For, unless we are greatly mistaken, this is the work of a man who has something, both in heart and brain, of different stuff than belongs to the graceful faint echoers of the masters' tones. It is the bungling work of an apprentice who bids fair to be a craftsman one day. Just now he is engaged in a threefold wrestle, with his ideas, his form, and his expression; when he has mastered them, we shall see what he can do.

We give an extract, which will illustrate our meaning.

Eunice slept; the day had passed in alternated wakings, sleep,

A quiet sleep, a dreamless sleep, or, if she dreamt, 'twere dreams that creep
Still-footed through the brain, nor rouse it into those convulsive starts,

And murmurous, broken words, that half reveal the deep, sad, breaking heart's
Low bed of sorrows, o'er which flows, by day, the quiet, smooth-faced stream
Of earth's conventionalities, but parcel pierced, e'en in our dream.
The pearly twilight, elbowing the sun's last rays athwart the low,

Broad window seat, filled all the west room with a genial, pleasant glow
Of mingled light and shade; a softened radiance, that flowed upon

Her couch, and rolled its silver wheels up to her out-stretched hand, pale, drawn,
Through all its tender muscles, with long, pangful days; and to her breast,
Soft, fair, and gently moving, as the sighing, palpitating crest

Of a white, foam-tipped tide might move, upon a calm, sweet, summer's day,
About a low, enchanted isle; so did her gentle being sway

Its tide about the dark and gloomy shores of death; and, last, her face,
Still, passionless with weakness and with sleep, yet full of quiet grace,
As smoothed and beautified by some dreamt vision of the coming stars,
The twilit glory fell upon; and yet, no more than first it was,

Did glorify her countenance, so utterly brimmed o'er with peace;

As a still lake doth shape its banks in shades, nor yet, doth once increase,
Nor mix confused two leaves, or ferns, but giveth each its order due,

So in her soul, that rippled 'neath Heaven's shore, Heaven's vision perfect grew.

Two or three shorter poems follow, and in these we find higher
finish, and more developed power. We append an extract or two
from one of these, which seems to us to be poetry of no mean order.
O purple, gorgeous Love, what hast thou which
Should sit within my squalid soul, and fling
The level glories of thy sun-orbed eyes
Athwart its casements, patched and dark, to bring
Th' aroma of thy flower-breathed nostrils, rich
With thick camellias from kings' gardens gleans, [?]
Into this poor low level? Wilt thou sing

An even strain with that thou sang for queens,
In all their velvet, holiday attire?

Dost mark I am low-down, and 'tis a fire

But homely hangs upon my lip, and weans

Its early ripeness from the breast of youth.

And wilt thou come? and wilt thou stay? In truth

I would lift up my hands, but they are weak;

I would lift up my voice, but that would break;

I will lift up my heart and say I gave
My best for it is first and last I have.

I know not, Love, what first thou found'st in me
To fit thy condescension on; to come
Down to my footstool from thy raised-up throne,
To which I scarcely dared slant up my dumb
Lips, rounded in a prayer; but, bent, my eyes
Locked up their glances in the footed dust,
That, beat from off a passing heel, in curves
Lay, building up its tiny bastions: lies

Should I have deemed the prophecies of truth,
That would have vouched for steady pulses, nerves,
To bear the full placed pressure of thy touch,
As thus I do, not shaking overmuch.

And yet, methinks, thou comest not to us
Always for what we are, or have, or give ;
But come because we need thee, not thou us,
And, probing deepward where we inner live-
As dewdrops in a dusty lily's mouth,
To find its heart out, and to gentle south
Give it for sweetest nourishment - thus thou
Dost gather up our sun-cracked seeds to sow
Them elsewhere than on flinty ribs of rock,
So they may grow and slant up bended stalk
Beneath its sloping shocks of bearded grain,
That, o'er run, ever droppeth out again.

All darkened, chill, and lone, I floated on
Within the near-lipped shell of my small sphere —
On o'er the sombre billows, scanty cleft.
Before my prow and in my wake, with drear,
Thin flames, lit up and speedy quenched again.
The gathering night had shed my soul with pain-
As one, who coucheth 'neath an autumn tree,
Hath felt its sere leaves fluttered on his head,
And down his shoulders, till his feet were 'bed
In flame-shot, satin-rustling tapestry,
And, then, a sudden, there burst over me
A flooded light, that was a second sea;
And thou camest sailing by, and put around
My bruised heart thy balmy arms, and wound
Thyself into my being, till I merged
My pains in thee and lost them evermore,
And they are fallen in a bedded sea

Whereof I know not, of its wave or shore.

Johannes Olaf. A Novel. By Elizabeth de Wille. Translated from the German by F. E. Bunnètt. Boston: Roberts Brothers. 1873.

