make a separate mention. He first came to Weimar in the latter half of the year 1790, as if sent by Providence for the especial consolation of Herder, at a time when he was universally misrepresented, and by some people actually shunned, on account of the political and philosophic principles ascribed to him. Different as were their views in regard to many subjects, yet in principle and in feeling they were thoroughly uni ted. The high moral tone of both writers, and their rank as great intellectual physicians for their own age, furnished a natural ground of sympathy with each other, that led to the closest friendship. Herder soon loved his young friend; and his reverence for the great endowments of his mind increased daily. The happy evenings which Richter spent with us, the serenity and youthful freshness of his mind, his burning eloquence, and the inexhaustible life, humour, and originality of his conversation upon every thing that came before him, reanimated Herder's existence. Oh! how often has the genial humour of this great favourite of Germany, in the course of an evening's walk or ride to Ettersburg, beguiled Herder of a world of sad thoughts, and cheated him into smiles and cheerfulness! In many respects, it is true, that Herder did not approve of John Paul's style and manner: and their amicable differ ences on this point often led to very instructive conversations. But, for all that, Herder esteemed his native genius, and the teeming creativeness of his poetic spirit, far above the unfeeling and purely statuesque poetry of the day, in which every thing was sacrificed to mere beauty of form; and in reference to certain poets of the age" (no doubt Mrs. Herder alludes chiefly to Wieland), "who applied the greatest gift of God to the injury of religion and good mo rals, thus abusing the divinity of their art to the abasement and brutalising of man's nature, Herder would often say with a noble scornAbove all such poets our dear friend John Paul stands at an immeasurable elevation: I willingly pardon him his want of ordonnance and of metre, in consideration of his high-toned virtue-his living world-his profound heart-his creative and plastic intellect. He is a true poet, fresh from the hands of God; and brings new life, truth, virtue, and reality, into our vitiated and emasculated poetry.' The passages in which John Paul* speaks of Herder, are many: two in particular I remember of great beauty, one in the "Flegel-jahre," the other in his last work, "Der Comet" (1821); but, not having those works at hand, I shall translate that which is cited by the editor of Mrs. Herder's Memoirs, omitting only such parts as would be unintelligible without explanations of disproportionate length. "Alike in all the changing periods of his own life, and by the most hostile parties, it was the fate of this great spirit to be misunderstood; and (to speak candidly) not altogether without his own fault. For he had this defect---that he was no star, whether of the first, second, or any other magnitude---but a whole cluster and fasciculus of stars, out of I call him John Paul, because he is universally known by that familiar appellation throughout Germany; just as Rousseau is called Jean Jaques. Let me take this opportunity of mentioning, that in a hasty sketch of John Paul, which I drew up for the London Magazine (December, 1821), I did him great injustice; for, working, unfortunately, at a pace of almost furious speed, I was obliged to content myself with such specimens as I had at hand: and with respect to one of these (the Swedish Priest), I sent to the press a translation executed in part twelve years ago, when I was less intimately acquainted with the German: the consequence is, that on lately revising it, I perceived one mistake as to the sense. A more important oversight was, that I forgot to prefix an explanation, apprising the reader, that the whole portrait of the Swedish Parish Priest is supposed to come from a boy; which explanation would at once have converted into a characteristic grace that air of romantic sentiment which otherwise seems childish. John Paul is a sealed author to all but those who are adepts in the German language-manners-customs and even local usages; and fifty times more difficult to translate than any metrical writer whatsoever. Hereafter, and under more favourable circumstances, I will communicate, through the London Magazine, a better selection from this most original of all German writers executed in the most finished style that I can command. 