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hands solely of dry chroniclers, theologians, or philologists. The few quotations we have given may serve to show the tone which is at present adopted. We are capable, however, of giving but a very faint idea of the extent and character of the historical literature of Germany, and we hope our readers will supply our deficiency by studying it themselves. We might mar their pleasure if we taught them to expect more than they will find. The difficulty we often have to comprehend a foreign author diminishes the pleasure his works are calculated to afford. German poetry, we are assured, has been injured in the estimation of many readers by the undue praise which its admirers have bestowed on it; and we should injure the writings of German historians if we were to lead our readers to look for many new views and new truths in them. History makes no flights, and it is honour enough to an historian if he barely surpasses his predecessor. The works, therefore, of which we have spoken can only supply farther illustrations and proofs of truths with which we were before familiar. It is, fortunately, not given to an individual, nor to a generation, to add many new charms to life, or to make many great advances in science; if it were, we should grow too proud in our strength, and forget or despise the generation which preceded us. We are bound to our parents by resembling them in passions, virtues, sentiments, and failings, and the change is not desirable to lose the affections of children for the vanity of knowledge. It is given to the eagle to soar, but his eye is insensible to the beauty over which he hovers. Man must climb the mountain with slow and laborious steps, but he enjoys the goodly prospect as he ascends, and surveys with wondrous delight, not only the beauty beneath him, but the difficulties he has overcome. He is grateful for his own powers, and also for the paths which have been smoothed, and the steps which have been made by those who have gone before him.

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public mind will find his account in gratifying it while it lasts. It is hard to say, however, whether the noble author, whose industry or fertility keeps pace with our eagerness for violent excitement, has produced this appetite, or merely pampered it, where a predisposition of this nature already existed. We were born in an age, not merely of wonders, but of unexampled outrage. Direness is grown familiar to our thoughts; and, after supping full of horrors during the French Revolution, the peninsular wars, and the fearful desolation of Moscow, followed, too, so closely by the angel of wrath, who poured the frozen tempest forth in dreadful retribution-all these events succeeding each other so quickly, and concluded by the sanguine glories of Waterloo, must have had some effect upon our tastes and habits of thinking. We may be as much revolted by the absurdities of Titus Andronicus as formerly, perhaps more, for our taste, if not our moral sense, is certainly improved, but we are not at all sure that we shall turn with the same disgust from the murderous cruelties that we could not endure in our earlier days, now that a series of dreadful realities has been succeeded by gloomy fictions decked out in terrible graces, or clothed in beautiful imagery by genius of unexampled potency. We are in a fair way, like the author described by Horace Walpole, to "dram with horror." We have been taugh: to give all our sympathy and much of our admiration to characters stained with the boldest vices and glorying in impenitence; nay, we are fairly told, that "none but the weak repent.' It may be said that our attention and sympathy are kept not merely awake, but in a state of strenuous excitement, by watching the wreck of glorious creatures; the convulsive struggles of hearts, originally noble, debased by crimes, bitterly conscious of their degradation, and yet exalted by a kind of demoniac pride above compunction or remorse; to dwell in thought where "hope never comes," and to see, through the medium of the poet's art, these internal tortures, without being able, even in idea, to sprinkle cool patience upon the heat and flame of their distemper," by looking forward to some happy result from the present suffering. What is all this, however, but

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teaching us to take a gloomy and unnatural pleasure in the contemplation of interminable misery?-a view from which the unsophisticated mind turns with unspeakable pain.

When James the Second was viceking in Scotland, during his brother's lifetime, we are told that he used to go in person to witness the application of torture to those (certainly) sincere sufferers for religion to whom our forefathers assigned the crown of martyrdom. Suppose the worst that could be imputed to them by their enemies were just, call them seditious fanatics: even this view of the case does not abate our horror of the individual who could find a savage enjoyment in witnessing such scenes of horror. We are, indeed, more shocked at his calmly contemplating them, than at his ordering them to be inflicted. He might persuade himself, that, by the last, he prevented evil, by deterring others from incurring the same punishment; but what could excuse the wantonness of cruelty indicated by the first? This is by far the deepest blot on his memory. The necessity of depriving him of that power which he used as the instrument of tyrannizing over the consciences of his people was obvious. To the world it could not be justified, but to himself it might. And, thinking as he did, that he could only save his people from eternal perdition by bringing them into the pale of an infallible church, he might imagine a merit in the costly sacrifice he made to his religion. We can pity the perversion of his understanding, while we applaud the resistance to his power. But there exists no such palliation for the cool barbarity in the other case. Yet we, who think of this with abhorrence, are daily accustoming ourselves to dwell with a kind of stern delight on the lively images of mental anguish, compared to which all bodily sensation sinks into comparative insignificance. It may be said that we can at any time relieve ourselves from such reflected suffering, by recollecting that the powerful spell which masters our faculties and leads captive our judgment is a mere fiction. Not so; for we know too well the sad story of our darkened nature to hope that there have not been, or are not at this moment, numbers of

