little treatise is probably to be regarded as the starting-point, indeed as the fountain-head, of German free-thinking in theology. Lessing was essentially a free-thinker, not only in the good, but also in the technical bad, sense of the expression.

There is no sentence of Lessing's more characteristic of the man, as none more universally familiar in quotation, than his really proud, though formally humble, declaration contained in the following words:

If God should hold all truth inclosed in his right hand, and in his left only the ever-active impulse to the pursuit of truth, although with the condition that I should always and forever err, and should say to me, "Choose!" I should fall with submission upon his left hand, and say, "Father, give! Pure truth is for thee alone!"

Famous words, and words worthy of their fame! But surely they bespeak, not so much the man who loves truth supremely, as the man who supremely loves intellectual activity.

V.

WIELAND.

1733-1813.

Of all the most celebrated writers of Germany, the writer least celebrated among English - speakers is undoubtedly Wieland. Equally undoubted is another curious, a seemingly incongruous, fact. Wieland is the author of a poem, of which, despite a certain grave inextricable fault involved, it may be affirmed that it is, by eminence, of all the poetic productions of German genius-considerable in length and not dramatic—the one poem best fitted to interest and to please the English-reading public. The singularity of the case is increased by the circumstance, that of this exceptional poem of Wieland's there exists, and there has long existed in English, a version scarcely less charming than the charming original. To carry the paradox to its height, there was formerly a time when Wieland's Oberon-for such is the title

of the poem to which we refer-was, through Sotheby's translation, almost as popular in England and America as it was in Germany.

The explanation is simple enough. Wieland belongs in a class of writers whom the world, in its progress, has left somewhat behind. He is a little antiquated now-like Klopstock, and unlike Lessing. The distinctively modern, the new, the progressive, spirit in literature, was not Wieland's. The order of things that came in with Goethe and Schiller was one in which Wieland at length appeared out of place. He had the effect of an anachronism in it. Not so with Lessing, by a few years the senior of Wieland; and not so with Herder, by a few years Wieland's junior. The difference is, that it was through Lessing and through Herder that the new era opened, while it was with Wieland that the old era closed.

But the old era closed splendidly with Wieland. He was a brilliant man of letters; upon the whole, the most brilliant mere man of letters that Germany has ever produced. His term of activity was long, and it was fruitful to the end. He became the patriarch of German letters--by universal acclamation recognized as such, alike for the transcendency and the seniority of his fame and for the personal charm of the man. He was, in some respects, for Germany what Voltaire was for France.

Wieland, in fact, approximated the French type by some traits of his literary character. Like the French, he studied, and he achieved, lightness, liveliness, clearness, grace, beyond any other German of his time. No German, unless it be Heine, has in this respect surpassed him since. He wrote for readers, and not for himself. He wrote for readers among people in general, and not for readers among scholars or specialists merely.

We thus describe a popular writer, and a popular writer Wieland was. But he was popular rather by the manner than by the matter of what he wrote. He was a superficial man, with no deep convictions of any sort to trouble him

or for him to trouble the world withal. He wrote what he thought would please, and he generally succeeded. With this success he was satisfied. Setting out as a pietist of the Klopstockian pattern, he ended by being an epicurean after the model of Voltaire. He was probably as earnest at first as he was at last, and at last as he was at first.

Wieland's literary genius blossomed early. The youthful piety which seemed to consecrate it commended Wieland, as the same thing had commended Klopstock, to the notice and patronage of Bodmer. Wieland, in personal habits and general style of deportment, accommodated himself better than did Klopstock to the views and feelings of Bodmer, whose favored guest he in his turn, like Klopstock, became. Wieland drank water instead of wine, and he did not smoke. But the illusion, which probably was as much Wieland's own as it was Bodmer's, did not last long. Young Wieland, from denouncing Anacreon and Anacreontists, became himself such in practice of life that he could write Anacreontic odes from experience of his own. The "Seraphic" school-so called by the German critic Gervinus -of Klopstock, made, and no wonder, a public auto da fe in Göttingen of the books of their renegade fellow-disciple, Wieland.

