The emperor clasps him with paternal hand- A prince like thee, to win high virtue's heavenly meed." Oberon is unique in German literature for happy wholeness and oneness. The plot is a masterpiece of felicity and skill in invention and joinery. Wieland was indebted for his idea to an anonymous French chanson de geste, so-called, that is, "song of exploit," belonging to the Middle Ages, entitled Huon of Bordeaux. This work, in Wieland's time, existed only in manuscript. A year or two, however, before Oberon was begun, a bare abstract of the old romance was printed. This became in Wieland's mind the quick seed which sprang up and bloomed in the brilliant flower of the Oberon. Wieland used great freedom with his original romance. Generally, his changes were for the better. We have seen the French critic, Saint-Marc Girardin, quoted as expressing a preference for Huon of Bordeaux over Wieland's Oberon. He seemed to find the medieval poem more delicate in describing the passion of love than is its modern version. This criticism is to us incomprehensible. The present writer has had the curiosity to look with some care over the pages of Huon de Bordeaux, now accessible in print to the public, and he has lighted upon nothing there deserving the praise of delicacy, in contrast with Wieland's Oberon. The caliph's (admiral's) daughter, for example, in the chanson de geste, is so unscrupulously eager for her foreign and unknown Christian lover that, to get out of the way all obstacles to the union she desires, she is even fain to put her father to death with her own hands. And yet we do not rate very high the delicacy of Oberon. Delicacy the poem has, but it is delicacy of touch rather than delicacy of tone. The tone is not high. There is little to uplift in the Oberon. The poem runs along on a somewhat lowly moral level. It is of the earth, earthy. The intellectual level of the poem is not much higher than the moral. There is some imagination, some fancy, much felicity of phrase, of metre, of rhythm, sufficient wealth of invention, but there is no thought save what is perfectly commonplace thought. This commonplaceness in thought may be praised as a virtue of the Oberon, and we will not gainsay; but as at least a characteristic of the Oberon, it cannot be denied. It is truly surprising how simple, how ordinary, how obvious, how matter-of-course, how commonplace, every thing in the Oberon is-the plot and the machinery being supposed given. This perhaps is as it should be. It probably constitutes the absolute triumph of the poet and the artist. But it is a triumph achieved in a comparatively humble order of things. In short, the Oberon is the finest poem that exists of its class; but its class is modest indeed compared with that of such a modern handling of an ancient theme as Tennyson gave us when he wrote his Guinevere. Some readers, with those verses of Milton in mind appealing every thing to the "perfect witness of all-judging Jove," and awarding fame strictly, As he pronounces lastly on each deed, may like to see the Olympian sentence of Goethe: "So long as poetry remains poetry, gold gold, and crystal crystal, Oberon will be loved and admired as a masterpiece of poetic art." Wieland's prose works have none of them resisted the antiquating influence of time. In one of his "dialogues of the gods" there is a rather interesting anonymous introduction, as "The Unknown," of Jesus Christ in the character of an interlocutor. This unknown personage converses with Jupiter and Numa. He sketches to those pagan divinities, quite as a Voltairean deist might be expected to make him do, his own enthusiastic scheme of beneficence to the human race. Jupiter, somewhat satirically, treats him with the condescension of seniority. The time chosen for the dialogue to occur seems to be that of Constantine the Great (A. D. 300). When, in due time, the mysterious stranger vanishes, the dialogue concludes with the following ex change of question and reply between Numa and Jupiter, left alone together: Numa (to Jupiter). What sayst thou to this apparition, Jupiter? Heinrich Heine has somewhere a very striking sentence, representing the assembly of the Olympian gods disturbed by the entrance of the crucified Galilæan, who flings his bloody cross on their banqueting-table, and puts a stop to their carousal. One is reminded of this, by the foregoing far paler, far less imaginative, and far less powerful conception of Wieland's. Bayard Taylor's Masque of the Gods might almost seem to have found in Wieland's dialogue its seed of suggestion. Wieland died repeating, in his own translation, the soliloquy of Hamlet. "To die-to sleep," were his last words-so spoken, and by such a man, words of mournful skepticism, rather than of Christian trust and rest. We cannot forbear adding still a note of Wieland's own, respecting a personal interview that it was his fortune once to have with the invading and conquering Napoleon at Weimar. It will