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ter altogether, and stands dumbfounded in the presence of the pervading symbolism of Goethe's writings. A work of art, as well as a product of nature, is to him a simple fact, having relations to other facts, but no inward spiritual meaning. He is, therefore, perpetually quarreling with what he terms the mysticism of Goethe (although he has already pronounced him a great realist), and is pained at the obvious lapse of his faculties in the latter parts of the Meister and the Faust. But this " 'mysticism" is as much a part of his being as his clearness of vision, or his serene wisdom, and demands as much the nicest study on the part of his critics.

The explanation of it, in our view, is simply this: that Goethe, as a man of genius and poet, was profoundly penetrated and possessed by all the vague struggling influences and aspirations of his time, and sought to give them melodious expression. The breath of the Divine Providence, which animated his century, only animated him the more interiorly and strongly, and the task of his genius was, to embody the movement of life in permanent forms. He lived from the middle of the eighteenth century (1749) to the beginning of the nineteenth (1832), through the most remarkable period of crisis and transition that the world ever saw. An old era was coming to an end, amid the decay and destruction of many things, and a new era was endeavoring to get formed. There was agitation, confusion, perplexity, everywhere; "private life," as Varnhagen von Ense says, in unfolding a similar view of Goethe, full of

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suffering, and the world at variance with itself; for, the old forms of society, long diseased and baneful, were unable to bind the fresh life to their own death, and the new unfolding forms were yet without a sanction."

Now, these were the elements with which the poetry of that epoch, or so much of it as was true and not a reminiscence, had to deal. Accordingly, we find, in the series of Goethe's works, a complete bodying forth of the successive steps of progress in the mighty struggle. In the earliest, the Goetz, we take a look back into the feudal time, and see it perish before us, in the person of the tenacious, stalwart hero, with a cry of woe to those that come after. Wehe der Nachkommenschaft! Then follows the Werther with its vapid sen

timentalism, and passionate whinings. and morbid self-love and sorrow, expressive of the chronic discontent of society, full of skepticism and black despair, and which, unable to reconcile itself to its condition, or get extricated therefrom, goes off in explosive violence.

In the Elective Affinities, though written long afterwards, there is a recurrence to the same theme, but with greater depth of passion, and less external vehemence. Restlessness has subsided into impatience or suppressed hope. The soul asserts its natural freedom, but submissively, and with a sad consciousness of its impotence in the presence of inevitable circumstances. Without revolting openly, therefore, against existing forms, it postpones its fruitions to another world, where hearts long severed may unite again in the bonds of a free, spiritual attraction.

In Wilhelm Meisters' Apprenticeship the view of life has reached a higher plane. Doubt and distraction have not wholly ceased, but the prospect of a free and noble natural existence is not shut out from the present earth. Casting aside all petty personal grievances, the hero submits to all manners of living and doing, in the hope of working off every disquietude by a placid and perpetual activity. In the very exertion of his powers, he is made conscious of new and potent charms in life, so that its most commonplace details are set to a music, not wholly divine, and yet more than earthly. The moodiness and madness of the self-torturing spirit, give place to tranquil, serious endeavours: the clouds fall away; a mild effulgence reveals vistas of pleasant fields, and, though we reach no great ethical height, no broad Christian views of things, we still catch glimpses of the infinitely rich and varied possibilities of life, under a noble human culture. But it is only in the Wanderings that the inadequacy of the previous view is filled up, and work becomes worship, and the discordant elements of society are reconciled by a scheme of coöpertiave and constructive freedom.

"In the Wanderjahre," says Varnhagen "a comprehensive view of a new order is drawn in firm, not rigid characters, with poetical freedom. The necessities of daily life take their rank by the side of the highest elevation of mind; Christianity works in the form

of mild piety; education spreads out her establishments, powerful and allcomprehensive; the taste for art, richly bestowed on individuals, becomes a universal advantage; the mechanical arts and trades, led by wise arrangements from their destructive rivalry, take their station without fear beside the higher arts, certain of receiving from them due honor and appreciation; natural disposition and capacity determine and ennoble every occupation. The false and incongruous position of woman disappears before rightly-assorted marriages, which bring together unequal classes. They are exalted into free ministers of a religion of love and beneficence. A new estimate of things and of actions, a new choice and distribution of the lots of life, a new sense of the good and the beautiful, are disclosed, by means of an Association, extending over the whole earth, full of liberal activity, of respect for the highest and for the least; busied in extinguishing crime and want, and affording the rich prospect of mankind advancing in culture and in industry; whose maxim may be, in worldly things, a fair share in the possession and enjoyment of the stock of good existing for every member; in what relates to the attractions of mind, the liberation of the prohibited possible from all fetters that can be broken." It is evident from this, that if Goethe had given us a third part of the Meister (necessary to the completion of the original design), we should have had, in Wilhelm's Meisterjahre, a wonderful anticipation of the various socialistic experiments of this age. But the time was not then ripe.