Wieland was a literary courtier, and a good one, some time before Goethe, eclipsing his precursor, became the world's proverb and paragon of such. Wieland began making little Weimar what it became as centre and focus of literary light; though the chief glory belongs, and justly belongs, to Goethe. At Weimar, Wieland long continued to live and labor, still enjoying a sufficient, but by no means splendid, pension from the duke, after the latter's arrival at his majority had brought the relation of teacher and pupil to an end. About Wieland gathered, one after another, the stars in that resplendent constellation of literary genius and fame which has made Weimar " a name forever" and a "Mecca of the mind" to all lovers of letters,

Wieland, Goethe, Herder, Schiller, and we may add Richter -though Richter never was properly a resident of Weimar -shine, perhaps, the brightest, as they shine with nearly equal lustre; but there were brilliant inferior names besides, that we need not here stay to reckon.

The attitude assumed by Wieland toward the new gods" who were taking Olympus by storm, under his very feet, was strikingly different from that which we have already described as the attitude of Wieland's contemporary, Nicolai. Like Nicolai, Wieland, too, to be sure, at first confronted his junior rivals with challenge; but soon he smilingly gave them his hand and helped them gain their seat on the summit.

The way in which the old order first met the new was, naturally, by encounter of Wieland with Goethe. Wieland edited a periodical, the German Mercury. In this he criticized Goethe. Goethe responded by a satirical farce, entitled, Gods, Heroes, and Wieland. Wieland good-naturedly reviewed the farce in his magazine, and praising it, over-praising it, pronounced it a piece of wit that every body should read. Goethe was fairly beaten. He acknowledged this himself. He said, "Wieland is gaining as much in the public estimation by the line he takes as I am losing." The two became, outwardly at least, good friends.

The amount and the variety of the literary work that Wieland did was prodigious. We pass his other productions, all of them, without even giving their titles, to take up at once his masterpiece, the Oberon.

We feel obliged to say, and to say strongly, in preface to our exhibition of this poem, that the Oberon is not free from the blemish of things doubtful in ethical and in æsthetic propriety. The spirit of the verse is not positively evil. There is in the story no intentional, and hardly is there practical, seduction to sin. Wieland was not, like Voltaire, a bad-hearted man. He was not, like Goethe, a good-hearted man whose good-heartedness did not stand in

the way of his indulging himself freely to the ruinous cost of others. Wieland apparently became, in mature life, a man of unimpeachable correctness in personal behavior. His writings were still loose, but his looseness now was all in his writings.

The things to which we allude in the Oberon, and which we must pass with allusion, are touched as delicately in phrase as the nature of the case permitted.

They are so nearly innocent that at least the sin is rather against taste than against morals. And they are not mere wanton recreations in the equivocal, on the part of the author. They belong inseparably to the plan of his poem, a plan dictated to the poet by his subject.

The story in Oberon is the story of a knight, Sir Hüon of Bordeaux, who unwittingly slays a son of Charlemagne, and is, by the implacable father, sentenced to do a series of impossible deeds in ransom of his life. These impossible deeds he happily accomplishes, with the very important assistance of Oberon and Titania, king and queen of the fairies, who have themselves a momentous interest of their own staked upon the success and virtue of the knight. For the elfin royal couple have, to their great misery, become hopelessly estranged from each other-Oberon having hastily bound himself by a mighty oath to stay away from his spouse until one human pair should be, by proof of uttermost temptation, found impregnably pure in chastity and in mutual truth. It goes without the saying that Sir Hüon, and the bride that he will win, become the blameless twain to bring Oberon and Titania happily together once more. But this does not result without much remarkable adventure and mischance befalling meantime both the knight and the fair. Of such varied experience on their part, is made up the substance of the story told in Oberon.

Oberon opens with Sir Hüon already far on his way to achieve the feats required by vengeful Charlemagne. The first chance encounter that he meets is a happy one. It occurs in the region of Libanon in Asia. He there falls in with