Читать книгу Tales From the "Phantasus," etc. of Ludwig Tieck - Ludwig Tieck - Страница 3

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GOETHE says of himself, that the first sight of a work of genuine art was always displeasing to him. There was no correspondence between his own mind and the object he was contemplating. It would not fit—became galling. He was made conscious of a deficiency in himself; and the result was, a feeling of annoyance and irritation at the cause of it. Yet if he could overcome this aversion, and set himself to work to understand it, in faith that ultimately he would find himself repaid, he never failed to make the most delightful discoveries; new powers developed themselves in himself, and beauty after beauty came out in the object.

It is to this cause that we attribute the comparatively small success which the works of Ludwig Tieck have hitherto met with in England—just because they are genuine; and we venture to affirm, with some confidence, that if people will take the same pains, they will find their efforts attended with a similar result to that above mentioned. There is nothing strange in all this: there is a deep gloomy earnestness about Tieck, an unprepossessing sternness, which makes people feel uncomfortable, without exactly knowing why. They cannot make out his way of thought. They feel it is deep and strong; but as they do not start with any confidence in him as a teacher, it serves only to make them painfully conscious of their own dimensions, and afraid of what the strong man may do with them. For all they know, he may be a tyrant, using his powers only for destruction; breaking in and wasting all their beautiful gardens, and leaving them nothing but ashes, and torn-off leaves, and withering flowers.

More or less, there is always something awful in a purely ethical writer. Tieck's works do not profess to be religious writings. He is concerned wholly with the nature of man as he finds him, and with the working of the moral laws, the natural tendencies of virtue and vice in the system of the universe; and in this way he contrasts strikingly with writers like Fouqué, whose works have so much of a distinct religious character. The wild preternatural spirit which breathes through all his tales forms but a subservient part. It does but represent the elements in which our moral nature hangs; and is, in fact, nothing more than the very element in which we all live, only held in a certain light that we may see it. Why he does not introduce the real influences of the other world as revelation makes them known to us, is a question which we need not ask ourselves; it is enough that it was not his purpose.

But perhaps we shall find the clue to the general tone of his mind in the state of things in Germany, and the general condition of European feeling at the time in which he was brought up.

His mind broke into consciousness at the stormy close of the eighteenth century, when Europe was rocking to her foundation, and all faith in God was dead. The seven thousand who would not bow the knees to the Deity of man were hanging off in fear and trembling, and watching for the doom of the world. In France, old Voltaire worshipped as a god. In Germany, the students at the universities caricaturing the sacrifice of the mass at the doors of the beerhouses, and one riding through the streets of Göttingen upon an ass, to try, as he said, what must have been the feelings of the Saviour (Goethe, Wahrheit und Dichtung). It was a time of which Jean Paul said, "Now strikes the twelfth hour of the night; and the foul birds of night are screaming, and spectres dance; the dead walk abroad, the living dream."

Tieck was born in the Roman Catholic Church; but he was brought up without any religious teaching; and the Church herself in those dark hours possessed but few or none of those outward marks of holiness which could make him feel safe in trusting himself implicitly to her guidance: the poison of infidelity was in her very heart; disgraced by the grossest idolatry, her enemies battering furiously at her from without, and she apparently helpless to resist them. It is not so now: she too has felt the warm breath of spring that has since swept over the face of the earth, and is waking her up to new life and energy; yet, if even now such scenes as those of last summer at Treves can shock the senses of the cultivated world, what must it have been then? She was like a cracked bell that would not ring when it was struck.

In a country, then, where there was no religion to which he could trust,—no philosophy but an infidel one; in despair of external guidance, Tieck was forced to the bold step of trying for himself what all these systems were made of; of going down himself, and searching the foundations on which they rested; what this nature of his really was. He dared stand boldly up before the world, and look it in the face, and ask it what it was. And the still more awful questions he asked of his own heart: What am I? How came I here? What is my business here? It is a fiery trial; and woe to him who fails! Better he had never been born! It is a sphinx he has to answer: if he find not the solution of the riddle, the monster will devour him. And few hearts but will quail, and few cheeks but will blanch, and few heads but will reel, with those bottomless abysses of scepticism yawning round. But it is like the Catholic legend of the purgatory of St. Patrick. Few of those who ventured in ever returned to tell the tale; but those who did were safe for ever. A man knows too well the value of the true, when he has been at such cost in the pursuit of it, to risk the losing of it again. "Abdallah" and "William Lovell," the two first books of any importance which Tieck published, shew him in the centre of the fearful struggle, wrestling with those two first unanswerable questions. And so at last he was content to leave them. To the last question he wrung out an answer from the depths of his own being; he comes now to offer it to us—a true teacher, if a stern one: and we shall do well to listen to his words; for the solemn earnestness which breathes through every line he has written shews how deeply he has read the mystery of life. The tales in the present volume were written in the first period after he emerged into a calmer and clearer light; and to these for the rest of this Preface we shall confine ourselves. We have said enough to account for their peculiar character externally; and the consideration of his later writings had better be left to another opportunity: to speak of them now would be but criticism without an object; before long some of them will be produced before the public, and what is to be said will be said then. Great things have happened in Germany since that time: a literature has sprung up almost without parallel for depth, and richness, and originality; and schools of poetry and philosophy various as those of Athens. Tieck has led one school, Goethe another; and if officious followers attempted to push them into rivalry, each knew his own place too well for such unnatural feud to endure.

