What follows, finishing our citations from this essay of Klopstock, is perhaps as significant as any thing it contains. The poet seems to be reassuring at once himself and his admirers as to their spiritual state :

Here [in sacred poetry] both the poet and his reader may certainly know whether they are Christians. For he can be nothing less who here moves our whole souls, nor he who finds himself thus moved. For how shall a poet, of the greatest genius, without feeling the strong impressions of religion, without an upright heart, glowing with all the fervor of piety, produce in our minds the most lively and devout sensations?

It is in strict keeping with the sentiment of the last foregoing, that Klopstock should in his old age have used, as he did use, his own Messiah for a manual of private devotion. Klopstock's piety was probably genuine; but it had in it a strong tincture of self-complacency, and it was highly sentimental. It by no means prevented its subject, so Scherer assures us, from smoking, from drinking, from promiscuously kissing, on first introduction, girls whom he met, and in general from deporting himself with a freedom and levity quite scandalizing to the grave Swiss Bodmer, who had made haste to invite the author of so edifying an epic as the Messiah to visit him at his home in Zurich. The deliberately calculating young bachelor poet had his peculiar plans of self-culture. Before accepting Bodmer's invitation, he bargained with that gentleman on the subject of being provided with the privilege of young ladies' society in Zurich:

How near are you [so he asks his Swiss correspondent] to any young ladies of your acquaintance, into whose society you may think I would be admitted? The heart of a young woman is an extensive scene of action into whose labyrinth a poet must frequently penetrate, if he wishes to acquire profound knowledge.

Klopstock became remarkably communicative and open to his Zurich admirer. "I love," he writes-this, remember, to a man whom he has never seen, a married man, a man fifty years old, that is, more than twice as old as himself (for Klopstock published the first installment of his epic when he was twenty-four years of age)-"I love a tender holy maid,

to whom my first Ode is addressed, with the most tender holy love." This "tender holy" lover was, however, disconsolate. He could not be sure that his affection was reciprocated. "By Milton's shade," Klopstock continues, "by thine ever blessed infants, by thine own great soul, I adjure thee, Bodmer, make me happy if thou canst." The exact practical thing, namely, which Klopstock wanted of Bodmer, was that the latter should interest and bestir himself to get the author of the Messiah a snug place of some sort, a pension would be better, to enable him to marry, and, in fruitful, placid ease of mind, finish his great poem. The mendicant poet put a very fine point upon the matter. Pregnantly suggesting that the Prince of Orange was said to be a generous fellow, "What if he should give me a pension?" he asks; but adds: "If you can do any thing to assist me in this business, excellent Bodmer, I hope you will do it, but not as asking in my name; for I would not beg my fortune of princes, though I would of Bodmer."

"Fanny" was the name of the "tender holy" maid. Fanny kept poor Klopstock in dreadful suspense, until he did at length get a pension-it was from the king of Denmark when it came; but, by the time that happened, Klopstock's own anxiety seems for some reason to have become allayed, and he in fact married another lady, one who fell in love with the poet as self-revealed in his Messiah. "Margaret" was this lady's name, a name immortal, in the affectionate diminutive form of "Meta," by association with Klopstock. Meta was supremely happy in her husband, and she made her husband supremely happy, four years only, and then she died. Klopstock waited long a widower; he at length married again. His second wife was a relative of Meta. All these three rest together now, side by side, in Ottensen, near Hamburg, in Germany. Klopstock himself was buried with. such honors as are usually accorded only to princes.

Few poets of any country or age have had an experience of life, on the whole, so happy as was Klopstock's. The fullness of fame was his while he lived, and he seems to have

been troubled with no misgivings as to its future continuance. That his fame at least was stainless signifies more now, to the poet, than that it should be either great or lasting. Carlyle, with that poetic touch of his, spoke admiringly of the "azure purity of Klopstock."

IV.

LESSING.

1729-1781.

IN all German literary history, no figure whatever stands out more boldly in relief-square-set, sturdy, stanch, strong, positive, combative, an individual soul "whole in himself -none with more challenge in his attitude, peremptory, imperious, commanding heed, than the figure of Lessing. Heine calls him the continuator of Luther. And indeed, during the two hundred years that immediately followed Luther, what German literary name emerges so worthy as was Lessing to stand second in that mighty succession? Lessing was five years later than Klopstock; but Lessing did more for German literature by criticising, than Klopstock did by creating.