1823. Herder. which it is for every one to compose at pleasure a constellation shaped after his own preconception. Monodynamic men, men of a single talent, are rarely misapprehended; men of multitudinous powers almost always. If he was no poet---as he would himself often protest, measuring his own pretensions by the Homeric and Shakspearian standard-he was, better, however, something still namely, a Poem, an Indico-Grecian Epopee, fashioned by some divinest and purest architect: how else, or, by what analytic skill, should I express the nature of this harmonious soul---in which, as in a poem, all was reconciled and fused; in which the good, the beautiful, and the true, were blended and indivisible? Greece was to him the supreme object of devotion-the pole to which his final aspirations pointed; and, universally as he was disposed by his cosmopolitan taste to find and to honour merit, yet did he from his inmost soul yearn, in the very midst of the blooming lands through which he strayed, like any far-travelled Ulysses, for his restoration to a Grecian home; more especially in his latter years. Herder was designed as it were from some breathing Grecian model. Thence came his Grecian reverence for life in all its gradations: like a Brahmin, with a divine Spinozism of the heart, he loved the humblest reptile--the meanest insect--and every blossom of the woods. Thence came the epic style of all his works, which, like a philosophic epos, with the mighty hand and with the impartia lity of a God, brought up before the heye et of centuries, and upon a stage of vastest proportions, all times, forms, nations, spirits. Thence also came his Grecian disgust towards all excess, disproportion, or disturbance of equilibrium this way or that. Thence was it that like a Grecian poem he drew by anticipation round about every feeling and emotion a as "Few minds have been learned upon the same grand scale Herder. as -How The major part pursue only what is most rare and least familiar in science: he, on the contrary, could receive only the great and Catholic streams of every science into the mighty depths of his own heaven-reflecting ocean, that impressed upon them all its own motion and fluctuation. Others are fastened upon by their own learning as by a withering and strangling ivy; but his hung about him as gracefully as the tendrils of a vine, and adorned him with fruit with clusters of grapes.magnificently, how irreconcileably, did he blaze into indignation against the creeping and crawling vermin of the times-against German coarseness of taste-against all sceptres in brutal paws-and against the snakes of the age! But would you hear the sweetest of voices, it was his voice in the utterance of love-whether for a little child, or for poetry, or for music, or in the tones of mercy and forbearance towards the weak. In general he has been little weighed or appraised, and in parts only-never as a whole. His due valuation he will first find in the diamond scales of posterity; into which scales will assuredly not be admitted the pebbles with which he was pelted by the coarse critics of his days, and the still coarser disciples of Kant. Two sayings of his survive, which may seem trifling to others; me they never fail to impress profoundly: one was, that on some occasion, whilst listening to choral music that streamed from a neighbouring church as from the bosom of some distant century, he wished, with a sorrowful allusion to the cold frosty spirit of these times, that he For the sake of English readers I must mention (to those who know any thing of the German literature it is superfluous to mention) that Herder, in common with every man of eminence in modern Germany, paid almost divine honours to Shakspeare: his wife tells us in her interesting Memoirs of him, that he could repeat Hamlet by heart. In the original "vor das Säkularische auge;" and in the true meaning of the word "secular," as it is exhibited by Milton in the fine expression-" A secular bird," meaning the phoenix, I might have translated it before the secular eye: but the vulgar theologic sense of the word in English would have led to a misinterpretation of the meaning. No other equivalent term occurs to me, except Aconian; and that is too uncommon to be generally intelligible. had been born in the middle ages. The other, and a far diffèrent, sentiment was-that he would gladly communicate with an apparition from the spiritual world, and that he neither felt nor foreboded any thing of the usual awe connected with such a communication. O! the pure soul that already held commerce with spirits! To such a soul this was possible, poetical as that soul was; and though it be true that just such souls it is that shudder with the deepest awe before the noiseless and inaudible mysteries that dwell and walk on the other side of death,---to his soul it was possible; for the soul of Herder was itself an apparition upon this earth, and never forgot its native world. At this moment I think I see him; and, potent as death is otherwise to glorify the images of men with saintly