The first startling feature, then, in all the characters in these tales is their terrible reality. In all the circumstances of the wild and wonderful, the supernatural working visibly, and interfering in the direction and control for good and evil of the affairs of the world; instead of finding the persons of the same fantastic character, such as we might naturally expect, as harmonising better with the elements in which they work; instead of saints with power of working miracles, or the ideal heroes of the age of chivalry,—we have the very men and women which we ourselves are, and such as we see every day around us. Excepting, perhaps, Goethe, no one knew his own age better than Tieck: he is a modern poet in every sense of the word; and that is why we claim so high a place for him.

The true poet of any time is he who can make that time transparent—who can let his readers in behind the curtain of their own souls and that of the society in which they live, and shew them what they are all doing, hoping, fearing—clear up their cloudy perceptions, and say for them what they would say for themselves if they could. This is exactly what Tieck does. His Emilius's, Egberts, Ludwigs,—what are they all, but the very men of whom every day he walked into the street he saw thousands? No matter what the conditions be under which he pictures them working, his men are real men, not fantastic; and that is all we have any right to require.

Yet I may say something about these marvellous conditions in which they appear; for perhaps even they are not so unreal as they seem.

It is only because we are used to them that this world and the beings that inhabit it do not seem wonderful. There is nothing in the phenomena which surround us abstractedly more reasonable than any other set might be which worked by fixed rules. As a matter of fact we experience one class, but that is all. It is not that one is wonderful and the other simple, as people seem to assume. This world we live in is, indeed, teeming with wonders. The poet has but to hold a magnifying-glass before it, and forthwith a thousand new forms of beauty start out before our eyes; and what before seemed most beautiful has become a monster. There are, indeed, poets who can produce the highest effect without any such magnifying; and the world as mirrored in their minds appears transfigured, its form and proportions continuing all the same. Yet the number of such spirits as have appeared on this planet of ours we may count upon our fingers, and of those who are fit to read and understand them the ratio is the same. Even Shakspere does not at times disdain the aid of the supernatural; and the idea of nature, as Tieck offers it, even its wildest and most fantastic form, is far deeper and nearer the truth than is the dull, common-place, lifeless thing which most men seem to regard it as. The question, however, is one which he will best qualify people to answer for themselves.

Most of the tales in the present volume belong to the "Phantasus." A party of persons meet together for conversation on various subjects of art and literature, and these stories, with sundry other dramas, are read aloud by different members of the society. They are introduced with the following prefatory dialogue:—

"It is not at every moment, nor every time we choose to turn to her," said Antony, "that Nature will unfold her secrets to us; or rather, it is not always that we are in the mood to feel her sacredness. There must first be a harmony in ourselves, if we are to find what surrounds us harmonious; otherwise we do but cheat ourselves with empty phrases, without ever rising to a true enjoyment of beauty. It may be, perhaps, that there are times when unexpectedly some blessed influence descends out of Heaven upon our hearts, and unlocks the door of inspiration; but towards this we can add nothing. We have no right, no means of looking for it; it is a revelation within us we know not how. So much is certain, that it is not above twice, or at most three times, in a man's life that he has the fortune, in any true sense, to see a sunrise. When we do see it, it does not pass away like a summer cloud before our minds; rather it forms one of the great epochs in our lives. From such ecstatic feelings as we receive then it is long and long ere we recover; by the side of these exalted moments years dwindle into nothingness. But it is only in the calmness of solitude that these high gifts can descend upon us. A party collecting itself to see it as a sight on the top of a mountain, is only standing as it were before an exhibition at a theatre, and can bring from it nothing but the same kind of empty pleasure and foolish criticisms."