our fellow-creatures secretly agonized from a consciousness that they have sold "the eternal jewel of their souls," and wasted the noblest endowments of their minds, yet, at the same time, not in the least inclined to "try what repentance can.'

It may be said that the state of mind induced by unrepented crime is enough, when brought so nearly to view in all its darkest hues, to repel the untainted mind from any advance towards the crimes that produce so much mental misery. Experience does not warrant the conclusion. We have heard the contrary deduction drawn by one of the greatest ornaments of this country, whose intimate knowledge of human nature, increased by a long attendance on our courts of justice, should give weight to his opinion. He observed that great crimes should not be made the subject of discussion, for that the horror excited by them seemed after a while to subside into a kind of familiarity with them, and that, strange as it might seem, there was scarcely a fagrant instance of wickedness taking place where such had not before been known, which was not soon after followed by some other of the same kind. No one could be so absurd as to say that this was from the desire of emulating what is so horrid in itself, and so soon overtaken by punishment. But these images, often presented to the mind, diminish the terror at the contemplation of guilt, by suggesting the idea of its being meditated and even perpetrated by creatures of the same nature and liable to the same temptations with ourselves.

To return to the works by which this train of reflections has been suggested. Does any one, rising from the perusal of the Giaour, for instance, find his mind, especially if it be an imaginative and feeling one, in a state to take either a rational or moral view of the story he has been perusing? It may be answered, as Horatio says, that to consider so would be considering it too curiously. It would be stripping the tree of its foliage and blossoms. But it is the nature of the root, the substance of the whole, that is the proper subject of inquiry, in a moral point of view. Now, the amount of the story, when stripped of its ornaments, is merely this, indeed

an

can be no other:-A Christian youth, in some unaccountable manner, ob tains a sight of the wife (not mistress) of a high-born and high-minded Mussulman. At the risk of more than one life, he obtains some short interviews (very short they needs must be) with this secluded beauty, well know ing the fatal result of a discovery to the object of his passion,-it would be too much to call it an attachment. It is a burlesque of sentiment to ascribe the tenderness and constancy of innocent love" to the headlong process and transient intercourse of an amour carried on in a harem, where the sword of vengeance, suspended by a single hair over the culprits, threatens every moment to descend upon their guilty heads. The discovery in such cases is generally both certain and speedy, and the catastrophe neither surprising nor unusual. Death is the invariable doom of such transgressors in all the regions of the East, and the manner of its infliction, though such as to give room to some exquisite painting, is by no means the most cruel mode of extinguishing life. It might, indeed, be dictated by the same feeling that we admire in the nobleminded and fondly-attached Othello when he says,

I will not shed her blood,

concealed, he insults the ministers of religion to whom he addresses himself, with the detail of his crimes, and the declaration of his resolute and dis dainful impenitence. Yet, under all these revolting circumstances, we are not merely seduced into sympathy by the art of the poet, but hurried into a kind of delusive admiration by the gloomy grandeur with which this despot over the imagination has invested the offspring of his fancy. There is a season "when the hey-day of the blood grows tane and humble, and waits upon the judgment;" when that season arrives, the distinction is easily made between the substantial forms of vice and the splendid and evervarying hues in which all powerful genius has arrayed them; but, certainly, those who in early life form their taste on such poetry as we have been considering, must have their moral perceptions blunted, and the sense of right and wrong in their minds in some degree confused.

What is said of the Giaour applies to every poem of the same author, with the exception of the Siege of Corinth, which does not appear to be so generally admired as the others. We speak of the past. Mazeppa does not present to the view the same internal agony, nor the same defiance of futu

Nor scar that skin of her's whiter than rity. The Hetman, who, after flying

snow,

And smooth as monumental alabaster.

