as,

let us hope, it was to the mind of Herder. Herder's doctrine of historic necessity, or fate, is adapted to be more satisfactory to the anti-Christian, than to the Christian, evolutionist. We have seen pantheism, as a derivation from Spinoza, attributed to Herder. Atheism, rather, his reader might suspect to have been the dominating spirit of Herder's philosophy of history; such curious anxiety he manifests to exclude the Great Being, for whom, in words—sincere words, doubtless-he professes unspeakable adoration, from any active share in the concerns of his universe or in the on-goings of history. But, as we said, Herder's religious point of view is that of the devout deist.

Our next citation, and our last, from this work shall be Herder's fourth great "principle”—which, without comment, we leave to the leisurely digestion of our readers:

Fourthly. The health and duration of a state rest not on that point of its highest cultivation, but on a wise or fortunate equilibrium of its active living powers. The deeper in this living exertion its centre of gravity lies, the more firm and durable it is.

We have called Herder's spirit in the present work dispassionate and calm. This characterization, however, is true, rather of the matter, than of the manner, of what he says. He is not seldom oratoric in his style; he even tends to swell into the grandiose and turgid. The merit of the whole work is in fairness to be estimated with constant regard to the fact that the author was, to a considerable extent, finding his own path in a new, untrodden field of philosophic inquiry. That Herder was not strictly original in his idea of history, as subject to a law of development, as enfolding within itself a principle of philosophy, we have already pointed out. Montesquieu was before Herder in this, as Bossuet in it was perhaps before Montesquieu. But the first man to attempt actually forcing this expansile and resistant idea into the forms and terms of a system, was Herder. And Herder's Philosophy of History, never quite completed according to the plan of the author, is still a standard treatise on its subject.

We feel that we ought not to dismiss Herder without adding yet a citation or two that may serve to suggest something of the versatility of his genius. Herder was a critic. Of his critical quality, let the following parallel of his between Klopstock and Milton stand for illustration. We might find an example better adapted to exhibit his boldness and his suggestiveness; hardly perhaps any more likely to interest our readers. We use the translation of W. Taylor:

We are accustomed to call Klopstock the German Milton; I wish they were never named together, and that Klopstock had never known Milton. Both have written sacred poesy, but they were not inspired by the same Urania. They bear to each other the relation that Moses bears to Christ, or the old to the new covenant. The edifice of Milton is a steadfast and well-planned building, resting on ancient columns. Klopstock's is an enchanted dome, echoing with the softest and purest tones of human feeling, hovering between heaven and earth, borne on angels' shoulders. Milton's muse is masculine, and harsh as his iambics. Klopstock's is a tender woman, dissolving in pious ecstasies, warbling elegies and hymns. Klopstock had studied deeply the language of his country, and won for it more powers than the Briton ever suspected his to possess. A single ode of Klopstock outweighs the whole lyric literature of Britain. The Herman

of this writer awaked a spirit of simple nervous song, far loftier than that which animates the chorus-dramas of antiquity. The Samson of Milton attains not these models. When music shall acquire among us the highest powers of her art, whose words will she select to utter but those of Klopstock?

Herder was a writer of parables; allegories or fables they were, conceived by him in the Oriental rather than in the ancient Greek or Roman spirit. Of these serious recreative pieces of Herder, we regret to say that we can spare no room for even a single specimen.

Already it is time that we bow ourselves respectfully out of this most unbendingly august of the presences to be found in the halls of German letters. We cannot do so more appropriately than by quoting, condensed, the words of hail and farewell nobly pronounced by Richter in one of his books on occasion of Herder's death. These two kindred though differing spirits loved each the other as his own soul.

Richter came to Weimar that he might be near Herder; and Herder leaned on Richter as Paul did on Timothy. A loftier strain, more pathetic, of funereal triumph, has seldom been chanted by the voice of friendship and genius, than that which Richter here lifts up, in clear and steady tenor, over the just-closed grave of Herder.

Having said this, we need to prepare our readers against a first disappointment. This mingled wail and eulogy from Richter will seem to them written in a strange, almost an outlandish, style. It will puzzle and confound at first. Read it thoughtfully, read it studiously, read it repeatedly. It will need, and it will repay, the pains. Return to it after having

gone through the chapter to follow, that devoted to the study of Richter, and see if then this strain, which to us seems of a mournful and triumphing beauty so rare, does not take possession also of your sentiment and imagination:

That noble spirit was misunderstood by opposite times and parties, yet not entirely without fault of his own. For he had the fault that he was no star of first, or of any other, magnitude, but a clump of stars out of which each one spells a constellation to please himself.

...