"Still stranger is it," said Ernest, "that the great majority of men are so dead to that awe and wonder, that fearful amazement with which Nature often fills some minds. If they can feel it, it is only as an obscure bewildered sensation of they know not what."

"It is not only on the dreary peaks of the St. Gothard that we can feel the terribleness of Nature. There are times when the most beautiful scene is full of spectres that fly shrieking and screaming across our hearts. Such strange shadowy forms, such wild forebodings, go often hunting up and down our fancy, that we are fain to fly from them in terror, and rid ourselves of our phantom rider, by plunging into the dissipations of the world. While under such influences wild poems and stories often rise up in us to people the dreary chaos of desolation, and adorn it with creations of art; and these forms and figures will be unconscious betrayers of the tone and temper of the mind in which they spring. In these kind of stories the beautiful mingles itself with the terrible, the sublime with the childish, goading our fancy into a kind of poetic madness, and then turning it to roam at will through the entire fabric of our souls."

"Are the stories you are going to read to us of this kind?" asked Clara.

"Perhaps," replied Ernest.

"And not allegorical?"

"As you please to call them. There is not, and there cannot be any creation of art which has not some kind of allegory at the bottom of it, however little it may let itself be seen. The two forms of good and evil appear in every poem; they meet us at every turn, in every thing man produces, as the one eternal riddle in an endless multiplicity of forms, which he is for ever struggling to resolve. As there are particular aspects in which the most every-day life appears like a myth, so it is possible to feel oneself in as close connexion with, as much at home in the middle of the wildest wonders as the ordinary incidents of life. One may go so far as to say, that the commonest, simplest, pleasantest things, as well as the most marvellous, can only be said to be true, can only exert an influence on our minds, in so far as they contain some allegory as their groundwork, as the link which connects them with the system of the universe. This is why Dante's allegories come so home to us, because they pierce through and through to the very heart and centre of reality. Novalis says, there is no real history, except what might be fable. Of course, there are many weak and sickly poems of this kind, which merely drag wearily on to the moral, without taking the imagination along with them; and these of all the different sorts of instruction or entertainment are the most tiresome. But it is time to proceed to our tales."

And here we would gladly leave this matter, and let the tales tell their own story. What their idea is as a whole, they speak plainly enough; and it would be to destroy their effect, as well as to misunderstand the whole theory of this kind of fiction, to translate them into a series of moral reflections, and append a didactic sentiment to them as to one of Æsop's fables. And yet English readers will not be content with a suggestion of allegory; they will be asking for meanings, and requiring to have the whole matter laid out before them in fair, plain characters of black and white; so that notwithstanding my full consciousness of the general undesirableness and the unphilosophical nature of such a proceeding, I will offer a few general remarks, in the way of elucidation, for three or four of these stories, which shall put people on the scent to find the real meaning, not only of these stories in particular, but in general of any such as may be brought before them. Consoling myself, therefore, with the reflection that a preface is always read, as it is written, the last thing in a book, and that in that case my explanation can hurt no one, and may be of some profit to those who have failed to see any thing for themselves, I proceed.

"Egbert," "Eckhart," and the "Runenberg," naturally form into a group together. They are different exhibitions of very similar ideas, and it will be enough to explain one. I should advise people, however, to read the three together straightforward, and then try to analyse for themselves the impression left upon their minds. Perhaps it may be something of this sort: that a single sin unrepented of and unatoned for becomes a destiny; a seed from which, however diminutive and trifling it may look, a whole life of crime and wickedness shoots up as a matter of course, perhaps inevitably. Cause and effect, effect and cause, going on producing and reproducing each other, each successive step leading further and deeper into the mire, return becoming more and more difficult, and at last impossible.