Lessing was supremely a critic. His critical ideas he embodied, indeed, in original work of his own-work which maintains to this day a higher than merely respectable rank in literature; but it is by his labors in criticism, rather than by his labors in creation, that Lessing has been, as he still is, and as he is likely long to be, a living literary force.

The story of this man's life is at once stimulating and depressing. It is a story of struggle against adversity, struggle always manfully maintained, but struggle almost never triumphantly victorious. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was the son of a Lutheran pastor. The pastor destined his son to his own vocation; but the disposition of the youth destined him far otherwise. Sent to the University of Leipsic for the study of theology, the Lutheran clergyman's son found in that

Saxon Paris what interested him more than theology. He found the theatre. He devoted himself assiduously to the cultivation of acquaintanceship with actors and actresses. The issue was a permanent diversion of his mental activity. He became a dramatic writer and dramatic critic. His subsequent literary production was nearly all of it determined by his bent toward the theatre.

Intellectual independence was the distinguishing note in Lessing's character. Convention counted with him for nothing. His habitual attitude of mind was that of doubt and question as to traditional ideas. Finding German literature attached as a parasite to the French, he strove, by criticism, as Klopstock strove by production, to break the ignominious bond that held it subject, and to give it rooting and grounding of its own, in reason, in nature, and in truth. It need not be concealed that Lessing's contempt of French literary models was probably pricked on by a practical disappointment which he experienced. For, like so many of his literary compatriots, Lessing, too, was at one time fain to be the virtual pensioner of a prince. He failed of appointment to a librarianship under Frederick the Great, and from that moment his natural pure "joy of fighting" was pungent with some spice of spite transferred against those French authors whom the Prussian monarch counted for all in all. Voltaire he criticised with startling boldness. He took up one after another the tragedies of that brilliant man of letters, and mercilessly showed how they violated the essential truth of reason and of nature. Nay, he vindicated Aristotle himself against Voltaire, and against that whole school, classic so-called, of dramatic writers who, claiming to represent, in fact misrepresented, the teachings of the mighty Greek.

The effect was prodigious. Rather, we should say, the effect has been prodigious. For the influence of Lessing's fruitful criticism did not exhaust itself in producing an immense immediate effect. The effect continues to this day, and it is not German literature alone that feels it, but like

wise the literature of every Western nation. Lessing, in fact, is probably at this moment exercising a literary influence, extensive and intensive, not second to that of any other name whatever in the world, since Aristotle. If Luther made a German literature possible, Lessing made a German literature actual. Of all that now is most glorious in the exploits of the German literary mind, achieved since Luther, it is not too much to say that Lessing is an inseparable element.

We have thus certainly not stinted our praise of Lessing as critic. It is only just, now, to add that Lessing's destructive critical rage against the French carried with it something of the ill grace displayed by a man who should, with an air, kick down a scaffolding that had just helped him to climb. French criticism contributed to put Lessing in the way of discovering the faults in French literature. Diderot as critic was in part master to both Lessing and Goethe. To a taunt—it should have been, perhaps it was, a German taunt-leveled once against the French, that they never invented any thing, it was wittily replied, "At least Descartes. invented German philosophy." Mr. John Morley, quoting this, boldly adds: "Still more true is it that Diderot invented German criticism." The boast of absolute originality is always and every-where a very precarious boast. "He that pleadeth his cause first seemeth just; but his neighbor cometh and searcheth him out."

Lessing's native independence of mind was early asserted against his parents, who, both of them, were anxious about their son, involved amid the temptations of a city. How far from being merely querulous and idle was the solicitude they felt, may be judged from some things which Taylor (of Norwich) relates of the young man's ways. Lessing had visited home, summoned thither to see his mother, said to be dying. The dying mother revived, and every seduction of home influence was applied to reclaim the youth from his irregular life. But when he went back to Leipsic it was rather to the theatre again than to the university. The actress, however, who formerly favored him had mean