I. A CENTURY OF GREAT POETS, FROM 1750 DOWNWARDS. Johann Friedrich Schiller,. Blackwood's Magazine, II. INNOCENT: A Tale of Modern Life. By Mrs. III. MARIE-AMELIE DE BOURBON, QUEEN OF THE Graphic, Temple Bar, Pall Mall Gazette, 755 Economist, POETRY. Pall Mall Gazette, 706 | LOVE'S QUEST, 706 PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY BOSTON. TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION. For EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. But we do not prepay postage on less than a year, nor when we have to pay commission for forwarding the money; nor when we club the LIVING Age with another periodical. An extra copy of THE LIVING AGE is sent gratis to any one getting up a club of Five New Subscribers. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & GAY. DIFFERENT PATHS. I LATELY talked with one who strove And thus it was I answered him: "Strike not away the staff I hold, You cannot give me yours, dear friend; Up the steep hill our paths are set In different ways, to one sure end. What, though, with eagle glance upfixed On heights beyond our mortal ken, You tread the broad sure stones of Faith More firmly than do weaker men; To each according to his strength; And broader pathway thro' the snow. And when upon the golden crest We stand at last together, freed From mists that circle round the base, And clouds that but obscure our creed; We shall perceive that though our steps Have wandered wide apart, dear friend, No pathway can be wholly wrong That tends unto one perfect end." LONG AGO. Two Roses bloomed upon a tree: Yet touch a chord by kindred feeling known, Call on an echo deep in kindred heart, Blood will assert an innate power its own, And wake the spirit for the champion's part. Our own, our own. God-given, holy chain, Linked as mere babies on our mother's knee, Soldered by mutual hope and joy and pain, LOVE'S QUEST. (FOR A MURAL PAINTING.) WHENAS the watches of the night had grown To that deep loneliness where dreams begin, I saw how Love, with visage worn and thin, With wings close-bound, went through a town alone. Death-pale he showed, and inly seemed to moan With sore desire some dolorous place to win; Sharp brambles passed had streaked his dazzling skin, His bright feet eke were gashed with many a stone. And, as he went, I, sad for piteousness, Might see how men from door and gate would move Their white leaves touched with every sway- To stay his steps; or womankind would press, ing. 9 I bent to gather one, while She Plucked off the other, gently saying, To both for Death to smite them both." Lost Love! Dead Love! They come and go No sun is like the once bright sun In which she said those flowers were one, With wistful eyes, to balconies above, And bid him enter in. But Love not less, Mournful, kept on his way. Ah, hapless Love! Saint Pauls. APART. AUSTIN DOBSON. From Blackwood's Magazine. A CENTURY OF GREAT POETS, FROM 1750 DOWNWARDS. birthright of many generations of Englishmen; yet even he was far from being the founder of our national poetry. But here not so far parted from absolute sight and touch one of them still living within the recollection, or at least within the lifetime, of a great many of us— stand the two men who have created German poetry. Were it possible that instead of the slow and gradual growth of character and expression which makes us out of children become men, the expansion of a human soul could come about in a day or a moment like that of a flower, it would scarcely be more surprising, more interesting, than are the phenomena which attend this other development, the birth of poetry — in a race which it is now the fashion to consider one of the most poetic races of humanity. A hundred years ago, however, that race had done little more than babble in vague ballad strains and preludes of verse. It had its Minnesingers, it is true, great enough to charm the literati of the present day who take to themselves the glory of having disinterred them; but great poems never need disinterring. Germany lay silent in a rich chaos of material, fanciful, superstitious, sentimental, transcendental, but with no literature in which to express itself, no poetry-a Memnon's head, quivering with sound suppressed, which as yet no sun-touch had called forth. But that the image is trivial for so great an occurrence, we might say that the curtain rolled visibly up from the dim world, thus lying voiceless, revealing in a moment the two singers, whose office was to remake that world, and give its darkness full expression. The curtain rolls up slowly — upon nothing an empty stage, a vast silent scene; when, lo, there enters from one side and another, on either hand, a poet JOHANN FRIEDRICH SCHILLER. THERE is something attractive and interesting, not only to the critic but to the general public, in that close contact and juxtaposition of two great writers in almost any department of literature, which permits every reader the privilege of contrast and comparison, and seems to enlarge his powers of discrimination by the mere external circumstances which call them forth. It would be difficult to overestimate