WE are not sufficiently familiar with contemporary German literature to say whether there has arisen a school of imitators of Spielhagen. A priori, the thing would seem likely; for there were not only remarkable originality and power in the author last mentioned, but a firm grasp of essentials, and an insight into the very heart of the agitating questions of the time which could not fail powerfully to influence younger minds. But be this as it may, there can be no doubt of the discipleship of the author of this story. The idea of "problematical characters," caught by Spielhagen from Goethe, she has seized, and more truly than her predecessor. Spielhagen has drawn us characters of this kind whose lives are confused and frustrated by impotence of will: this author, more truly seizing Goethe's idea, shows us a character of noble physical and spiritual gifts, whose life is strangely perverted and made enigmatical by intense overmastering power of will.

There is, in persons and incidents, a singular resemblance between this story and Hammer and Anvil; so remarkable indeed that it has the effect of a child's picture-puzzle confusedly put together. The

chief characters in that remarkable novel have here their counterparts, but with a difference in their spheres of action; and the principal events are imitated, but adjusted in a different relation to the persons and circumstances.

Were we however to consider this work only as an imitation, we should do it great injustice. The principal character is a very striking conception. Sprung on the one side from the descendant of a line of old Vikings, and on the other from an artist whose genius could not blossom in the cold northern climate and amid the rugged realities of a life of poverty on a Friesland island, the hero combines the adamantine will, the deep elemental passions and stern self-restraint of the one, with the love of beauty, the depths of unspoken feeling and the undemonstrative tenderness of the other. From the conflict of these forces come all his trials, and yet this conflicting action makes him the man he is a strange, deep, disturbing force that draws out of their ordinary channels all with whom he comes into contact.

The story is indeed too much subordinated to the hero. The other characters seem scarcely to exist, except so far as they are influenced by him; and he moves among them, strange, sad, fulfilling his own destiny and perturbing theirs. The whole book is pervaded by that singular and profound melancholy which seems at present to tinge the whole German mind, perhaps as a reaction from that irrational elation which possessed them two years ago, when in accomplishing "German unity" they seemed to have realised the chief desire of life. Such illusions are not parted with without a sore pang.

W. H. B.

M

THE GREEN TABLE.

R. CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS has delivered his promised panegyric upon Mr. Seward, before that pure and philosophic body, the Legislature of New York. The discourse is quite worthy of the subject and the audience, though we could have wished, for the sake of the country and the orator, that the latter had made it more worthy of his own reputation and character. Mr. Adams is one of the best representatives of the section to which he belongs. He is not altogether an agreeable one to outside barbarians, for he is arrogant, cold, intolerant, and hard, and has in him that mixture of the prig and the Puritan which is not regarded as a pleasant combination, except in the favored region where it is indigenous. Coming, too, from a wrong-headed and not very right-hearted family, he has traits, both intellectual and moral, which are more characteristic than attractive. It is needless to add that he has inherited what doubtless he believes to be a

just appreciation of Southern inferiority, but what in reality is only a bitter remembrance and resentment of Southern opposition to the Presidents whose name he bears. On the other hand, Mr. Adams has many and just claims to consideration. He is a gentleman beyond all doubt - a man of ability, culture, and refinement, without a stain upon his personal or political integrity. There is no public man of either party who is less a demagogue, or, in the vulgar sense, a politician; and but for the levity of some trifling letters which he wrote last summer, when he was talked of for the Presidency, there was nothing to lower the dignity of his position before the country until he consented to become the eulogist of Mr. Seward. If not a statesman in the highest acceptation of the word, he is full of the knowledge and has carefully studied the lessons which make statesmen, so that if he had not been a Massachusetts man and an Adams, and had never heard of a negro, he would worthily have been among the foremost of those who fill the places of great men to-day in the Republic. As contradistinguished from, and as compared with the people for and with whom he acts, he is a statesman, undoubtedly, with all his drawbacks, and it was the popular conviction of this, and the public respect for his purity of character, which were so near securing his nomination at Cincinnati, notwithstanding the little hold which he has on the affections or even the sympathies of his countrymen. It would be unjust not to add that as a member of Congress, in 1860-61, he manifested a praiseworthy disposition to avert by compromise the horrors which were impending; and although the concessions which he was disposed to offer were neither large nor gracious, they were nevertheless real and honest, and prompted by motives which a man like Mr. Seward was wholly incapable of understanding.