For the full and condensed expression of all this, however, we must turn to the two parts of Faust, which, begun in the author's earliest years, and completed only near his death, runs parallel in its development to his own being. It is the grand resumé and consummation of his thought and hope. Abysmal, wild, and heterogeneous as it seems, there is yet a unity pervading it which, though not wholly organic, gives to it a certain consistency and life. All the spiritual worlds are gathered to watch its issues; all humanity is involved in the result. As a legend, the fable had its origin in the middle ages, but in its actual working out, the century of Goethe is transfixed on every page. Faust comes before us as one who has

exhausted science in the pursuit of individual and selfish ends; as a representative of the age of "victorious analysis" and natural research. Having worn away the golden days of youth in the service of the intellect, his manhood is weary of the result, is saddened, disappointed, withered, and would fain throw away its barren and empty life. A nameless unrest surges through his soul, and no attainment in knowledge, no conquest of nature, is able to speak the word of peace to the billows. All his selfish-seeking turns to vanity in the fruition. It drives him but further from his fellow-man and from God. A chill isolation and solitude is the recompense of his toil. Musty parchments get heaped about him, and skeletons and grinning skulls, till, in the agony of baffled endeavor, he curses life and all its fancied joys, and even that patience which endures its woes. There is henceforth for him only contempt, and mockery, and denial. And it is of this mood that Mephistopheles, his evil spirit, his other and lower self, the incarnation of the intellect and the senses, is born-Mephistopheles, who hurries him along, from moral indifference to sensual indulgence, from debauchery to seduction. and from seduction to murder, till his soul, in its hideous riot and self-abandonment, breeds the monstrous crew who celebrate their triumph in the fearful witch-dance of the Brocken. The principle of evil works itself out, at the close of the first part of the tragedy, in a scene of heart-rending dislocation and distress.

In the second part we are shown the social effects of the same evil-an incoherent society, which is but one vast masquerade, where the spokesmen are fools, and the only recognized nexusmoney-a stupendous paper lie. Faust, as the representative of humanity, plunges into the midst of the mad whirl, strives to penetrate the mystery of its iniquity and errors, but in vain. He summons the antiquated faiths, and finds them the children of chimera: he worships the spirit of ancient beauty, in the person of the rejuvenated Helen, and she disappears as suddenly as she had appeared, leaving him only the vesture; he engages in war and commerce, and everywhere guilt, and care, and distress dog his steps-till at last, old, blinded, baffled, rich, and miserable,

he deliberately abandons his quest, surrenders his purpose of directing his own way, abjures his individual ends, and gives himself up to work. "What ho! ye myriads of humans," he cries, “relinquish your empty search and go dig the earth! Spread yourselves, in free, creative activity, over the globe-lay fire to the snug little private dwellings of the fond old couples-fill in the remorseless marshes and pools-rescue the land from the devouring ocean, till nature is brought into obedience to man, and ye shall all stand a free people upon a soil as free." But no sooner has Faust discharged himself of responsibility for himself, no sooner has he resolved upon a life of spontaneous creative activity, than he finds the goal is won. He calls upon the beautiful day to linger because his earth is now transfused into heaven. The sin, and suffering, and sorrow of the past are forgotten in the glories of a better consciousness; legions of angels drop roses from the celestial voids; even the rocks break forth into song; and all who had ever sinned and suffered reappear, as the leaders of a heavenly throng who welcome the spirit of Faust to the regions of the redeemed, in a mystic sevenfold chorus of hallelujahs and praise.

This is, of course, the very meagerest outline of Goethe's richly varied magnificent representation—like a single thread drawn from a tissue of cloth-ofgold-and yet, we venture to say, that it will not fall upon the reader with a stronger sense of the impotence of the conclusion than the original does, amid all its splendid accessories of music and picture. For everybody must feel, how much soever he may be impressed by the miraculous vigor and variety of the poem, that it nowhere strikes the highest key; that it nowhere utters the demiurgic word; and that the massive and beautiful world it builds up in the realm of thought is, after all, a bubble world, destined to no continuous life, as in gorgeous sunset we see innumerable colored lights dart and flash among the gold and silver-edged clouds, but we do not behold the sun. Glimpses there are of the great open secret of destiny, in that high doctrine of spontaneous labor for the good of others, in that immortal line

"Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan;” but the author has not surrendered him

self fully and joyously to its divine inspiration. Neither he nor his age felt, though it might have seen, nor does our age feel while it sees, what was proclaimed eighteen hundred years ago, that out of the heart are the issues of life; that goodness is greater than truth; that affection is better than culture; that wisdom is only wisdom in so far as it is a manifestation of love.