how much Goethe has done for Schiller and Schiller for Goethe in this way. They have made a landscape and atmosphere for each other, rounding out by the constant variety and contrast, each other's figures from the blank of the historical background-impressing upon our minds what one was and the other was not, by an evidence much more striking than that of critical estimate. We have not in England any parallel to the group they make, or to the effect they produce. Wordsworth and Coleridge might have faintly emulated it had their intercourse been longer and fuller; but Wordsworth and Coleridge, or Byron and Shelley, or any other combination in our crowded poetical firmament, would be but two among many-not The Two, the crowned and undisputed monarchs of a national literature, as are this German pair, men of the same age, the same inspiration, to whom the great task has been given, consciously and evidently, of shaping the poetry of a people. To us, with our older traditions and long-accumulated, slowly-growing wealth, the position altogether is remarkable enough to call forth an interest more curious and eager than is generally excited by literary questions. The poetry of a nation, according to our experience, is its oldest and most assured inheritance, something so deeply bedded in our heart and life that we cannot point out to ourselves where it began, or call up before our minds any conception of those dim ages when it was not. Shakespeare himself, the greatest glory of our English tongue, stands centuries back, and has been the - and the poetry of Germany is created under our eyes. A most curious, memorable sight as ever came to pass in this world, and all the more notable that the doers of it are not one nor many, but two, magnifying, revealing, expounding each other, and by their mutual presence making the mystery clear. What would it have been in England had Shakespeare and Milton instead of Of the two Goethe was so much the more remarkable that he can be considered and treated of alone; but of Schiller we can scarcely speak without bringing in the name of his greater, more splendid, and less lovable coadjutor. Their friendship was creditable and profitable to both, though we confess we are a little weary of hearing it pointed out as an exception to the ordinary relations between men of letters, which, the world persists in believing, are constantly interrupted by jealousies and emulations. This persistent theory maintains itself bravely, as most theories do, in the very face of fact being the growth of two different ages, | given new form and development to the stood side by side, working together, cre- life of his country. ating consciously, and of set purpose, that literature which they enriched so nobly, one of them, at least, with probably little thought enough of the vast thing he was doing! We are all fond of comparing and contrasting these two Princes of English song, notwithstanding the difference of their time and character; but what endless opportunities should we not have found for this contrast had they existed in one sphere. The difference is so great however, that we cannot make any just parallel. Milton could no more have been produced in all his intensity and learned austere splendour in the broader and richer Shakespearian age, than by which it might have been proved a Shakespeare, all-embracing, all-tolerant, all-comprehending, could have preserved that godlike breadth and fulness in the stern struggles of the Commonwealth. The comparison between them cannot be complete. But Goethe and Schiller were born and lived under the same influences, were moulded by the same events, drew breath in the same atmosphere. And they were what it is possible our Shakespeare was not, though of late ages we have been taught to believe it essential to poetry- they were conscious poets, worshipping in themselves the divine faculty which they recognized, and feeling its importance with a distinctness which was beyond all shadow of a doubt. The association of two such men gives an additional interest and attraction to each. It is a union which has been commented upon at unmeasured length and by many critics, moved by that curious and overweening enthusiasm for German literature which has affected with a kind of literary frenzy so many original and thoughtful minds. We do not pretend to approach the subject with the adoring reverence which has been so common, and from which it is so difficult to escape when any attempt is made to consider the two great poets of modern Germany; but we do not claim any exception from the special spell of their remarkable position, a position as notable in the world as that of any reformer, statesman, or patriot who has thousand times that whatsoever may be the jealousies of art, writers and painters invariably find their closest companions in their own craft, and are nowhere so happy or so much at home, all friendly tiffs notwithstanding, as among their brethren of the brush or the pen, who alone fully realize their difficulties and understand their efforts. Where is the writer, living or dead, who has not been