transfiguration--yet, methinks, that from the abyss of distance and of sumless elevation, he appears not more radiant or divine than he did here below; and I think of him, far aloft in the heavens and behind the stars, as in his natural place; and as of one but little altered from what he was, except by the blotting out of his earthly sor rows. What is said of the disciples of Kant in the above extract, is to be explained thus: Herder, when a young man, had studied at Königsberg; and, in consideration of his poverty, Kant had allowed him to attend his lectures gratis. Herder was sensible (though from the style of his own mind insufficiently sensible) of Kant's greatness; and in after life often spoke publicly of Kant with great reverence. Kant, on the other hand, admired his pupil, and augured well of his future success; but never dissembled his disapprobation of what he considered crazy and visionary enthusiasm (Schwärmerey.) This feeling, openly and frankly expressed, seems in youth to have given Herder little offence: but in after life, being repeated to him, perhaps with some ill-natured aggravations, so wounded his own self-esteem, that he attempted to avenge himself by an attack upon Kant's great work, the "Kritik der R. Vernunft," in a Metakritik. Of this attack, which was in truth perfectly feeble, Kant took no sort of notice: and it fell into immediate contempt. But the followers of Kant throughout Germany could not forgive the insult offered to their master; and too often allowed themselves, in their indignation at this instance of infirmity in Herder, to forget his real services to literature and philosophy. X. Y. Z ANTIQUITY. ANTIQUITY! thou dark sublime! Nay, Learning's self may turn to dust, May leave its glimmering lamp to rust; Creation's self thy date shall be, And Earth's age be as thine; The Sun and Moon are types of thee, Nor shall they longer shine. Though Time may o'er thy memory leap, Eternity shall start from sleep 1823. ・Antiquity.. Though bounds are for thy station set, Thy fame with Time shall struggle yet, Whene'er I walk where thou hast been, To think what days in millions by While those that raised thy early fame When thou wert left, and here thou art, On the first page that Time unfurl'd, Thy Roman fame o'er England still Their legions on to war: And camps and stations still abide On many a sloping hill; Though Time hath done its all to hide, Thy presence guards them still. The moss that crowns the mountain stone, And ivy, as thy lasting bower, And, careless of life's passing hour, I walk with thee my native plains, As in a nobler clime, Rapt where thy memory still remains, Disciple unto Time, Whose foot in ruins crush'd Power's fame, And left its print behind, Till Ruin, weary of its name, Their fate to thee resign'd. And 'neath thy care, in mists sublime, They reign and linger still;— Though ivy finds no wall to climb, Grass crowns each swelling hill; Where slumbering Time will often find And turn a wondering look behind Thus through the past thy name appears, To run its race with Time; While some, as sun-beams gild the brook, And then, ere Time a stride hath took, Temple and tower of mighty name, Lorn Silence o'er their mystery dreams, 'Round where their buried memory sleeps Spring spreads its dewy sky, In tender mood, as one that weeps Time's frost may crumble stubborn towers, Thou still art reigning past his powers, And Ruin builds thy throne: When all is past, the very ground Is sacred unto thee; When dust and weeds hide all around, JOHN CLARE. A SHIPWRECK. On the 26th of last November, late in the day, a solitary vessel was discovered off -, on the coast of Sussex, whose broad, round, and elevated bows and stern, bespoke her plainly to be Dutch. She was loitering on the waters, as these Dutch vessels are apt to do, while her general movements and conduct, in relation to the shore under her lee, the state of the tide, and the coming night, indicated the doubts and embarrassments of a stranger. She was an object of deep interest to a little group of fishermen, assembled at their ordinary evening council at the capstan, and the opinion among them was, that evil awaited her. The appearances of the weather were fearful: the sky was foul with vapour, and the sun, low in the west, stood staring through the mist with a pale, rayless, and portentous face, that told of approaching danger and disaster. There was little wind, but the sea roared loudly, and came rolling in with an agitated swell, which, old John Read remarked, denoted that the gale was already up to windward, and would soon be upon us. He was right; before dark it blew a storm, and the last time the stranger-ship was seen from the land afloat, she was bending down to her beam ends under a press of sail, doing her utmost to gain an offing, and |