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POETRY.-The Soldier's Grief, 50. The Widowed Sword, 50. September, 96. Ruined, 96. Via Solitaria, 96.

SHORT ARTICLES.-Literary Intelligence, 62, 69, 72, 80, 82, 93. Life in the Atmosphere, 69. All the Books published in America, 69. Books on the American War, 72. Old Opinions on Slavery, 72. Burke on Secession, Democrats, and Federalists, 80. Gangrene, 82. Westminster Clock, 93. Petroleum Gas, 93. Electric Light, 93.

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THE SOLDIER'S GRIEF.

"How is grown my little lady ? ""Tis a soldier from the wars, Bearing honors on his bosom,

And the marks of battle-scars—

"Daughter of my worthy master,
Whom I left four years ago,
When I went to join my army
In the smiting of the foe?

"Makes she still the daylight brighter,
As she bounds along the lawn,
With the laughter of the joy-bells,
And the motion of the fawn?

"Come the children from the village

Still with homage to their queen, Learning goodness from her actions, Learning graces from her mien? "Do the old men stand to bless her, And the young men stand to pray For a wife but half as lovely,

Ere their youth be passed away?

"How I long to tell her stories

Of the marching and the strife; And to see her melt with pity

For the soldier's harrassed life

"Long to give her bauble treasures

That I gathered in the East,
And the fruits of southern vineyards
That are crowning of a feast!

"But perhaps she's now a woman,
With a stately gait of pride,
And a haughty husband wears her
Jeweled at his rigid side:

"Not remembering the roses

That I wreathed for her fair hair, When we roamed along the valleys, Gladder than the gladdest there :

Not remembering the tear-drops

That were standing in her eyes, When she decked my gun with ribbons, Whispering the fast good-byes.

"O my gossip, tell me quickly,

Shall I find her still the same,
Setting roughest things to music,
When she speaks my humble name?”

"Soldier, simple-hearted soldier,

Home returned from the wars, I must give the wounding deeper Than thy many battle-scars. "Yonder, where the sun is making Folding shadows round the trees; Yonder, where the grass is growing Damp and tangled under these; "Yonder, where the frightened woodquest In among the branches shoots;

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From The Cornhill Magazine.
HEINRICH HEINE.

"I KNOW not if I deserve that a laurelwreath should one day be laid on my coffin. Poetry, dearly as I have loved it, has always been to me but a divine plaything. I have never attached any great value to poetical fame; and I trouble myself very little whether people praise my verses or blame them. But lay on my coffin a sword: for I was a brave soldier in the war of liberation of humanity."

Heine had his full share of love of fame, and cared quite as much as his brethren of the genus irritabile whether people praised his verses or blamed them. And he was very little of a hero. Posterity will certainly decorate his tomb with the emblem of the laurel rather than with the emblem of the sword. Still, for his contemporaries, for us, for the Europe of the present century, he is significant chiefly for the reason which he himself in the words just quoted assigns. He is significant because he was, if not pre-eminently a brave, yet a brilliant, a most effective soldier in the war of liberation of humanity.

inence. These writers, and others with aims and a general tendency the same as theirs, are not the real inheritors and continuators of Goethe's power; the current of their activity is not the main current of German literature after Goethe. Far more in Heine's works flows this main current; Heine, far more than Tieck or Jean Paul Richter, is the continuator of that which, in Goethe's varied activity, is the most powerful and vital; on Heine, of all German authors who survived Goethe, incomparably the largest portion of Goethe's mantle fell. I do not forget that when Mr. Carlye was dealing with German literature, Heine, though he was clearly risen above the horizon, had not shone forth with all his strength; I do not forget, too, that after ten or twenty years many things may come out plain before the critic which before were hard to be discerned by him; and assuredly no one would dream of imputing it as a fault to Mr. Carlyle that twenty years ago he mistook the central current in German literature, overlooked the rising Heine, and attached undue importance to that romantic school which Heine was to destroy; one may rather note it as a misfortune, sent perhaps as a delicate chastisement to a critic, who-man of genius as he is, and no one recognizes his genius more admiringly than I do has, for the functions of the critic, a little too much of the self-will and eccentricity of a genuine son of Great Britain.

Heine is noteworthy, because he is the most important German successor and continuator of Goethe in Goethe's most important line of activity. And which of Goethe's lines of activity is this? Ilis line of activity as "a soldier in the war of liberation of humanity."