If he was no poet, as he often, indeed, thought of himself—and also of other very celebrated people-standing as he did close by the Homeric and Shakespearean standard, then he was merely something better, namely, a poem, an Indian-Greek epos made by some purest god. . .

In his beautiful soul, precisely as in a poem, every thing coalesced, and the good, the true, the beautiful, constituted an inseparable trinity. He wished to see the sacrifices of poesy as fair and undefiled as the thunder of heaven permits to scathed humanity. . . .

Few minds are learned after the same grand fashion as he. . . . Many are clasped by their learning as by a withering ivy, but he as by a grapevine. . . .

He exhibited the Greek humanity, to which he restored the name, in the most tender regard for all purely human relations, and in his Lutheran indignation against all whereby they were poisoned, however sanctioned by Church and State. He was a fort overgrown with flowers, a northern oak whose branches were sensitive plants. How gloriously irreconcilable he burned against every creeping soul, against all looseness and self-contradiction, dishonesty, and poetical slime-softness; as also against German critical rudeness and all sceptres in paws; and how he exorcised the serpents of his time! But would you hear the softest of voices, it was his

in love-whether for a child, or for a poem, or for music-or in mercy for the weak. He resembled his friend Hamann, who was at once a hero and a child, who, like an electrized person in the dark, stood harmless, with a glory encircling his head, until a touch drew the lightning from him. . .

Altogether, he was little weighed and little estimated; and only in particulars, not in the whole. That task remains for the diamond-scales of posterity. . . . His life was a shining exception to the ofttimes tainted endowment of genius; he sacrificed, like the ancient priests, even at the altar of the muses, only with white garments.

He seems to me now-much as 'death usually lifts men up into a holy transfiguration-in his present distance and elevation, no more shining than formerly, by my side, here below. I imagine him yonder, behind the stars, precisely in his right place, and but little changed, his griefs excepted. Well, then, celebrate right festively yonder thy harvest-feast, thou pure, thou spirit-friend! May thy coronal of heavy wheat-ears blossom on thy head into a light flower-chaplet! thou sunflower, transplanted to thy sun at last!

In his song to the night, he says to his sleeping body:

Slumber well meanwhile, thou sluggish burden
Of my earthly walk. Her mantle

Over thee spreads the Night, and her lamps
Burn above thee in the holy pavilion.

Otherwise, now, and colder, stands the star-night above his mold. Alas! he who only read him has scarcely lost him, but he who knew and loved him is not to be consoled any more by his immortality, but only by the immortality of the human soul. If there were no such immortality; if our whole life here is only an evening twilight preceding the night, not a morning twilight; if the lofty mind is also let down after the body by coffin-ropes into the pit-O, then I know not why we should not, at the graves of great men, do, from despair, what the ancient savage nations did from hope; that is, throw ourselves after them into the pit, as those did into the tombs of their princes, so that the foolish, violent heart, that will obstinately beat for something divine and eternal, may be choked at once. ... O, I well know that he tolerated such griefs least of all. He would point now to the glittering stars of spring, above which he now dwells; he would beckon to us to listen to the nightingales which now sing to us and not to him; and he would be more moved than he seemed to be....

We will now love that great soul together, and if, at times, we are moved too painfully by his memory, we will read over again all whereby he made known to us the immortal and divine, and himself.

There has been of late a revival of interest in Herder, and the prospect is fair that he will eventually be rehabilitated to something like his contemporary fame. Any change of dominant taste tending to make more of morals in literature, and of mere culture, apart from morals, less, might work against Goethe; but it would, to the same degree, work in Herder's favor.

VII.

RICHTER.

1763-1825.

The largest, softest, most loving heart in literature-heart pure, too, of the purest-was Richter, Richter the unique, the only. So the German themselves call Richter, and so, much more, may we, not Germans, call him, since with a far stronger feeling than can be theirs of his unexampled peculiarity. Not quite, however, "Richter the Only," is the favorite form of the name. For well-nigh universally still, as was the case during his life-time, he is, among those who, knowing him best, love him most, affectionately designated (after his double first name, Gallicized by himself), “Jean Paul," rather than Richter.

To the heart, great and tender, of this man, was married a brain only less remarkable for both quantity and quality. Still, less remarkable the brain was than the heart, in Richter; and what Goethe, in German phrase-phrase to be transferred rather than translated-spoke of as the "eternal womanly" predominated in his character. But it was a most manly womanliness. Richter was a sentimentalist, but he was a sentimentalist of a robust and virile type. You are not unbraced in reading him. On the contrary, you feel him to be tonic. Richter is full of ozone, moral, but especially intellectual. He possesses the stimulating value of difficulty. It is impossible to read him in a lax and languid