tremulous and faint, and bloodshot eyes look out through the darkness, which is around and within, for the light of a stern last morning. Six men are to be hanged on the morrow: comes no hammering from the Rabenstein?—their gallows must even now be o' building. Upwards of five hundred thousand two-legged animals without feathers lie round us, in horizontal positions; their heads all in nightcaps, and full of the foolishest dreams. Riot cries aloud, and staggers and swaggers in his rank dens of shame; and the Mother, with streaming hair, kneels over her pallid dying infant, whose cracked lips only her tears now moisten.—All these heaped and huddled together, with nothing but a little carpentry and masonry between them;-crammed in, like salted fish in their barrel;-or weltering, shall I say, like an Egyptian pitcher of tamed vipers, each struggling to get its head above the others; such work goes on under that smokecounterpane! But I, mein Werther, sit above it all; I am alone with the stars."

We looked in his face to see whether, in the utterance of such extraordinary Night-thoughts, no feeling might be traced there; but with the light we had, which indeed was only a single tallow-light, and far enough from the window, nothing save that old calmness and fixedness was visible.

NOTHING Lost.

Detached, separated! I say there is no such separation: nothing hitherto was ever stranded, cast aside; but all, were it only a withered leaf, works together with all; is borne forward on the bottomless, shoreless flood of action, and lives through perpetual metamorphoses. The withered leaf is not dead and lost, there are forces in it and around it, though working in inverse order; else how could it rot? Despise not the rag from which man makes paper, or the litter from which the earth makes corn. Rightly viewed no meanest object is insignificant; all objects are as windows, through which the philosophic eye looks into infinitude itself.

CHILDHOOD.

Happy season of childhood! Kind nature, that art to all a bountiful mother; that visitest the poor man's hut with auroral radiance; and for thy nurseling hast provided a soft swathing of love and infinite hope, wherein he waxes and slumbers, danced-round (umgaukelt) by sweetest dreams! If the paternal cottage still shuts us in, its roof still screens us; with a father we have as yet a prophet, priest and king, and an obedience that makes us free. The young spirit has awakened out of eternity, and knows not what we mean by time; as yet time is no fast-hurrying stream, but a sportful sunlit ocean; years to the child are as ages: ah! the secret of vicissitude, of that slower or quicker decay and ceaseless. down-rushing of the universal world fabric, from the granite mountain to the man or day-moth, is yet unknown; and in a motionless universe, we taste, what afterwards in this quickwhirling universe is forever denied us, the balm of rest. Sleep on, thou fair child, for thy long rough journey is at hand! A little while, and thou too shalt sleep no more, but thy very dreams shall be mimic battles; thou too, with old Arnauld, wilt have to say in stern patience: "Rest? Rest? Shall I not have all eternity to rest in?" Celestial Nepenthe! though a Pyrrhus conquer empires, and an Alexander sack the world, he finds thee not; and thou hast once fallen gently, of thy own accord, on the eyelids, on the heart of every mother's child. For as yet, sleep and waking are one: the fair life-garden rustles infinite around, and everywhere is dewy fragrance, and the budding of hope; which budding, if in youth, too frostnipt, it grow to flowers, will in manhood yield no fruit, but a prickly, bitter-rinded stone fruit, of which the fewest can find the kernel.

EARLY INFLUENCES AND SPORTS.

In all the sports of children, were it only in their wanton breakages and defacements, you shall discern a creative instinct (schaffenden Trieb): the manikin feels that he is a

born man, that his vocation is to work. The choicest present you can make him is a tool; be it knife or pen-gun, for construction or for destruction: either way it is for work, for change. In gregarious sports of skill or strength, the boy trains himself to co-operation, for war or peace, as governor or governed: the little maid again, provident of her domestic destiny, takes with preference to dolls.

SUNSET.

On fine evenings I was wont to carry forth my supper (bread-crumb boiled in milk), and eat it out-of-doors. On the coping of the orchard-wall, which I could reach by climbing, or still more easily if Father Andreas would set-up the pruning-ladder, my porringer was placed: there, many a sunset, have I, looking at the distant western mountains, consumed, not without relish, my evening meal. Those hues of gold and azure, that hush of world's expectation as day died, were still a Hebrew speech for me, nevertheless I was looking at the fair illuminated letters, and had an eye for their gilding.

