Drug thy memories, lest thou learn it, lest thy heart be put to proof,
In the dead unhappy night, and when the rain is on the roof.

Like a dog, he hunts in dreams, and thou art staring at the wall,
Where the dying night-lamp flickers, and the shadows rise and fall.
Then a hand shall pass before thee, pointing to his drunken sleep,
To thy widow'd marriage-pillows, to the tears that thou wilt weep.
Thou shalt hear the "Never, never," whisper'd by phantom years,
And a song from out the distance in the ringing of thine ears;
And an eye shall vex thee, looking ancient kindness on thy pain.
Turn thee, turn thee on thy pillow: get thee to thy rest again.
Nay, but Nature brings thee solace; for a tender voice will cry.
"T is a purer life than thine: a lip to drain thy trouble dry.

Baby lips will laugh me down: my latest rival brings thee rest.
Baby fingers, waxen touches, press me from the mother's breast.
O, the child too clothes the father with a dearness not his due.
Half is thine and half is his: it will be worthy of the two.
O, I see thee old and formal, fitted to thy petty part,
With a little hoard of maxims preaching down a daughter's heart.
"They were dangerous guides the feelings she herself was not ex-

empt

Truly, she herself had suffer'd " - Perish in thy self-contempt!

Overlive it lower yet be happy! wherefore should I care?

I myself must mix with action, lest I wither by despair.

What is that which I should turn to, lighting upon days like these?
Every door is barr'd with gold, and opens but to golden keys.

Every gate is throng'd with suitors, all the markets overflow.
I have but an angry fancy: what is that which I should do?

I had been content to perish, falling on the foeman's ground,
When the ranks are roll'd in vapor, and the winds are laid with sound.

But the jingling of the guinea helps the hurt that Honor feels,
And the nations do but murmur, snarling at each other's heels.
Can I but relieve in sadness? I will turn that earlier page.
Hide me from my deep emotion, O thou wondrous Mother-Age!
Make me feel the wild pulsation that I felt before the strife,
When I heard my days before me, and the tumult of my life;

Yearning for the large excitement that the coming years would yield,
Eager-hearted as a boy when first he leaves his father's field,

And at night along the dusky highway near and nearer drawn,
Sees in heaven the light of London flaring like a dreary dawn;
And his spirit leaps within him to be gone before him then,
Underneath the light he looks at, in among the throngs of men;

Men, my brothers, men the workers, ever reaping something new; That which they have done but earnest of the things that they shall do:

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,

Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;
Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew
From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue;

Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,
With the standards of the peoples plunging thro' the thunder-storm;
Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle-flags were furl'd
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.

So I triumph'd, ere my passion sweeping thro' me left me dry,
Left me with the palsied heart, and left me with the jaundiced eye;
Eye, to which all order festers, all things here are out of joint,
Science moves, but slowly slowly, creeping on from point to point:
Slowly comes a hungry people, as a lion, creeping nigher,
Glares at one that nods and winks behind a slowly-dying fire.
Yet I doubt not thro' the ages one increasing purpose runs,
And the thoughts of men are widen'd with the process of the suns.
What is that to him that reaps not harvest of his youthful joys,
Tho' the deep heart of existence beat for ever like a boy's?
Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, and I linger on the shore,
And the individual withers, and the world is more and more.
Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, and he bears a laden breast,
Full of sad experience moving toward the stillness of his rest.
Hark, my merry comrades call me, sounding on the bugle-horn,
They to whom my foolish passion were a target for their scorn:
Shall it not be scorn to me to harp on such a moulder'd string?
I am shamed thro' all my nature to have loved so slight a thing.
Weakness to be wroth with weakness! woman's pleasure, woman's pain –
Nature made them blinder motions bounded in a shallower brain:
Woman is the lesser man, and all thy passions, match'd with mine,
Are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine—
Here at least, where nature sickens, nothing. Ah, for some retreat
Deep in yonder shining Orient, where my life began to beat;
Where in wild Mahratta-battle fell my father evil-starred;
I was left a trampled orphan, and a selfish uncle's ward.

Or to burst all links of habit-there to wander far away,
On from island unto island at the gateways of the day.

Larger constellations burning, mellow moons and happy skies,
Breadths of tropic shades and palms in cluster, knots of Paradise.

Never comes the trader, never floats an European flag,

Slides the bird o'er lustrous woodland, droops the trailer from the crag; Droops the heavy-blossom'd bower, hangs the heavy-fruited tree Summer isles of Eden lying in dark-purple spheres of sea.

There methinks would be enjoyment more than in this march of mind In the steamship, in the railway, in the thoughts that shake mankind. There the passions cramp'd no longer shall have scope and breathing

space;

I will take some savage woman, she shall rear my dusky race.

Iron-jointed, supple-sinnew'd, they shall dive, and they shall run,
Catch the wild goat by the hair, and hurl their lances in the sun;
Whistle back the parrot's call, and leap the rainbows of the brooks,
Not with blinded eyesight pouring over miserable books

Fool, again the dream, the fancy! but I know my words are wild,
But I count the gray barbarian lower than the Christian child.