afford an interesting contrast with a like experience of Goethe's, to be noted hereafter. Wieland writes: The Duchess presented me to him in form, and he addressed me affably with some words of compliment, looking me steadily in the face. Few persons have appeared to me so rapidly to see through a man at a glance. He instantly perceived that, notwithstanding my celebrity, I was a plain, unassuming old man; and, as he seemed desirous of making, forever, a good impression on me, he at once assumed the form best adapted to. attain his end. I never saw a man in appearance calmer, plainer, milder, or more unpretending. No trace was visible about him of the consciousness that he was a great monarch. He talked to me like an old acquaintance with his equal, and, which was very rare with him, chatted with me exclusively an entire hour and a half, to the great surprise of all who were present. At length, about midnight, I began to feel inconvenience from standing so long, and took the liberty of requesting his majesty's permission to withdraw. "Allez donc," said he in a friendly tone; "bon soir." [Go, then; good night.] The more remarkable traits of our interview were these: The previous play having made Cæsar the subject of our conversation, Napoleon observed that he was one of the greatest characters in all history; and that, indeed, he would have been, without exception, the greatest, but for one blunder. I was about to inquire to what anecdote he alluded, when he seemed to read the question in my eye, and continued: "Cæsar knew the men who wanted to get rid of him, and he ought to have been rid of them first." If Napoleon could have read all that passed in my mind, he would have perceived me saying, Such a blunder will never be laid to your charge. . . . He preferred Ossian to Homer. . . . Notwithstanding the flattering friendliness of his apparent manner, he repeatedly gave me the idea of his being cast from bronze. 66 At length, however, he had put me so much at my ease, that I asked him how it happened that the public worship, which he had in some degree reformed in France, had not been rendered more philosophic, and more on a par with the spirit of the times. "My dear Wieland," he replied, worship is not made for philosophers; they believe neither in me nor in my priesthood. As for those who do believe, you cannot give them, or leave them, wonders enough. If I had to make a religion for philosophers, it should be just the reverse." In this tone the conversation went on for some time, and Bonaparte professed so much skepticism as to question whether Jesus Christ had ever existed. There is, in Wieland's character both as author and as man, so much to engage the kind feeling of the reader, such cheerfulness, such brightness, such versatility, such pliancy, such good-nature, such amiable desire to please, that, notwithstanding his faults, of levity, of fickleness, of lasciviousness, of skepticism, one does not part from him without a certain regret. His company, at least to your slacker moods of mind, is not-though perhaps it ought to be-the less delightful, that it never threatens to disturb you "with the joy of elevated thoughts." 66 VI. HERDER. 1744-1803. AMONG the greater divinities of the German literary Olympus, Goethe is generally the one selected to stand for Jove, the monarch of them all. This, if regard be had chiefly to supremacy of fame and of influence, is, of course, an arrangement of the hierarchy not to be quarreled with. We, however, imagine that Goethe's noble personal presence, "the front of Jove himself," has, by natural, if illogical, associative effect, had something to do with the instinctive and almost universal acclamation which has crowned this elect favorite of fortune the German literary Zeus. Herder was a less impressive-looking physical man than was Goethe; but, if physical qualities were to be carefully denied any influence, and if moral qualities were to weigh, and to weigh equally with intellectual, in making their possessor a candidate for pre-eminent place; if a certain inborn kingliness of soul, a certain proud consciousness imprinted on the brow, of inalienable native right to reign, were to be accepted in evidence of title-in one word, if ethical height as well as mental breadth were to be measured, in finding out the true Jove among German literary men, then Herder, and not Goethe, would undoubtedly be that monarch. In our own opinion, at least, the erectest, the stateliest, in short, seen by the eye of the morally-judging mind, the kingliest, of all his peers is he. But this majestic man was not, like Goethe, born to ease and leisure. The mien of courtliness and command, the grace of elegance in manner, which in Herder so well comported with his fame, were not the fruit to him of early habit and example. Herder was of poor, almost squalid, extraction. Burke proudly told the Duke of Bedford: “ Nitor in adversum ['I struggle against adverse circumstance'] is the |