The Giaour, who, with his eyes open to the danger, if not the criminality of the deed, has seen the person represented as the object of his love become a victim to his selfish gratification and the offended laws of her country, is not weak enough to repent; far otherwise, he comforts himself by sacrificing the injured husband to the manes of the guilty wife; and we are finally taught to admire his constancy to his Leila, of whom his knowledge had been so transitory, that he could barely retain an image of her outward form; yet, to cherish that image, and to revel in the recollection of the vengeance inflicted on him whom he had previously robbed of what was dearest to him, he takes up his abode in a convent, the most unlikely place imaginable for such a person to shelter in; and, instead of retiring to the solitude of his cell to cherish thoughts best

from the fatal field of Pultowa, shared all the miseries of the few who escaped the pursuit, is represented as resting under the same tree which gave shelter to the royal fugitive. The opening of the poein is unusually simple, nervous, and concise, and the occasional notice of the late destruction of Moscow exceedingly well introduced. 'Twas after dread Pultowa's day,

When fortune left the royal Swede, Around a slaughter'd army lay,

No more to combat and to bleed.

The power and glory of the war,

Faithless as their vain votaries, men,
Had pass'd to the triumphant Czar,

And Moscow's walls were safe again,
Until a day more dark and drear,
And a more memorable year,
Should give to slaughter and to shame
A mightier host and haughtier name;
A greater wreck, a deeper fall,
A shock to one-a thunderbolt to all.

The noble poet never exercised more successfully his power of hurrying us along by the rapidity and

glow of his description, so as to make us absorbed in the subject, whatever it may be, of the powerful spell that binds us in willing subjection. Yet he who has given so deep an interest to all that we have been taught to abhor, does not appear to make the most of a theme one would have supposed particularly calculated to call forth his astonishing powers. One would certainly have expected more of spirit and pathos in the lines which describe the sequel of one of the most surprising and affecting events to be met with in history.

His wounds were stiff-his limbs were stark

The heavy hour was chill and dark;
The fever in his blood forbade
A transient slumber's fitful aid:
And thus it was; but yet through all,
Kinglike the monarch bore his fall,
And made, in this extreme of ill,
His pangs the vassals of his will;
All silent and subdued were they,
As once the nations round him lay.

pp. 6, 7.

All this is very well, but from a poet like Lord Byron, and with a theme like the Hero of Narva, and the still more wonderful Hero of Bender, more might have been expected. This warrior monarch has been described in terms more forcible by a less powerful muse.

"A frame of adamant,- -a soul of fire; No dangers fright him, or no labours tire, O'er love, o'er fear, extends his wide domain, Unconquered lord of pleasure and of pain."

Possibly our poet may have little pleasure in treading in any path where others have been before him. The wild steed, which, in a manner incorporated with his rider, forms the subject of this poem, seems no unsuitable emblem of its author; who, when bearing along some lofty-minded, yet guilty and wretched sufferer, flies with unspeakable grace and rapidity beyond the bounds of all common observation, increasing in his headlong course the suffering of his hero and the sympathy of his readers, till they become, with merely witnessing his flight, as much agitated at first, and as weary and breathless at last, as the rider of the untamed steed. After the exordium which shews us the few sad relics of the field of Pultowa,

under an old oak, our author breaks out with all his wonted spirit and unequalled power of description, and sets the Cossack prince and his horse at once before our eyes. Among the rest, Mazeppa made His pillow in an old oak's shadeHimself as rough, and scarce less old, The Ukraine's hetman, calm and bold; But first, outspent with this long course, The Cossack prince rubb'd down his horse,

And made for him a leafy bed,

And smooth'd his fetlocks and his mane,
And slack'd his girth, and stripp'd his
rein,

And joy'd to see how well he fed ;
For until now he had the dread
His wearied courser might refuse
To browze beneath the midnight dews:
But he was hardy as his lord,
And little cared for bed and board;
But spirited and docile too;
Whate'er was to be done, would do.
Shaggy and swift, and strong of limb,
All Tartar-like he carried him:
Obey'd his voice, and came at call,
And knew him in the midst of all:
Though thousands were around-and
Night,

Without a star, pursued her flight,-
That steed from sunset until dawn
His chief would follow like a fawn.

pp. 7, 8.