Look at Christian in the "Runenberg." He is born to a calm and serene life of tranquillity and peace; affectionate parents—a simple routine of the gentlest and most beautiful of all nature's choicest occupations—far away from all temptation—secure from every danger—a home that ought to have given him all, and more than all, of enjoyment and content,—whose life could promise more happily than his? Yet he has no love, no heart, no feeling for it. His sense of duty is not strong enough to set him to work; he finds it dull and uninteresting; he craves for excitement, for something new. The plain life is not grand enough to suit his exalted aspirations: he must go to the mountains, to the ups and downs, and rough and rugged ways of the world, where he may climb, and hunt, and seek a broader range for activity and enjoyment; he does not think of asking leave—he goes; he never regrets leaving home; and at first finds all bright, and gay, and delightful sunshine. The happy, happy hunting-time; and who so happy in it as Christian? But it soon palls—it does not satisfy. The cup is poisoned, there is a gall and wormwood in the taste the sweet leaves behind; and again he thinks of home. He sings his old song; but the words come wearily and listlessly—he has no heart for hunting any more. He wishes to be at home again; but he makes no effort. The mysterious mandrake in sympathy with his old life wakes up and speaks to him. It is the warning-voice of conscience; but he dreams on. The tempter comes, and he is lost irretrievably. The moment of return is offered—now or never! and he refuses. He does not stay among the mountains; he flies away to the plains beyond; he flings off, as he fondly believes, the dark mysterious incidents of that night, as a wild and impious dream; he thinks he is what he was; away he goes again to the plains to his old employment, and he is happy, industrious, contented in it. Every thing again looks smooth, and bright, and beautiful; but he has not gone back, and now he may not. What should have been for his peace, now is but a further snare to make him fancy all is right with him. He does indeed set out to seek his father, but wearily and unwillingly. His way would have led him back over the mountains; but there he is not permitted to go. The object of his journey comes to meet him; they go back together; he becomes more and more prosperous, and sinks deeper and deeper into his fatal delusion. Yet the fatal tablet is in his heart, the bond by which he is bound to evil; even on his wedding-night he cannot forget the giver. At length the long-smothered poison burst out with all its fury, and flowers touch his heart no more. He curses them and nature; the warning mandrake, instead of the voice of conscience, is but a revelation of the power of evil. It has but taught him to despair, and seek his friends elsewhere; and he is lost for ever.

Of the more awful person in this fearful story I will not speak; but for the outline of the fate of Christian, who can look round him into the most ordinary life, and not see innumerable instances of it? The burden of the other two stories is very similar: the way to understand them is to try and analyse the feelings left on our mind by the whole, and not distract ourselves by assuming a fancied meaning, and speculating with the particulars to make each fragment fit our theory. Do not let us perplex ourselves to find out what the little dog is, what is the meaning of the bird, and the old woman. They may have many meanings; but we shall never find them by beginning at that end. It is only by the light of the whole that the parts become intelligible.

"The Love-charm" is a work of a different nature; it is one of the most remarkable of all Tieck's writings, and, as far as we know, stands alone among the productions of modern art. With the help of a popular German superstition, he has woven a tragedy out of the ordinary events of every-day life, the spirit of which approaches as near as modern thought can be made to approach to the fatalism of the Greek drama. A destiny of some kind, either moral or external, is essential to tragedy. What we mean by "the terrible" as applied to human action, is, that the free will of man is laid under the influence of some external power, which he has little or no ability to resist, which hurries him on through a series of action and incident, from which, if in full possession of his self-control, he would shrink in horror. Thus, in common life the crimes men commit under the influence of any of the loftier passions, such as love or revenge, or when goaded on by famine or despair, or which men do in ignorance, when the ignorance may partially, but not entirely, be their own fault, are terrible, and therefore tragic. The individual seems to be sacrificed, not to deserve all that has fallen on him; his fate becomes one of the startling mysteries of life. The meaner or more selfish the passion under which the crime is committed, or the cooler and more deliberate the action, the more what he does loses the character of tragic, and becomes merely disgusting. Pity goes with terror, and in such cases there can be no pity. The destiny in Shakspere's tragedies is a moral one; not an external power constraining, but an internal power impelling; working not against, but in and through the will. Such was the influence of his father's spirit on Hamlet, Hecate and the Witches on Macbeth, Iago's intellect on Othello, and so on with the rest. The Greek destiny, though in our way of thinking less human, is more terrible even than that of Shakspere. The sins of the fathers visited on the children, curses continuing to work generation after generation, and the helpless struggle of the victim only precipitating him into a darker doom—there is a stern grandeur about this form of thought; it is a feature of a broader philosophy than ours to bear to see the individual sacrificed, and believe that in some mysterious way the well-being of the whole is furthered by it, "with calm self-surrender to hear the murderer's hand upon a brother's throat, yet stand with upturned unquailing eyes before the everlasting Providence." It is a scheme of thought so unlike ours that we can hardly realise it, it is so like a monster to us. Yet this Love-charm is an attempt to do it; and although the spell is but over a single person, and forms no portion of a broad scheme of Providence; although for the stately forms of kings and heroes stalking across the stage, we have but the ball-going ladies and gentlemen of the eighteenth century, and but an old witch for the Delphic oracle, or the gods appearing in visible form; few people can rise from reading it without having been made to feel that this life, after all, is a stranger thing than they have been in the habit of imagining.

