said Wieland to a friend of Richter, "a

new language, and of all my epistolary debts I will pay this one sooner than any other. At the several attempts I have made, every expression seems poor and bald." The admiration of Wieland illustrates also the variety of his powers; for while with the many he was chiefly prized as a sentimental writer, it was as humourist that Wieland ranked him among the greatest. With him, however, the jest was always secondary,-a sporting on a ground of earnestness. This characteristic of his humour,-and probably an essential one of all genuine humour,-he himself describes in a letter to Jacobi :-"Without earnestness I know no jest; but earnestness itself is original, and independent of jest :"--one of those pregnant sentences which abound in him, especially in his great works on Aesthetics, or the philosophy of criticism, and on Education.

Thus

Yet, with his pre-eminent mental gifts,-his love for the true, his susceptibility to the sublime and beautiful, his genial sense of the comic and mastery of wit, his subtle powers of analysis and affluence in similitudes,-there was in him as a writer of fiction, as creator and artist, a fundamental want. A passage in his "Studies for Autobiography" fully describes in a few words the nature of this want. He says:-"Goethe when travelling perceives every thing with distinctness and precision with me all melts away into the romantic. I travel through cities without having seen any thing in them. I am excited only by beautiful scenery,-for that feeds the feeling of the romantic,-or by a human being, or a book. True, I know and see all the individualities of life, but I take little note of them and forget them." In other words, external objects were interesting to him, not from their own absolute nature and constituent parts, but as the excitants of his mind. A landscape moved the inward springs: having done this, his eyes were withdrawn from it, and sinking into a corner of the carriage, he abandoned himself to the train of dreams the reality had started. Goethe, on the other hand, would pause, with entire outward attention survey it, seize its points and characteristics, and bear away a full, correct, vivid image of the landscape as a corporeal reality. The faculties by which bodily being, so to speak, is perceived, noted, and grasped, were deficient in Richter. To him the value of an object lay in its internal, its suggestive qualities. This feature of his mental constitution exhibited itself of course more prominently when his mind passed from the passive to the active state, and began out of its own stores and resources to reproduce and create, Hence, when a conception so possessed him as to be

urgent for utterance, he sought not first for words, but strove, as himself informs us, to express it in tones. The deep notes of music, having no definite ending, but dying away imperceptibly and losing themselves in infinitude, were the chosen medium of his emotions. What a fanciful, fluctuating, masterly voluntary on the organ is, as an achievement of Art, to a sculptured product of disciplined genius; so is a fiction of Richter to a creation of Goethe.

This deficiency in plastic power, in the ability to mould his material into well-balanced proportions, is visible not only in the want of definiteness of form in the whole and in the parts, but also in the absence of the restraints which such a power necessarily exerts over the action of the other faculties. Thus, his fertility displays itself often in rank luxuriance his pages are overloaded with prodigality of mental wealth. In his Vita book he says:--" Were it possible, I would wish, that after my death all my thoughts should be given to the world; not one should perish :" and this conservative tenderness towards the progeny of his brain he practised when composing. Now, it is the very essence of Art to reject. Out of a mass of matter thronging round the genial Artist, he selects with a severe hand: the successful fulfilment of his design absolutely depends upon the compression of a quantity of unconnected material into a compact whole of prescribed dimensions. The picture of Zeuxis executing his Helen with the five beautiful maidens about him, perfectly illustrates the process of true Art. The Ideal, which is its aim, is a purified abstraction from the real.

To the exactions of this fundamental law of Art, Richter was unwilling and unable to submit. His faculties, exempted from a severe and wholesome control, revel in all the wantonness of health and uncurbed vigour. Thought springs out of thought, till they are so multiplied as to obscure the picture they were designed to illuminate. You are distracted by the throng of similes; irritated by the incessant provocations to your sense of the comic; and overwrought by the pathetic. The results of the creative efforts of so abundant and robust a mind, unrestrained by the requirements of definiteness in form, are often somewhat as we might imagine natural products would be, freed from some one of the laws which preside over their growth; the branches of the oak, for example, swelled by sap that should have gone to the stem, or the daisy bemonstered into the shape of a sun-flower. Another effect is, that the alternations are too sudden and violent. Now we have a storm,-not of mere blustering, door-and-shutter-slamming