Thou in chambering and in wine With thy riot revellers joining, Badest those menial knaves of thine Give no ear to plaint or pining, But, heedless of my cries, to drag Through the snow the beggar-hag." Thy mandate was obey'd: I fell, And bound to earth by icy spell, With the infant which I cherish'd, Unpitied in that snow-grave perish'd. Ruthless! thou hadst feeling none For my frozen death-bed groan! Chorus of Birds. Ruthless! feeling thou hadst none: Is no succour-rescue near? Nought can now their vengeance stay. Then am I doom'd for aye to suffer still; So hath stern fate decreed its sterner will, Him who on earth wore but the shape of man, No mortal prayer may free from judgment ban. Chorus. Yes thou art doom'd to suffer thus for ever, From such a fate no prayers of ours deliver; For who on earth wore but the shape of man, Our solemn rites free not from judgment ban. Seer. If 'tis so, away, away! Guilty soul, away, away! Seer. Now obey my invocation, Ye who dwelt in youth and beauty, Yet mid frailty and temptation Never swerv'd from virtue's duty, Mundane joys and gauds despising While on earth,-nor higher prizing Than these mystic herbs, that burning, Are to ashes now returning. As these too never yielded fruit, As the bow the clouds athwart Comes in robe like new-formed snow; Yet a grief upon her brow. With that mien may angels vie; Shines her robe like new-formed snow; Yet dims a tear her sorrowing eye, Yet a grief is on her brow. Seer. Round her head a chaplet wreathes; The Maiden's Spirit. Erst was I Tana fair and young, Of none the passion I returned; Wherefore should'st thou longer stay? Cold to love, its prayers I spurn'd ;— Who was not human, &c. &c. Never may we meet agen, (The Spirit vanishes.) On this snake-form'd wand of mine Again new signs to sight appear, Gay and careless never needed With flowers to braid my tresses' curl, Were mine; and-wherefore, know I not, I seem to pine for something miss'd: With wing that far outstrips the gale, For gemmed flies o'er meads that range. Yes, it is for thee decreed, To dwell on earth, or enter heaven. Still if aught our prayers avail thee, Nought of those do I require: I seem to dwell in heaven's own sphere. Vain such wish: still do not grieve thee, Whoso doubteth-heedeth not, Whoso doubteth, &c. Seer. Let us now our temple strew Now your quenched tapers light. Chorus. Wonders still our eyes salute, Who art thou in sable weed? Yet what it means may not be guess'd. See-it pointeth to its breast, Spirit, I adjure thee, speak; Phantom, &c. Seer. If reply thou deignest none, Hence, and from our fane begone. Whoso heareth-heedeth not, Let him flee this sacred spot, We shall speedily resume these selections from a poetry so entirely and so undeservedly unknown to England. ART. VII.--Fermer der Geniale.--(Fermer the Genius.) A Novel by Lewis Tieck; translated into English, with Philological Notes, and an Essay on the Author, by Ferdinand Marckwort. London and Brunswic. 1837. GENIUS! What a world of imaginations and recollections are wakening at the name! One sense of ineffable, unenviable glory, the pinnacle of a precipice, which some desire, but all dread: the height to which we climb perhaps in a dream, and slip from, only to perdition; or, waking, thank our stars we never tried it in reality. Such is genius in its own proud, solitary, and irrevocable position, from which, like the thoughtless sea-boy who placed his foot on the top-mast head, there is no medium, no descent, but a plunge into the yawning sea. Such was Napoleon's, who conquered all things, even hope; too great to leave himself the possibility of permanence. Such was Scott's, accumulating lands and debts; such Byron's, dazzling Europe, to die in its obscurest corner; and such, though in minor degree, the lot of those who can boast nothing of credit but dishonoured bills, and whose sole hope of remembrance rests not in their own but their tailors' books, where they stand immortalized from generation to generation, without a chance of their names being effaced. But what is genius? a spirit that makes all happy but itself and its tradesmen. This is scarcely a sufficient definition,-folly itself might rival half this: or does it bring happiness to its possessor in despite of storms? goodness alone can do so much :or does it join with others to make every moment happy? assuredly not by any means-but if the contrary, there is a vast deal of unsuspected genius in the world. But genius when it works, which is not often, works prodigies, --and without any apparent means; it is a kind of mental engine, substituting steam; and empty pockets are its locomotive power; a power, unfortunately, never new, but yet in constant activity. Nature, said the philosophers, terribly abhors a vacuum, and makes every effort to obtain a plenum by the materia subtilis ; so does her favoured son: both, on the same system, carry it out to the utmost of their means and spread it wherever they go or try to go it is a power that is substance in vacuity, and in obscurity, light: that in coldness wakes warmth and glows amid destitution: that whispers to leaves, and feeds the fountains of the stars, and mingles with the soul's overflowings; bears the voice of winds, and holds the planets in their aerial course, and fills, though unseen, the blank intervals of life itself with a glow and a balm, of etherial ecstacy. In short does every thing but get money. This power is, however, considerably cut down by the demonstrative system of modern invention: the older lucubrations of the Aristotelian, moral, critical, or even poetic, are met by the New Method of Bacon's disciples; the speculative philosophy that attempts the cashing of a hopeless bill is put down by the practical philosophy that refuses the money; and "genius free to range" no longer, is confined to Rules, if not of reason, yet of the Fleet-there it joins companionship wild and bad; tarnishes its wings in the foul stream of Fleta; takes unto it seven other spirits more wicked than itself; and since it cannot reach heaven in its pride of solitary flight, is satisfied to fill its belly with the husks of swine. Is this genius? that diamond ray, light without heat, and though dazzling every eye yet cold and hard as the mere stone? Goethe, himself a doubtful character, quarrelled with the word in purest German, and insisted on altering its nature through its name which he chose to call Geniale. And thus speaks the worthy translator "Genial is a word which frequently occurs in works written during these forty years, and it is particularly Goethe, who has nationalized it and fixed to it a meaning which, though it never answers the English word genial, (procreating, festive, gay) combines the humorous, the deep and the original, in a word, great powers of intellect. The English word genius conveys a meaning rather too elevated for the intention of the author. Genial is a word which even the most rigorous purists will probably never succeed to proscribe, as there does not exist in the German language (not the dictionary only, which can hardly contain the third part of a modern language) a word equally comprehensive and including such different ideas at once; and we feel the more and more that the employment of words ought to be subjected to the clearness of the idea, that language is merely a vehicle, and that, in general, the admission of foreign words, if restrained, is highly susceptible of enlarging the indigenous materials of a language."-p. 81. We shall never, as philologists, and as critics likewise, be surprised at the impossibility existing for the purists to proscribe the word, since the most rigorous of themselves even, upon paper, are not in the least disposed to varnish the thing. The purists as men of undoubted genius, whatever it may consist of with them, are too intimate with the niceties of language not to know that a close mutual relation and affinity exists between the words themselves in the first place, and their application in the second: for placed in the best company, that is to say with the best of cheer, we can aver upon our judgment as critics that the sternest of them never showed the slightest wish to get rid of the term, unless in the abstract. Fermer, however, is of a different class, for he is merely a |