Emilius's character is eminently tragic. He has every feature which can interest us, without that moral or religious force in him which would make us feel shocked at his fate. The Greeks felt that good and holy men were no fitter subjects of tragedy than very wicked ones. There is something revolting (μιαρόν) in the idea that a good man can be allowed even in ignorance to fall into crime. Whatever be the mysterious ways of Providence; whatever fearful power there may be abroad, working on and influencing the destinies of mankind; what indeed is the meaning of the prince of the power of the air, or whether there be really such an element as chance; this, at least, we must believe, that the good man is in the hands of the Highest, and that the laws of nature would sooner be reversed than he be let fall from His hands. But Emilius is a dreamer, whose power exhausts itself in speculation, and never acts at all except on impulse: without firmness, without will to give oneness of design and consistency to his actions, this character—which is no law to itself, which will not command itself, no matter how pure may be in general its purposes, or how lofty its aspirations—is exactly the one most open to be laid under the spell of some other force. Every man's life, taken from beginning to end, looked back upon presents an exhibition of some one law or principle; whatever it be, in the end it is found to be tolerably uniform and consistent: its principle may be an internal one of will and conscience; if it is not this, if it grows not out of self-command, it is pretty sure to be some more fatally perilous one.

Emilius is admirably worked throughout. Contrast his feelings towards man and nature, and life and love, as they appear in the first short poem, and what they have become a few hours later, merely from the excitement and irritation produced by the ball. The scene of the village-marriage, the young man's warmth and nobleness, and exquisite susceptibility, are introduced to heighten our pity for his fate; while the way in which he is led to it, in a dreamy mood, listlessly yielding to the caprice of a wayward companion, and not from any real wish to find out want and relieve suffering, reduces the value of the action to a mere gratification of a passion, and thus, while it deepens our sympathy, adds nothing to our respect. The concluding scene is so magnificent, that we cannot run the risk of injuring its effect by offering any criticism on it; and with these few words we leave the "Love-charm."

In "Eckhart" and the "Runenberg" we have seen some of the moral trials which meet men on first starting into life. In the "Friends" we have the lighter kind of speculative. A very little philosophy serves to teach us how very unreal every thing is that passes before our eyes; how it all takes a colouring from our spirits; how the very same thing appears almost contradictory to different people, or to the same person in different moods; that we do not so much see things themselves, as our own image thrown into them. Accordingly, men begin to crave for a truer insight; they try to clear their intellect of the gauzy film of feeling, and see things as they are. Ludwig, a young indolent dreamer, full of all this kind of sentimental longing to be rid of sentimentality, is on his way to visit a sick friend. He sits down in the heat of the day under a tree to indulge in the pleasure of a little disconsolate reflection on his friend's melancholy letter, and insensibly falls off into a sleep, and dreams. At once he finds all the difficulties of the world solved for him, all his highest aspirations satisfied. The chasm that divides the worlds of sense and spirit is bridged over; his mind meets its true objects. The earth he despised he is now relieved from; the deceptions of nature all vanish; he sees things as they are; he is in the real world of truth and beauty; nothing is subjective any longer; he breathes a real genuine objectivity; all mortal weaknesses, and with them love, may not enter here; the phantoms of his childhood flit before him again, but no longer as they were; they are transfigured into the cold sublimity of Grecian goddesses. Alas! he is far from satisfied; after the first few days of rapture, he would gladly be on earth again. He wished to be as the gods; his wish is granted, and among the gods he cannot live. This cold world may be a very grand place, but it is not for such as him. Like Lessing's Phœnix, at first sight the dwellers here seem beautiful beyond all conception; the second glance shews that if a man will be like them he must be content to be the only one of his race, with none to love him and none that he can love. "He is like the spirits he can comprehend, not like them." The truth he sought, he finds he has left behind; the old earth is his true home; and men, be they what they will, are his brothers. His friend comes to meet him; but he does not know him again, because here for the first time he sees him as he is, while before he had only seen in him the image of himself. If this be truth, he is sick of it; he sighs for the deception again, if deception it was that had been so delightful; he wakes to find his vision but a dream, in the sweet reality of his friend's embrace.