Then follows a detail of his early pursuits and employments, which he narrates to amuse the king, and of the guilty attachment which led him to say,

ill betide

The school where I was taught to ride.

The description of his criminal love and its object appears rather diffuse and out of place, when one considers the time and the iron head to which it is addressed. Indeed, the comparisons by which the lady's charms are illustrated, require all the peculiar force and beauty of diction in which they are clothed to save them from stumbling over that step which we are told leads from the sublime to the ridiculous. Yet the magical grace which this poet, and only he, could strew around this manifold description, forbids the smile that such a cluster of metaphors might excite, had any other ventured to associate them together. Her eyes, in the first place, have an oriental expression. Their hue was dark as the sullen skythat canopied the luckless warriors. But then,

Through it stole a tender light,
Like the first moonrise of midnight.

It was like the shadow of that same moon swimming in the stream; and it was moreover very like saints expiring at the stake, but then they were those saints

"Who lift their raptured looks on high, As if it were a joy to die."

And she had a brow like a midsummer lake when the waves are still, and the sun reflected in calm transparency. Then her lip and cheek,but here he recollects the state of the wounded and wearied monarch, and spares him the description of these long remembered beauties. The narrative goes on to paint the progress of his guilty passion, and the discovery of the intrigue, to which he seems to recur with very youthful feelings. "I'd give

The Ukraine back again to live
It o'er once more-and be a page,
The happy page, who was the lord
Of one soft heart, and his own sword,
And had no other gem nor wealth
Save nature's gift of youth and health."-
P. 19.

The dreadful reverse of this short period of illicit enjoyment is best told in his own words.

"But one fair night, some lurking spies Surprised and seized us both.

The Count was something more than wroth

I was unarm'd; but if in steel,
All cap-à-pie from head to heel,

They bound me on, that menial throng,
Upon his back with many a thong;
Then loosed him with a sudden lash-

Away!-away!—and on we dash !—
Torrents less rapid and less rash.
"Away!-away!-My breath was gone-
I saw not where he hurried on:
'Twas scarcely yet the break of day,
And on he foam'd-away!-away!—
The last of human sounds which rose,
As I was darted from my foes,
Was the wild shout of savage laughter,
Which on the wind came roaring after
A moment from that rabble rout:
With sudden wrath I wrench'd my head,
And snapp'd the cord, which to the

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The thunder of my courser's speed,
Perchance they did not hear nor heed:
It vexes me-for I would fain
Have paid their insult back again.
I paid it well in after days:
There is not of that castle gate,

Its drawbridge and portcullis' weight,
Stone, bar, moat, bridge, or barrier left;
Nor of its fields a blade of grass,

Save what grows on a ridge of wall,
Where stood the hearth-stone of the
hall;

And many a time ye there might pass,
Nor dream that e'er that fortress was:

I saw its turrets in a blaze,

Their crackling battlements all cleft,

And the hot lead pour down like rain From off the scorch'd and blackening roof, Whose thickness was not vengeance proof." pp. 20-24. If we were coldly told in prose of

What 'gainst their numbers could I do? such long cherished and dreadful re

"Twas near his castle, far away

From city or from succour near,

And almost on the break of day;
1 did not think to see another,

My moments seem'd reduced to few;
And with one prayer to Mary Mother,
And, it may be, a saint or two,
As I resigned me to my fate,
They led me to the castle gate."

"Bring forth the horse!-the horse was brought;

In truth, he was a noble steed, A Tartar of the Ukraine breed, Who look'd as though the speed of

thought

Were in his limbs; but he was wild,

Wild as the wild deer, and untaught, With spur and bridle undefiled

'Twas but a day he had been caught; And, snorting, with erected mane, And struggling fiercely, but in vain, In the full foam of wrath and dread To me the desert-born was led :

venge, wrecked where the injury had been mutual, and visited upon so many unoffending sufferers, we should feel our moral sense revolted. But, decked out in all the splendid graces of this powerful poetry, we are almost led, for a moment, to triumph in the fulness of the hetman's revenge. Not satisfied with his absolute sway over our will and imagination, this " prevailing poet," by the agency of his potent spells, enlists our senses into his service. We are hurried away in the following stanza so forcibly, that we seem constrained in the Cossack's bonds, and flying with him through the wilderness. The thirst, the pain, the horror, seem in part our own. Poetry has no power for any one who can read the following stanza without being hurried along with a kind of painful sympathy.

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