I went out to adore, and I weep. Forgive, forgive this tear also to the finite one, O thou who shalt be!

Thou wilt unveil to me all doubts, thou who shalt guide me through the dark valley of death-I shall then learn whether the golden worm had a soul.

The morning sun grows sultry; clouds stream aloof; visible is he who comes-the Eternal.

Now swoop, rush, whirl the winds; bows the wood; billows the

stream....

The wood bows, the stream flees, and I fall not on my face? Lord, Lord, God merciful and gracious, thou approaching power! have mercy on me! . . .

See ye the new sign of his presence, the darting beam? Hear ye, high in the cloud, the thunder of the Lord? It calls: Jehovah . . . Jehovah. . . and the struck forest smokes.

But not our hut. Our Father bade his destroyer to pass over our hut. Ah! already rushes heaven and earth with the gracious rain; now is the earth (how it thirsted!) refreshed, and the heaven (how it was laden!) disburdened.

Behold, Jehovah comes no longer in storm; in gentle, pleasant murmurs comes Jehovah, and under him bends the bow of peace!

We here, as promised, conclude our exhibition by example of Klopstock as poet. As poetical critic, however, using himself for his subject, he deserves still to have hearing for a moment or two. Klopstock felt the necessity of instructing his public in the principles on which he sought to write poetry of the highest kind. From an essay of his, printed in preface to one of the installments in which his Messiah originally appeared, we separate a few expressions of opinion on the subject of Divine Poetry. There is abundant selfrevelation, on the poet's part, in every paragraph of this prefatory essay. Klopstock:

A piece of sublime poetry is a work of genius in which strokes of wit are to be sparingly used.

There are masterpieces of wit that neither reach the heart nor flow from it; but a genius without the tender feelings of the heart is very imperfect.

The highest and utmost effect of genius is to move the whole soul.

.. Young's Night Thoughts is perhaps a work that has the merit of having fewer faults than any other. If we take from him what he

says as a Christian, Socrates remains; but how does the Christian rise above Socrates! . . .

His [the sacred poet's] design is more extensive than awaking a single passion. . . . By a masterpiece of skill he lays before us views at which, by a sudden and powerful touch, he makes us cry out with joy, stand immovably fixed in astonishment, or, filled with grief and terror, turn pale, tremble, and weep.

The last foregoing sentence reveals what was the perfectly conscious aim of Klopstock, in those innumerable passages of his poem in which, with exclamation points, with superlative phrases, with grammatical and rhetorical figure, in short, with all the futile exterior artifices of intense writing, he invokes the passions of the reader. He will now set forth why he cultivated prolixity on principle:

When the poet, in some important part of his work, designs strongly to affect the soul he will perhaps proceed unabsorbed in the following manner. ... He will say, In order strongly to affect the mind, I gradually rise, that every step may prepare for what is to follow. In order to fill my readers with a sorrow mixed with silent astonishment, I must insensibly encompass them with sorrowful images. I must first remind them of certain truths that open the soul to the reception of the last and most powerful impressions. . . . Were I abruptly to bring them thither, they would be rather stunned than filled with strong sensations.

Here is a critical sentence of Klopstock's, the very last word of which, a proper name, will, we venture to say, surprise every reader:

The Greeks, the Romans, and the French have all their short golden age of polite literature; and I do not know why we have not given one to the English; they have long had their masterpieces, and these have not ceased with-Glover!

"Glover" is the name of an English poet whose now forgotten epics, especially the Leonidas, enjoyed a great fame in their day. To Coleridge and Wordsworth, paying together a visit of youthful reverence to the venerable German poet in his home, Klopstock expressed the opinion that Glover's blank verse was superior to Milton's! of fame, and such may be the value of critical opinion pronounced by authority enjoying its moment of imperial sway!

Such are the phases

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