consoled and stimulated by the generous appreciation of rivals, even when less successful than himself, even when somewhat soured by personal disappointment! The great, except in the most singular cases, are always ready to applaud an honest effort; but even among the small there is a wonderful amount of generosity and appreciation of excellence, a generosity for which they seldom get much credit, but of which all real brethren of the arts are fully aware. Patrons are good (perhaps) when they are to be had and the personal friends who love us because we are ourselves, famous or unfamous, are best of all earthly blessings; but for companions, for the understanding which alone makes one man's sympathy living and potent to another, for comprehension of what we have arrived at, whether successfully or not, commend us to our fellows, those others of our trade with whom according to the proverb we never agree. Possibly not, at all times and in all circumstances; but even when there is not agreement there is un- an intellectual eminence should, it might derstanding, which is next best. . involved in these words: they are a paradox; yet they are true as far as our perception goes. be said, see better and more clearly than The association, however, of these two the observer on the common level. But great German minds, does some injus- yet it is not so; for the very gain in tice to the lesser greatness. We in-point of perspective has a confusing stinctively begin our estimate of Schiller effect upon the landscape. The lines by the confession that he has produced are altered by the apparently impartial no Fausta confession which is per- distance from which he views them. fectly true, but highly unnecessary in There is something wanting to the hurespect to any other poet. Neither has man aspect of the work- —a something Goethe, we might add, produced a Wal- which is made up by the keener sense of lenstein: but Faust so far transcends all local colour, the sharper perception of all embodiments of human sentiment which differences in atmosphere, the currents are less than sovereign and supreme, that of air, the clouds and shadows, which the poet's fame has become one with that give special character to the scene. of his creation, and we do not ask what Thus the fantastic wildness of the Gerelse he has done beside this crowning man imagination—the aspect, half piceffort. That wild, mystic impersonation | turesque, half grotesque, of its special of natural genius, speculation, supersti- temper and tendencies - works into the tion, and all that is great and little in the picture with double force from the German soul, stands alone in the world. Goethe altitude, thus making the more The supreme imagination which thus abstract poet at the same time the more welded a mass of incongruous and fan-national. We feel the apparent fallacy tastic popular fancies into one being, has undeniably something in it beyond the range of the noble and gentle thinker who attempts no such mystical flight. But Schiller stands upon no smiling Schiller has nothing in him of the demi-grand elevation of superiority: he stands god; he stands firm upon mortal soil, among the men and women whom he where the motives, and wishes, and as- pictures, sympathizing with them, somepirations of common humanity have times wondering at them, sometimes their full power. Even the visionary regarding them with that beautiful enthupart of him is all human, Christian, natu-siasm of the maker for the thing created, ral; and when he touches upon the bor- by which the poet abdicates his own ders of the supernatural, as in those sovereignty, and represents himself to miraculous circumstances which sur- himself as the mere portrait-painter of round his Maid of Orleans, it is still something God - not he has made. pure humanity and no fantastic arch-de- How faithfully, how nobly, without one moniac inspiration which moves him. thought of self-reflection, he follows the He is infinitely more of a man, and lines of his hero's noble but faulty figparadoxical as the words may appear ure, not sparing Wallenstein -putting infinitely less of a German, than his his strength as well as his weakness on greater rival. The standing-point from the canvass, yet showing ever the heroic which Goethe contemplates the world is magnitude of both! With what a swell that of a separate being, able, upon his of high and generous emotion he holds detached point of vision, to see as it his Shepherd maiden spotless through were all round the human figure which the stormy scenes of her brief drama! he contemplates, to behold it in relief, His own individuality has nothing to do with a full sense of the perpetual com- with these noble pictures. He puts himplication of meaner with higher impulses, self aside altogether from the stage, and the confused mixture of petty exter- froin the canvass, and throws his whole nal circumstances with the wild and vio-magnanimous force into the being whom lent movements of unrestrained will and it is his business to present to the world. passion. The man who sees thus from Wallenstein is no more equal to Hamlet |