Hitherto, in the present series of books, some regard has steadily been had to the proportion in the study of foreign tongues, living and dead, observed by the average American school of higher education. Modern languages, especially the French and the German, but more especially the German, have of late been encroaching somewhat on the ancient preserves prescriptively belonging to those two great languages of antiquity, the Greek and the Latin, in the courses of study established by our colleges and universities. Thus far, however, their place therein remains, and, as the present writer thinks, properly remains, generally less than that of their elder kindred. The room, therefore, narrow though it be, given, in the pages which follow, to German literature, is after all not so very inadequate-measured in comparison with the quasi-authoritative standard, to which, as now hinted, habitual deference has, throughout this series of volumes, been paid.

It has not been thought necessary, or even desirable, in fulfillment of the purpose of the present volume-more than in the case of the volumes preceding in the series-that the author should frequently either make new translations of his own, or secure such from other hands, for the extracts to be introduced. A fresh version will indeed here and there be found in these pages; but for the most part recourse has been had to translations previously existing in English. In general, for each case as it arose, the writer has compared various translations one with another, as also, of course, with their common original, sufficiently to satisfy himself what rendering was, all things considered, best suited to his purpose; and then, besides, in the particular passages finally selected from considerable works for transfer to his pages, he has collated his chosen version with the corresponding German text, in order to make corrections or improvements observed by him to be needed. In some instances, however -instances in which the authority of the translator, either for scholarship or for literary skill, was great-he has remitted this caution.

Nothing further, perhaps, in the way of explanation, is required-unless to say that the present writer may be understood, acting under a sense of serious responsibility, to have formed independently for himself, though, naturally, not without much comparative study of various discussion by others, the literary, and by occasion the ethical, judgments and opinions which he has here committed himself to express. On the whole, it is a humble work, for a work so arduous and so full of risk to himself, that the writer herewith submits to the public. He hopes that he shall at least be found. to have done no injustice, either to the authors whom he presents, or to the readers to whom he presents them.

CLASSIC

GERMAN COURSE IN ENGLISH.

I.

GERMAN LITERATURE.

To Germany may justly be accorded the paradoxical distinction of possessing at once the most voluminous and the least voluminous national literature in the world. Our meaning is, that while the aggregate bulk of books written and printed in the German language would probably be found to exceed, and even vastly exceed, that of those written and printed in any other language whatever, you would certainly look elsewhere in vain for a second example of a national literature in which the proportion of what, judged at once for substance and for form, could be pronounced choice and admirable was equally small. The German genius is prolific in thought, it is eager for expression; but of beauty in expression for thought, it is far, very far, from being correspondingly, we need not say capable, but desirous. The result is, as we have intimated, that, while of literature, in the large, loose sense of the term, the Germans have even an over-supply, of literature in the strict, narrow sense, they possess comparatively little. Little comparatively, we say; for absolutely they possess much. And of this much in quantity, a part at least is in quality very fine.

Our concern, in the present volume, will be chiefly with what is best in German literature. We shall leave to one side, merely mentioning perhaps, as we pass, all that enormous contribution of the German mind to classical scholar

ship, to sacred hermeneutics, to dogmatic theology, to metaphysic speculation, to exact science, to historical research. This has been, it still is, it always will be, immensely important to the accumulation of intellectual treasure for the human race; it is even widely and enduringly important to the development of literature- the literature of the world at large, as well as of Germany; but proper literature itself it is not. In short, literature in the higher sense of that term-polite literature-has never yet been to Germany the favorite, fullest expression of the national genius.

During a certain limited period of time, such did indeed seem almost to be the case. The period which had its long and splendid culmination in Goethe was, no doubt, a predominantly literary period in Germany. Long, we thus suffer ourselves to call the culmination of that period; yet in truth, accurately considered, the culmination was not long, but short. It seems long only in a kind of illogical, illusive association with the lengthened life-time and lengthened productive activity of Goethe himself, the space between whose birth and whose death spans well-nigh the entire chief literary history of Germany. Klopstock published the beginning of his Messiah in 1748; in 1749 Goethe was born. What was there in German literature before the Messiah of Klopstock? In 1832 Goethe died; in 1826 Heine had published the first installment of his masterpiece, the Pictures of Travel. What has there been in German literature since?

Of course, we speak broadly, and with only approximate truth. Klopstock was not the earliest, and Heine is not the latest, of German authors. Still, it is one of the chiefly remarkable things about the history of literature in Germany that that literature should first have been so tardy in beginning, and then should have apparently exhausted itself in a development so sudden and so short.

So tardy, however, in beginning, as we shall thus seem to have represented, German literature in reality was not. You have to run back from Klopstock, two centuries, to Luther,