The "Elves," the last story which we shall notice, is of a far more solemn character; with all its beauty, it has a sad dirge-like tone. Written fourteen years later than the others, it is now the true poet's lament over the hard insensibility of the world to its true good. The world of spirit lies stretched out under the eyes of the children of earth; the invisible visible; but from earth and to earthly perceptions, dull, gloomy, unattractive. To the busy practical man of business, to the prudential economist, the man of understanding, the workers in it seem but idle, worthless vagabonds; these lazy good-for-nothings, that scarcely till the ground, are never seen at church, and shew no symptom of respectability; why do they cumber the earth? the talk is of cage and pillory for them; no child of theirs may approach the unhallowed precincts. Accident leads a young girl beyond the boundary, and then how changed is every thing! The dull scene has become more brilliant than the gardens of Aladdin; scales fall from her eyes; now it is the old world that is dark and gloomy. Down among the mysteries of the fountains of Nature, she sees her now no longer yielding reluctantly an unwilling pittance to the sweat of the labour of man, but uncursed. At the word of the dwellers in that enchanted land, her choicest fruits and flowers she pours out in lavish abundance. The spirits of the elements work visibly there, and the mortal sees them, and knows now who are the true benefactors of mankind. Time and space exist not for these pure beings. Seven years are gone in one night, and the narrow fir-clump contains the garden of Eden.

The mortal goes back to earth: what she has seen she may not tell. These esoteric secrets of the poet are not for the crawling animal who cannot hold himself upright, nor turn his eyes to heaven, and who only knows the sun by the sight of his own shadow: but one of them she weds; and the child of these two—oh, what may we not hope from that child! Alas, in vain! In vain, from the secret labours of these beautiful beings, the brooks run fresh and full, and the fields overflow with plenty. Men will not see; in the midst of their abundance they curse the author of it. In an evil hour of weakness the initiated betrays the secret, and then all is gone. The gloom of the fir-clump vanishes; it becomes like any other. The gipsy rabble are gone; what all men hated, they are relieved of; but with this comes the loss, too, of all they prized—their corn, their wine, and fruitful trees. Famine comes, and drought and pestilence; the elfin child dies, and all is ruin and disaster. They see not their tokens. There is not one prophet more. What a deep philosophy runs through all this!

Have we heard our prophets? At the end of the last century one said:—

"Yes, another era is already dawning upon earth, when it shall be light, when man shall wake from high and lofty dreams; and these dreams he shall find realised, and that he has lost nothing but sleep.

"The rocks and stones which two veiled figures, Sin and Destiny, like Deucalion and Pyrrha, fling behind them at their true prophet, shall rise and be new men.

"And at the sunset gate of this age stands written, 'Here lies the way to wisdom and to virtue;' as at the west gate of the Chersonese the proud writing, 'Here lies the way to Byzantium.'

"O eternal Providence, thou wilt that it shall be light!"

Whether this prophecy be fulfilled or fulfilling, and whether Germany has yet done any thing to the accomplishment of it, is for time to shew. So much is clear, that not here in England only, but all Europe over, there is a move forward—a cry of hunger and thirst for something deeper and truer; and to this move no living man has more contributed than Ludwig Tieck. He is the last, the only survivor of the noble band of German poets; and Europe has not a man of whom she is more justly proud.

The morning of his life broke in storm and tempest. Like some infant river just starting from its snowy cradle in its native mountains, foaming and dashing down its narrow bed, bounding from rock to rock, and powdering the air with vapour, which catches the sun's rays as it rises, and shivers them into a thousand brilliant hues,—his strong mind broke fiercely and impetuously from the clouds of error, and unbelief, and freezing scepticism, in which it was nurtured; at first, with loud questionings of fate, troubled and dark, yet, with all its fallings, flinging round itself in the wildest profusion rays and flashes of exquisite beauty. It rolls on down from its mountains; it has swept now over every rock and shoal, and flows on calm, serene, and deep, and clear through smiling fields, and woods, and villages, and happy men and women, bearing on its broad bosom all who trust themselves on it for profit or enjoyment, from the tiny pleasure-boat of the young lover to the tall ship sweeping proudly forward, laden with the choicest fruits and produce of every clime. As the heavens draw up the water from the ocean, and, lading their clouds with it, bear it off into the centre of huge continents, and with it start new fountains into life, which again, winding as veins through all lands, and scattering blessings as they go, flow back at last into their parent sea,—so in all ages pure wisdom, entering into lofty spirits, sends them down through their generation, scoring out deep channels on it as they pass: the stream of life and light makes its way again to the source from which it came; but with this mortal life it ceases not to flow: its recipients become the veins of the world, and while the world lasts they endure—as the channels of truth where men drink and live. And one of them is Tieck.

J. A. F.