To ascertain the master current in the literature of an epoch, and to distinguish this from all minor currents, is the critic's highest function; in discharging it he shows how far he possesses the most indispensable quality of his office-justness of spirit. The living writer who has done most to make England acquainted with German authors, a man of genius, but to whom precisely this one quality of justness of spirit is perhaps wanting, I mean Mr. Carlyle,-seems to me in the result of his labors on German literature to afford a proof how very necessary to the critic this quality is. Mr. Carlyle has spoken admirably of Goethe; but then Goethe stands before all men's eyes, the man- Heine himself would hardly have admitted ifest centre of German literature: and from this affiliation, though he was far too powerthis central source many rivers flow. Which ful-minded a man to decry, with some of the of these rivers is the main stream? which of vulgar German liberals, Goethe's genius. the courses of spirit which we see active in "The wind of the Paris Revolution," he Goethe is the course which will most influ- writes after the three days of 1830. " blew ence the future, and attract and be continued about the candles a little in the dark night by the most powerful of Goethe's successors? of Germany, so that the red curtains of a - that is the question. Mr. Carlyle at- German throne or two caught fire; but the taches, it seems to me, far too much impor- old watchmen, who do the police of the Gertance to the romantic school of Germany - man kingdoms, are already bringing out the Tieck, Novalis, Jean Paul Richter, and fire-engines, and will keep the candles closer gives to these writers, really gifted as two, snuffed for the future. Poor, fast-bound at any rate, of them are, an undue prom- German people, lose not all heart in thy

bonds! The fashionable ccating of ice melts | to light his own individuality. I can clearly off from my heart, my soul quivers and my mark where this influence of mine has made eyes burn, and that is a disadvantageous state itself felt; there arises out of it a kind of of things for a writer, who should control poetry of nature, and only in this way is it his subject-matter and keep himself beauti- possible to be original.” fully objective, as the artistic school would have us, and as Goethe has done; he has come to be eighty years old doing this, and minister, and in good condition-poor German people! that is thy greatest man!"

But hear Goethe himself: "If I were to say what I had really been to the Germans in general, and to the young German poets in particular, I should say I had been their Liberator."

Modern times find themselves with an immense system of institutions, established facts, accredited dogmas, customs, rules, which have come to them from times not modern. In this system their life has to be carried forward, yet they have a sense that this system is not of their own creation, that it by no means corresponds exactly with the wants of their actual life, that, for them, it is customary, not rational.

My voice shall never be joined to those which decry Goethe, and if it is said that the foregoing is a lame and impotent conclusion to Goethe's declaration that he had been the liberator of the Germans in general, and of the young German poets in particular, I say it is not. Goethe's profound, imperturbable naturalism is absolutely fatal to all routine thinking; he puts the standard, once for all, inside every man instead of outside him; when he is told, such a thing must be so, there is immense authority and custom in favor of its being so, it has been held to be so for a thousand years, he answers with Olympian politeness, "But is it so? is it so to me?" Nothing could be more really subversive of the foundations on which the old European order rested; and it may be remarked that no persons are so radically detached from this order, no persons so thoroughly modern, as those who have felt Goethe's influence most deeply. If it is said that Goethe professes to bave in this way deeply influenced but a few persons, and those persons poets, one may answer that he could have taken no better way to secure, in the end, the ear of the world; for poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things, and hence its importance. Nevertheless the process of liberation, as Goethe worked it, though sure, is undoubtedly slow; he came, as Heine says, to be eighty years old in thus working it, and at the end of that time the old Middle-Age machine was still creaking on, the thirty German courts and their chamberlains subsisted in all their glory; Goethe himself was a minister, and the visible triumph of the modern

The awakening of this sense is the awakening of the modern spirit. The modern spirit is now awake almost everywhere; the sense of want of correspondence between the forms of modern Europe and its spirit, between the new wine of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the old bottles of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, or even of the sixteenth and seventeenth, almost every one now perceives it is no longer dangerous to affirm that this want of correspondence exists; people are even beginning to be shy of denying it. To remove this want of correspondence is beginning to be the settled endeavor of most persons of good sense. Dissolvents of the European system of dominant ideas and facts we must all be, all of us who have any power of working; what we have to study is that we may not be acrid dissolv-spirit over prescription and routine seemed ents of it.