A MOTHER'S INFLUENCE.

My kind mother, for as such I must ever love the good Gretchen, did me one altogether invaluable service: she taught me, less indeed by word than by act and daily reverent look and habitude, her own simple version of the Christian faith. Andreas too attended church; yet more like a parade-duty, for which he in the other world expected pay with arrears—as, I trust, he has received; but my mother, with a true woman's heart, and fine though uncultivated sense, was in the strictest acceptation religious. How indestructibly the good grows, and propagates itself, even among the weedy entanglements of evil! The highest whom I knew on earth I here saw bowed down, with awe unspeakable, before a higher in heaven: such things, especially in infancy, reach inwards to the very core of your being:

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mysteriously does a holy of holies build itself into visibility in the mysterious deeps; and reverence, the divinest in man, springs forth undying from its mean envelopment of fear. Would'st thou rather be a peasant's son that knew, were it never so rudely, there was a God in heaven and in man; or a duke's son that only knew there were two-and-thirty quarters on the family coach?

NATURE ALONE IS ANTIQUE.

It struck me much, as I sat by the Kubach, one silent noontide, and watched it flowing, gurgling, to think how this same streamlet had flowed and gurgled, through all changes of weather and of fortune, from beyond the earliest date of history. Yes, probably on the morning when Joshua forded Jordan; even as at the midday when Cæsar, doubtless with difficulty, swam the Nile, yet kept his Commentaries dry—this little Kuhbach, assiduous as Tiber, Eurotas or Siloa, was murmuring on across the wilderness, as yet unnamed, unseen: here, too, as in the Euphrates and the Ganges, is a vein or veinlet of the grand world-circulation of waters, which, with its atmospheric arteries, has lasted and lasts simply with the world. Thou fool! Nature alone is antique, and the oldest art a mushroom; that idle crag thou sittest on is six thousand years of age.

Love.

If in youth, the universe is majestically unveiling, and everywhere heaven revealing itself on earth, nowhere to the young man does this heaven on earth so immediately reveal itself as in the young maiden. Strangely enough, in this strange life of ours, it has been so appointed. On the whole, as I have often said, a person (Personlichkeit) is ever holy to us; a certain orthodox Anthropomorphism connects my me with all thees in bonds of love: but it is in this approximation of the like and unlike, that such heavenly attraction, as between negative and positive, first burns out

into a flame. Is the pitifullest mortal person, think you, indifferent to us? Is it not rather our heartfelt wish to be made one with him; to unite him to us, by gratitude, by admiration, even by fear; or failing all these, unite ourselves to him? But how much more, in this case of the likeunlike! Here is conceded us the higher mystic possibility of such a union, the highest in our earth; thus, in the conducting medium of fantasy, flames-forth that fire-development of the universal spiritual electricity, which, as unfolded between man and woman, we first emphatically denominate Love.

In every well-conditioned stripling, as I conjecture, there already blooms a certain prospective Paradise, cheered by some fairest Eve; nor, in the stately vistas, and flowerage and foliage of that garden, is a tree of knowledge, beautiful and awful in the midst thereof, wanting. Perhaps too the whole is but the lovelier, if cherubim and a flaming sword divide it from all footsteps of men; and grant him, the imaginative stripling, only the view, not the entrance. Happy season of virtuous youth, when shame is still an impassable celestial barrier; and the sacred air-cities of hope have not shrunk into the mean clay-hamlets of reality; and man, by his nature, is yet infinite and free!

ANGER.

To consume your own choler, as some chimneys consume their own smoke; to keep a whole satanic school spouting, if it must spout, inaudibly, is a negative yet no slight virtue, nor one of the commonest in these times.

JOY AND SORROW.

A peculiar feeling it is that will rise in the traveler, when turning some hill-range in his desert road, he descries lying far below, embosomed among its groves and green natural bulwarks, and all diminished to a toybox, the fair town, where so many souls, as it were seen and yet unseen, are