1, to herd with narrow foreheads, vacant of our glorious gains,
Like a beast with lower pleasures, like a beast with lower pains!
Mated with a squalid savage - what to me were sun or clime?
I the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time

I that rather held it better men should perish one by one,
Than that earth should stand at gaze like Joshua's moon in Ajalon!
Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward let us range.
Let the peoples spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.
Thro' the shadow of the world we sweep into the younger day:
Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.

Mother-Age (for mine I knew not) help me as when life begun:
Rift the hills, and roll the waters, flash the lightnings, weigh the Sun -

O, I see the crescent promise of my spirit hath not set.
Ancient founts of inspiration well thro' all my fancy yet.

Howsoever these things be, a long farewell to Locksley Hall!
Now for me the woods may wither, now for me the roof-tree fall.
Comes a vapor from the margin, blackening over heath and holt,
Cramming all the blast before it, in its breast a thunder-bolt.
Let it fall on Locksley Hall, with rain or hail, or fire or snow;
For the mighty wind arises, roaring seaward, and I go.

C. C. F.

NOTICES OF BOOKS.

Life of Jean Paul Frederic Richter. Compiled from various Sources. Together with his Autobiography. Translated from the German. Boston Charles C. Little and James Brown. 1842. 2 vols. 16mo.

THE two noble and priceless papers on the life, labors, sufferings, and writings of Jean Paul, which Mr. Carlyle has given us in his "Miscellanies," and which have been so long in all hands and hearts, leave us but little to say, and little courage to say anything on the subject, more than to recommend, which we do most warmly, this new Biography of the wonderful man, to all who may peruse our pages. Of all the German writers and men Richter is the one whom we are most eager that our countrymen should appreciate and understand, for we feel sure that when they do, they will love and admire and cherish him as a bosom friend, and find in him pure inspiration. He is to us by far the most suggestive, soulstirring, improving of German minds. We profess to know him, and yet, for that very reason, in a case so peculiar as this, we should feel great distrust of ourselves in undertaking to make him known to such as have not conversed with him, that is to say, by attempting anything like a dissection or description of his genius. Carlyle has somewhere remarked, that the anatomist cannot operate till the subject is dead. But as the subject in this case happens to be a full-grown living man - a living soul, that is, big with the breath of life, large and free as nature, we should tremble before the task of having to analyze or delineate it to the world's eye. Moreover, although we have given a good deal of attention to Jean Paul's works, and have long wandered through their winding glades and over their bracing, magnificent mountain-heights, we have never yet reached the summit of summits, whence we could feel that we had such a command of the whole diversified surface, as to be able to give confidently an impression of its whole character. In other words, we feel ourselves too near the heart of this writer to make a critical survey of him for the public. Still we have such a deep love and reverence for the man, and admiration for the writer, that, even after the good and invaluable things that have been said of him, we feel moved to add our mite of impression and of praise.

If any one should ask us to characterize Richter, we should

reply, characterize nature, and then we will comply with your wish. Richter is nature, if ever man could so be called. Nor do we mean that he is a man of no character. We mean to say, that, in our view and feelings, he is the Shakspeare of Germany. We, too, have in our own mind, often been led, as Mrs. Lee does at some length in the book before us, to contrast Jean Paul with another, who is perhaps more generally considered amongst us the great man of German authors, namely, Goethe. We, however, are inclined to make the contrast much more favorable to Richter, or less so to Goethe, than she does. This has always seemed to us the difference between the two men, that Jean Paul's heart embraced everything, while Goethe's held everything at a distance. We mean to say, that what is called Goethe's all-sidedness has always seemed to us to be a cold indifference of heart to the many forms of humanity, which passed only as a curious phenomenon before his dry vision, while Richter seems to us, with his large and glowing bosom, to meet all the aspects of human life and lot with a profound and tender and immortal interest.

It may sound singularly to many, when we confess that we have often of late been tempted to illustrate to our countrymen what Richter is as a writer, by calling him the German Dickens. Of course this comparison holds only in respect to the exquisite blending of humor and pathos, of the droll and the tender, and to that keen sense of the difference between what is truly great and what is only disguised littleness in human life, in which the English writer and the German do certainly bear a striking likeness to each other. Superadd to Dickens a more wide and elevated acquaintance with life in all its circles and conditions, -enrich his mind immensely with stores of the most heterogeneous and significant facts and images from all ages and all departments of knowledge, - quicken his already lively sense of the beauty of outward nature into an all-animating and boundless glow of devotion and love; let his mind be filled with all knowledge of metaphysical systems, without enslaving in the least his own power of thought, and you will have something like a Jean Paul. We mean to say, that in "wit and fun and fire," in the union of tender sensibility to what is most true and beautiful, with moral indignation at what is base, in short, in some of those characteristics which make Jean Paul most peculiarly dear to us, he may well be called the Boz of Germany. We do not think we could better begin to recommend him to American readers than by such a parallel as this.

Whether Richter was a Christian in his creed, or what sort