And how did Goethe, that grand dissolvent in an age when there were fewer of them than at present, proceed in his task of dissolution, of liberation of the modern European from the old routine? He shall tell us himself."Through me the German poets have become aware that, as man must live from within outwards, so the artist must work from within outwards, seeing that, make what contortions he will, he can only bring

as far off as ever. It was the year 1830; the German sovereigns had passed the preceding fifteen years in breaking the promises of freedom they had made to their subjects when they wanted their help in the final struggle with Napoleon. Great events were happening in France; the revolution, defeated in 1815, had arisen from its defeat, and was wresting from its adversaries the power. Heinrich Heine, a young man of genius, born at Hamburg, with all the culture of Germany,

but by race a Jew; with warm sympathies | the representatives of the modern spirit in for France, whose revolution had given to his every sphere where it is applicablo, regarded race the rights of citizenship, and whose rule had been, as is well known, popular in the Rhine provinces, where he passed his youth; with a passionate admiration for the great French emperor, with a passionate contempt for the sovereigns who had overthrown him, for their agents, and for their policy-Heinrich Heine was in 1830 in no humor for any such gradual process of liberation from the old order of things as that which Goethe had followed. His counsel was for open war. With that terrible modern weapon, the pen, in his hand, he passed the remainder of his life in one fierce battle. What wasthat battle? the reader will ask. It was a life and death battle with Philistinism.

themselves, with the robust self-confidence natural to reformers, as a chosen people, as children of the light. They regarded their adversaries as humdrum people, slaves to routine, enemies to the light; stupid and oppressive, but at the same time very strong. This explains the love which Heine, that Paladin of the modern spirit, has for France; it explains the preference which he gives to France over Germany: "the French," he says, " are the chosen people of the new religion, its first gospels and dogmas have been drawn up in their language; Paris is the new Jerusalem, and the Rhine is the Jordan which divides the consecrated land of freedom from the land of the Philistines." He means that the French, as a people, have shown more accessibility to. ideas than any other people; that prescription and routine have had less hold upon them than upon any other people: that they have shown more readiness to move and to alter at the bidding (real or supposed) of reason. This explains, too, the detestation which Heine had for the English: "I might settle in England," he says in his exile, "if it were not that I should find there two things, coal-smoke and Englishmen; I cannot abide either."

Philistinism—we have not the expression in English. Perhaps we have not the word because we have so much of the thing. At Soli, I imagine, they did not talk of solecisms; and here, at the very head-quarters of Goliath, nobody talks of Philistinism. The French have adopted the term épicier, grocer, to designate the sort of being whom the Germans designate by the term Philistine; but the French term-besides that it casts a slur upon a respectable class, composed of living and susceptible members, while the original Philistines are dead and buried long ago-is really, I think, in itself much less apt and expressive than the German term. Efforts have been made to obtain in English some term equivalent to Philister or épicier; Mr. Carlyle has made several such efforts: "respectability with its thousand gigs," he says; well, the occupant of every one of those gigs is, Mr. Carlyle means, a Philistine. How-what was intolerably inconvenient to them ever, the word respectable is far too valuable they have suppressed, and as they have supa word to be thus perverted from its proper pressed it not because it was irrational, but meaning; if the English are ever to have a because it was practically inconvenient, they word for the thing we are speaking of-and have seldom in suppressing it appealed to so prodigious are the changes which the mod- reason, but always, if possible, to some precern spirit is introducing, that even we Eng-edent, or form, or letter, which served as a lish shall perhaps come to want such a word convenient instrument for their purpose, and -I think we had much better take the term Philistine itself.

What he hated in the English was the "ächt-brittische Beschränktheit," as he calls it-the genuine British narrowness. In truth, the English, profoundly as they have modified the old Middle-Age order, great as is the liberty which they have secured for themselves, have in all their changes proceeded, to use a familiar expression, by the rule of thumb;

which saved them from the necessity of recurring to general principles. They have thus Philistine must have originally meant, in become, in a certain sense, of all people the the mind of those who invented the nick- most inaccessible to ideas, and the most imname, a strong, dogged, unenlightened oppo- patient of them; inaccessible to them because nent of the chosen people, of the children of of their want of familiarity with them, and the light. The party of change, the would- impatient of them because they have got on be remodellers of the old traditional European so well without them, that they despise those order, the invokers of reason against custom, who, not having got on so well as themselves,

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