are really the essence of all morality, instead of making us yawn, startle us like original and novel fancies. His im. agination transfigures the meanest things, and conveys the commonest thoughts in words that haunt the memory. In his fine characterizations of Schiller and Alfieri, how admirably he contrasts the two men: "The mind of the one is like the ocean, beautiful in its strength, smiling in the radiance of summer, and washing luxuriant and romantic shores; that of the other is like some black, unfathomable lake placed far mid the melancholy mountains; bleak, solitary, desolate, but girdled with grim sky-piercing cliffs, overshadowed with storms, and illuminated only by the red glare of the lightning." How vividly by a few suggestive words he brings Johnson before us,-not the Johnson of Macaulay, the squalid, unkempt giant in dirty linen, with straining eye-balls, greedily devouring his victuals,not the husk or larvae of the literary leviathan, the poor scrofula-scarred body without the soul, but Johnson "with his great greedy heart and unspeakable chaos of thoughts; stalking mournful on this earth, eagerly devouring what spiritual thing he could come at,"-in short, the grand old moral hero as he is, in the very center and core of his being! A kind of grim Cyclopean humor gives additional pungency to Carlyle's style, which,-" if it is a Joseph's coat of many colors, is dyed red with the blood of passionate conviction." Cherishing, and even parading, an utter contempt for literary art, he sacrifices truth itself to be artistical, and is, in fact, with many glaring faults, one of the greatest literary artists of the time.

Why, to take an opposite illustration, has John Neal, in spite of his acknowledged genius, been so speedily forgotten by the public whose eye he once so dazzled? - why, but

because, holding the absurd theory that a man should write as he talks, and despising the niceties of skill, he bestows no artistic finish on his literary gems, but, like the gorgeous East,

"showers from his lap

Barbaric pearls and gold,"

with all their incrustations "thick upon them"? With less prodigality of thought and more patience in execution, he might have won a broad and enduring fame; but, as it is, he is known to but few, and by them viewed as a meteor in the literary firmanent, rather than as a fixed star or luminous planet. Washington Irving has probably less genius than Neal; but by his artistic skill he would make more of a Scotch pebble than Neal of the crown jewel of the Emperor of all the Russias.

That we have not exaggerated the value of style,— that it is, in truth, an alchemy which can transmute the basest metal into gold,— will appear still more clearly if we compare the literatures of different nations. That there are national as well as individual styles, with contrasts equally salient or glaring, is known to every scholar. Metaphors and similes are racy of the soil in which they grow, as you taste, it is said, the lava in the vines on the slopes of Etna. As thinkers, the Germans have to-day no equals on the globe. In their systems of philosophy the speculative intellect of our race,- its power of long, concatenated, exhaustive thinking,—seems to have reached its culmination. Never content with a surface examination of any subject, they dig down to the "hard pan," the eternal granite which underlies all the other strata of truth. As compilers of dictionaries, as accumulators of facts, as producers of thought in the ore, their bookmakers have no peers. The

German language, too, must be admitted to be one of the most powerful instruments of thought and feeling to which human wit has given birth. But all these advantages are, to a great extent, neutralized by the frightful heaviness and incredible clumsiness of the German literary style. Whether as a providential protection of other nations against the foggy metaphysics and subtle skepticism of that country, or because to have given it a genius for artistic composition as well as thought, would have been an invidious partiality, it is plain that, in the distribution of good things, the advantages of form were not granted to the Teutons. In Bacon's phrase, they are "the Herculeses, not the Adonises of literature." They are, with a few noble exceptions, the hewers of wood and drawers of water for all the other literatures of the world. The writers of other countries, being blessed more or less with the synthetic and artistic power which they lack, pillage mercilessly, without acknowledgment, the storehouses which they have laboriously filled, and dressing up the stolen materials in attractive forms, pass them off as their own property. It is one of the paradoxes of literary history, that a people who have done more for the textual accuracy and interpretation of the Greek and Roman classics than all the other European nations put together, who have taught the world the classic tongues with pedagogic authority,-- should have caught so little of the inspiration, spirit, and style of those eternal models.

The fatigue which the German style inflicts upon the human brain is even greater than that which their barbarous Gothic letter, a relic of the fifteenth century, blackening all the page, inflicts upon the eye. The principal faults of this style are involution, prolixity, and obscurity. The

sentences are interminable in length, stuffed with parentheses within parentheses, and as full of folds as a sleeping boa-constrictor. Of paragraphs, of beauty in the balancing and structure of periods, and of the art by which a succession of periods may modify each other, the German prosewriter has apparently no conception. Instead of breaking up his "cubic thought" into small and manageable pieces, he quarries it out in huge, unwieldy masses, indifferent to its shape, structure or polish. He gives you real gold, but it is gold in the ore, mingled with quartz, dirt and sand, hardly ever gold polished into splendor, or minted into coin. Every German, according to De Quincey, regards a sentence in the light of a package, and a package not for the mail-coach, but for the wagon, into which it is his privilege to crowd as much as he possibly can. Having framed a sentence, therefore, he next proceeds to pack it, which is effected partly by unwieldy tails and codicils, but chiefly by enormous parenthetic involutions. All qualifications, limitations, exceptions, illustrations, and even hints and insinuations, that they may be grasped at once and presented in one view, are "stuffed and violently rammed into the bowels of the principal proposition." What being of flesh and blood, with average lungs, can go through a book made up of such sentences, some of them twenty or thirty lines in length, with hardly a break or a solitary semicolon to relieve the eye or cheat the painful journey, without gasping for breath, and utterly forgetting the beginning, especially when a part of the poor dislocated verb, upon which the whole meaning of the sentence hinges, is withheld till the close? Our countryman, Rufus Choate, had a genius for long periods; his eulogy on Webster contains one which stretches over more than four pages; but even he yields

to Kant. It is said that some of the latter's sentences have been carefully measured by a carpenter's rule, and found to measure two feet eight by six inches. Who, but a trained intellectual pedestrian, a Rowell or Weston, could hope to travel through such a labyrinth of words, in which there is sometimes no halting-place for three closely-printed octavo pages, without being footsore, or bursting a bloodvessel? Is it strange that other peoples, who do not think long windedness excusable because Kant has shown that Time and Space have no actual existence, but are only forms of thought, are offended by a literature that abounds in such Chinese puzzles? Can we wonder that the German bullion of thought, however weighty or valuable, has to be coined in France before it can pass into the general circulation of the world?

In direct contrast to the heavy, dragging German style, is the brisk, vivacious, sparkling style of the French. All the qualities which the Teutons lack,- form, method, proportion, grace, refinement, the stamp of good society,— the Gallic writers have in abundance; and these qualities are found not only in the masters, like Pascal, Voltaire, Courier, or Sand, but in the second and third-class writers, like Taine and Prevost-Paradol. Search any of the French writers from Montaigne to Renan, and you will have to hunt as long for an obscure sentence as in a German author for a clear one. Dip where you will into their pages, you find every sentence written as with a sunbeam. They state their meaning so clearly, that not only can you not mistake it, but you feel that no other proper collocation of words is conceivable. It is like casting to a statue, the metal flows into its mould, and is there fixed forever. If, in reading a German book, you seem to be jolting over a craggy moun