the incidents of his fables, in the sentences of unparalleled solemnity and magnificence, delivered as part of the dialogue of his speakers, nay, in the very conceits and quibbles of his clowns, lessons of the most elevated and comprehensive morality. Some of them have at times almost tempted me to believe in them as of more than poetical inspiration. But, excepting John Kemble and Mrs. Siddons, I never met with a player who appeared to me to have thought of Shakspeare as a moralist at all, or to have inquired what were the morals that he taught; and, as I have said, John Kemble did not appear to me to understand the character of Hamlet. Garrick himself attempted to strike out the grave-digger scene from the tragedy of Hamlet, and the very rabble of London, the gods of the galleries, forced him to restore it. There is not, in the compass of the drama, a scene of deeper and more philosophical morality.

THE WANDERER'S FAREWELL.

FROM THE GERMAN OF KOERNER.

ONCE more let it sparkle and gladden the heart!
Farewell, loves and friendships! for ever we part!
Ye mountains! farewell, and thou once happy home!
A power resistless impels me to roam.

The sun in the heavenly fields knows no stay —
O'er land and o'er ocean he rides far away;
The waves linger not as they roll on the sand,
And the storms in their fury sweep over the land.

The bird on the light floating cloud sails along,
And sings in the distance his dear native song;
Through woodland and meadow the youth rushes forth,
To rival the wanderer, old mother Earth.

HERMEUS;

OR LETTERS FROM A MODERN GREEK.

YET if, as holiest men have deemed, there be
A land of souls beyond that sable shore,
To shame the doctrine of the Sadducee
And Sophist, madly vain of dubious lore;
How sweet it were in concert to adore
With those who made our mortal labor light!
To hear each voice we feared to hear no more!
Behold each mighty shade revealed to sight —
The Bactrian, Samian sage, and all who taught the right!

From Alexis Hermeus,

To Adelheid Eichwald,

Greek Professor at

University. Athens, 1834.

You know how heavy has

I nerved my heart to bear

To you, my kind, my learned friend, I feel a melancholy pleasure in pouring out the overflowing of my soul. been the pressure of domestic affliction. my wrongs with calmness, my griefs with courage. My father! thy murdered manes cried aloud for vengeance our oppressors felt thy spirit nerve my arm, and carry terror amidst their ranks. The darling of thy age, my beautiful sister, my Euthasie, what though the dirk pierced not thy bosom - though thy lovely form was not mangled by the murderer's steel-driven forth from the home of thy youth, our palace halls, endeavoring by flight to save that life for thy parent which sorrow had already embittered; and when the shock came, which told thee of our father's fate, bearing up under sickness and grief, to be able once more to fling thyself into my arms, to die upon my bosom. All the tender ties which had hitherto given a charm to my existence being thus rudely broken, all that remained to me of hope was staked on the deliverance of my country. Alas! this hope, like every other which warmed my heart in life's spring, or kindled a glow in the ardent season of manhood, has faded away, and I am left alone the last of my race-a wanderer amidst the deserted halls of my fathers, to sigh at the remembrance of past happiness and mourn over the blighted honors of my line.

Years have passed away since these melancholy events; yet remembrance haunts me still. Time passes on, and though he cannot

bring oblivion of my injuries and griefs, he has touched them with his wand, and softened the poignancy of my despair. Even at the first I sank not my country called, and I was not deaf to her voice. Greece, bleeding and oppressed, cried aloud to her children to rescue her from slavery and slaughter. You know how long and arduous was the struggle. What have her champions gained by their blood? Their unexampled heroism and devotion? Rivalry, ambition, and civil intrigues mar its internal peace; whilst jealousy of each other has made its rulers become its tyrants.

You endeavor in your letters, my kind friend, to revive ambition in my soul, and give life a new impetus; and could I efface the lines from the tablets of my memory, it would make me proud of my country to hear one, whose mind is embued with so vast a store of learning and philosophy, the wisdom of all ages, speak of it with such enthusiasm and veneration. But alas, it is ancient Greece you venerate; your enthusiasm is excited for those poets and philosophers, who gained for her the admiration, and made her the school of the world. It was these who obtained her sons the glory of becoming the masters of her victory! Such is the omnipotence of genius!

The conquerors of the world- those before whose august tribunal princes came from the farthest limits of the then known world, to adjust their differences, to solicit alliance, and claim protection became themselves scholars and disciples, and stood in humble respect, as some indigent philosopher revealed to them the veiled lore of Pythagoras and Plato, the severe morality of Zeno. And what was their reward? Not alone the possession of that elevation of mind which the pursuit of wisdom, the practice of virtue ever gives; but they had the glory of rendering their fame, and the Roman name, more lasting than, by all the extent of their conquests, their collossal trophies of art, gigantic indications of their wealth and power. For that wisdom and knowledge, and those sublime precepts of virtue, which the Grecians had robed in garb as fanciful as their own brilliant imaginations, and emblematical, as veiling from the vulgar those philosophic truths the ignorant could not comprehend, the Romans transported to a region. where reason reigned in august supremacy, robed them in the dignity of the Roman gown, and embodied in the majesty of the Latin tongue. It was from the various schools of Greece that Tully acquired that wisdom which has secured him the immortality he sought. It was the abstract love of virtue, the self-denial inculcated by Zeno, which we find inspiring the actions and guiding the pens of Cato and Brutus. It was the gentler, and not less elevated wisdom of the Academy, which we see reduced to practice in the lives of the elder and younger Pliny. It is the transfusion of these by Latin genius into the Latin tongue, which will make that language, with that of Greece, immortal

as genius; and has made these two languages become the peculiar study of those, in every portion of the globe, who would quaff of the Hyperian spring, not in its turbid and shallow meanderings, but at its pellucid and unfathomable fount.