Entertaining these opinions in regard to Mr. Adams, we are very sincere in the expression of our regret that he should have condescended to undertake the canonization of Mr. Lincoln's Secretary of State. The average character of our public men for truthfulness and honesty is now so very low, that the country cannot afford to lose, in whole or in part, the prestige of even one good name. The reputation of Mr. Adams was too valuable in that respect to be parted with, but it is impossible now to say, with candor, that it stands as it stood before he addressed the bribe-mongers at Albany. If there was ever a man prominent in the government of this country, whom it was difficult for an impartial person, knowing him well, to praise without loss of self-respect, it was William H. Seward. He had a long and large career, and was associated notably with many great events, but it was a conspicuous feature of his public life that no one ever trusted him much or reverenced him at all. The obscurity to which he was finally relegated by the party to which he belonged - and which at one time had almost belonged to him was in nowise an evidence of the ingratitude of republics, as Mr. Adams would have us to believe, but was simply the natural result of the public acquaintance with his real character and deserts. He was regarded as a schemer who had got to the end of his schemes, and he was accordingly left to his devices. In fact the whole country knew that he had always had but one object in life, which was success. He had cared but for one sort of success, and that was his own. His only criterion of means was their adaptation to his ends. He knew and used men only through their weakness or corruption, and he understood and addressed himself chiefly to those motives which were base. If he appealed to the higher sentiments or nobler impulses, it was but to abuse them. The patriotism and enthusiasm of the masses were but strings for him to play on. They gave him the material for a flourish, a hypocrisy or a clap-trap, which he liked and understood far better than a truth or a reality. Truth was to him, in fact, whatever he could get people to believe, and he stopped at no untruth which audacity and iteration could make current and effective. Whatever he wanted to do and could do, he thought it right to do and did. The highest reach of his

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sagacity and sometimes it reached marvellously far in this out what tricks and falsehoods would turn the public feeling in the direction that he wished it to pursue. - was to find credulity and ignorance, and built up, systematically, what he called the For this, he fathomed the depths of popular opinion of the nation, upon a wretched foundation of lies. Pope Pius used to describe the first Napoleon as "a great comedian," and an equally just criticism might ascribe to Mr. Seward the honors of a great juggler or mountebank, for he always played to the pit, and his art went no higher than to know what his groundlings were fond of and would applaud. This peculiar gift of his Mr. Adams admiringly magnifies and pleasantly calls "his power to direct the popular sense." stances of the mode in which he exercised it, before the war, was the monOne of the most conspicuous instrous and impudent falsehood such-which he deliberately uttered in the Senate in a written speech, im- now everywhere conceded to have been puting to President Buchanan and Chief Justice Taney a corrupt bargain for the judgment in the Dred Scott case. uttered it- for it was a sheer invention of his own— He knew it to be a libel when he who heard it and every public man (including Mr. Adams) who read it, like- and wise knew it to be a shameless and wicked fabrication. Yet he knew that every Senator there were fools and fanatics who would believe it, and unprincipled partisans who would scatter it abroad and assert it to be true on his authority. He therefore not only uttered it, but caused the speech which contained it to be circulated far and wide. He knew it would produce its effect, and that was all he cared for. To be conscious of the falsehood and to know that all whose good opinion was worth having despised him for it, did not affect him in the least. He was what is called "a live man," and results were his sufficient compensation.

In saying all this we are not using the language or speaking in the spirit of partisanship, nor do we merely repeat the judgment of Mr. Seward's opponents or his enemies. We say what his own party associates knew of him, and what the New York politicians who listened to Mr. Adams at Albany knew as well as he, all the while that he was painting Mr. Seward for their admiration as a "philosopher statesman," whose prototype was Pericles, Gregory the First, or Cardinal Richelieu, but especially Pericles! And it is because Mr. Adams, knowing this and knowing Mr. Seward, has gone deliberately to work to make a great and noble career out of a life which was a perpetual and mere imposture from beginning to end, that we think he has abused the public confidence and painfully damaged his own reputation. If he could make history out of no better stuff than the philosophical statesmanship and "moral superiority" of William H. Seward, and the "singularly disinterested labor" of Thurlow Weed, he had better have confined himself to the more authentic annals of Miles Standish and Sinbad the Sailor. It is bad enough surely that men like Mr. Seward should debauch the country by their practices and their example, but the evil is tenfold more hopeless and demoralizing when respectable men like Mr. Adams can be induced to become their panegyrists.

We should be less disposed to speak thus harshly, if there were any signs in Mr. Adams' discourse of the blindness which comes from enthusiasm or affection. But whatever be his faults, he certainly does not err in the direction of impulsiveness. His speech is an elaborate effort to make out his own case by making out Mr. Seward's-nay, to establish his father's case as well as his own. glorification of the few far-seeing patriots and statesmen who began early It is a sort of apotheosis of political abolitionism — a to wrestle with "the slave-holding power," and through whose influence and teachings that hated "oligarchy" was so grandly and nobly disposed of at last. One would think, from reading it-if he knew no betterthe Presidents, from Washington to Lincoln inclusive, had been dolts and that all imbeciles, except two whose name begins with the first letter of the alpha