The son of a degenerate race; born at a period when every patriot must blush to own the land of his birth; beholding that beloved land, the dearer to my heart for its wrongs and its sufferings, alternately the spoil of foreign oppressors or the prey of her domestic tyrants; seeing the path to honorable distinction closed to the virtuous, and office and power the reward of base sycophancy to the ambitious holder of present power; or purchased by villany, by pandering to the bad passions of a debased and ignorant populace you know how deeply I mourn its degradation. Wandering amidst the wrecks of its former glory, by dwelling continually on what it has been, I endeavor to forget what it is. Sometimes, when the blighted visions of my youth, honor and fame, conjured up by memory, cause my breast to glow, I wish myself the inhabitant of some other country, where talents and valor might open the path to glory; of your country, whose sons seem embued with the love of knowledge, perseverance in its attainment, and enthusiasm in its honor, which once characterized mine. But no! Greece is still my country, and I love it even in its desolation. I love to imagine what it may become, should it ever be under the sway of an enlightened prince, who should be able to destroy the factions which now distract its peace; and the vigorous administration of wise laws re-elevate the minds of his subjects, incite them to industry, and awaken such a commercial spirit, as shall furnish them with employment and ensure its reward— plenty and wealth. It was in the hope soon to see realized these dearly cherished projects for my country's good, that I accompanied my noble relative on his mission to Bavaria, which enabled me to renew my intimacy with you and revive the ardor of our friendship. Farewell.

LETTER 2.

Athens, 1835.

How encouraging are the hopes you hold out to me, my friend, my preceptor, my guide, in the pursuit of that knowledge which your affection led you to say was the only pursuit worthy of my genius and my talents. You found me brooding in melancholy despondency over the remembrance of past sorrows and the state of my country. My visit to Munich, and subsequent introduction to some of the most distinguished of your countrymen, by making me draw a comparison between the state of Greece and other countries, at present more fortunate though less favored by nature, who has showered here with a liberal hand all her most precious gifts, has made me feel that her con

dition is irremediable; and your enthusiasm and antiquarian researches respecting ancient Greece, have led me to a deeper study of the works of her sages, a more minute investigation of her history. From dwelling continually on the means of enabling her to resume her station among the nations of the world, by soliciting the aid of interested foreign powers, jealous of each other and foes to liberty, I have now learned to behold her as she is, and to know that her degradation has been not more owing to her long subjection and the cruel policy of her oppressors, than to the extinction of the glow of honour and the love of virtue in her sons, which characterized their ancestors. I endeavor, therefore, to close my ears to the hearing of her treasons and betrayals, I avoid the sight of her sorrows, and seek oblivion of the past and present, by absorbing my mind with those stores of learning which you first lured me to investigate. Wandering by the banks of the Illissus, or reposing from the ardent beams of the sun under the shade of the Acropolis, I have by turns investigated the ethics and philosophy inculcated in the Academy, the Lycæum, and the Portico; and that energy and ambition which in happier times might have been exerted for the benefit and glory of my country, now repressed but not extinct, gives new impetus to the soarings of intellect.

Thus all the faculties of my soul are absorbed in the elucidation of those sublime theogonies, where science appeared concealed from the vulgar by a veil emblematical and allegorical, which to the eye of the initiated made her appear but the more lovely.

From the writings of the later Platonists I ascend to Plato himself, and find that he has but defined and extended that mystic theology which Pythagoras taught and Orpheus first brought to Greece. This theology, which had for its basis the intelligence, the spiritual wholeness of the deity, and the immortality of the soul, Orpheus learned of the Egyptians, the immediate source from which Greece acquired her arts, her learning, and the most sublime tenets of her religion.

But whence did Egypt derive her arts and civilization? did these in their progress descend the Nile, and were the now burning plains of Ethiopia, as many have supposed, the nurse of that learning and science which Egypt transmitted to Europe? Or was it under the genial skies, amid the spicy hills, the fertile plains of Asia, that man first asserted the dignity of his nature, and unfoldéd those intellectual powers which indicated the divinity of the soul by which he is animated? Is it to farther India and China, now moving retrograde in the scale of civilization, that we must refer for the dawn of that mental light which has progressively illumined every portion of this continent, till we now behold its promising effulgence in the west?

Since I have received a copy of your erudite work, I spend much of my time at Eleusis. Often in my boyhood did I wander amid these