Mr. Lewes adopts as the motto of his book a sentence from Jung Stilling, to the effect that Goethe's heart was as large as his intellect; but in doing so has missed the point precisely which explains alike his failures and his successes. We do not mean to intimate by this that Goethe was destitute of heart, as the slang-whangers of criticism boisterously contend; for we do not see how he could have been a poet at all, without a large endowment of that sympathy which is the alchemy of genius. But we do mean to intimate that, large as his heart was, it was not commensurate with his intellect. Over all the outgoings of his spirit the intellect kept watch and ward, and, like a muffler over the mouth, too often discharged his breathings of their inward vital heat. His grand ideal of universal self-culture, to which all the circumstances of his existence were bent-his readings, his study, his companionships, his travelswas an ideal prompted by the head, and not by the heart. Those multifarious excursions into the realms of nature, while the warmer provinces of human history lay neglected, were excursions dictated by the head and not by the heart. That long life of shifting love-relations was a life over which reason rather than feeling presided, and as the persons of Frederica, Lilli, Sybilla, Katehen, and the French girl, rise before us, with disheveled tresses mantling their wan and mournful faces, we see the noble form of Goethe standing stern and impassive in the midst of them, like a mountain from which the cold winds of the summit have torn all the clinging vines and clustering flowers. We admire Goethe for the manful courage with which he met and worked down the ills of life, "carved a way for us through the impassable;" we are charmed into ecstacy by the eolian melodies which ever floated about his brain; and we are awed into mute reverence by the prodigious grasp and grandeur of his thought, and its deep reverberations

through his soul. We lay our hearts against his, and feel the pulsations of a mighty spirit, which has looked through all the ways of men, and firmly chosen its own high path. But in the midst of our admiration and delight we feel an atmosphere around us, which does not quite repulse, nor yet quite win

us. We are dazzled by the necromancer. in his sky-woven robes-may even be healed by his most potent charms-but we do not call him friend. We do not clasp him to our bosoms as we fancy that we might the old child-like Homer, or the genial Shakespeare, or even the stern "father of Tuscan song."

A PLEA FOR QUINCES AND QUINCE-TREES.

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quince first came from Cydon, a city of Crete. Later naturalists, with but few dissenting voices, have accepted this authority as conclusive, in confirmation of the common tradition. Even if we cherished any doubts on the subject, we would hardly adventure now, as the fugaces anni have somewhat stiffened the Hotspur joints of life within us, to assault a body of testimony so respectable, and sustained by so many stalwart followers. We apprehend, too, if we did, that our chivalry would be rewarded like the task of Sisyphus, or that of those almanacs and country newspapers, which annually insist, in the face of the popular illusion, that the "Irish potato" is a native of South America, instead of Ireland. It is wiser, then, to let the Cretan origin of the quince pass as a dogma of the orchard. This tradition, indeed, aside from the presumptive evidence afforded by the botanical name of the fruit (Cydonia), and from any claim formerly presented by the islanders themselves to the honor (which, according to Titus I. 12, might be religiously regarded as apocryphal), derives significance from the glimmerings cast upon the subject by ancient classic literature. Pliny informs us that quinces were often suspended about the images of the gods in the sleeping-apartments of Roman houses. The most plausible reason we can find, for the selection of the quince among fruits, as a decoration for the Pagan divinities, rests upon the presumption that it flourished in Crete, and especially about the venerable steeps of Mount Ida, so far back as the era of mythology. We are told by the poets, that Jupiter received his edu

cation there, in a cave, under the tutorage of the Corybantes. How probable, then, and how agreeable the surmise, that a quince-orchard was the airingground of the student Thunderer! With this conjecture once established, we have no difficulty whatever in explaining, by honest, logical sequence, the mystery of the subsequent sacred association of the fruit. This hypothesis also confirms a suspicion we have long entertained, that the celebrated golden apples which Juno presented to Jupiter upon their wedding day, and which were intrusted to the safe keeping of the Hesperides, were quincesthe Chrysomeliana mala of Columella, and the Aurea mala of Virgil. This supposition admitted, the nuptial gift of the divine bride, by the genial allusion it contained to the early associations of her lord, becomes invested with a truly graceful meaning.

In social winter nights, with "Dory" upon our knee, and other upturned diminutive faces below, embroidering the domestic hearth, it was not unpleasant formerly to tell, by the hour, of the enchanting favors of fortune suddenly amassed upon men of our acquaintance, especially, as it happened, upon certain worthies whom, as common lads of the town, it was once our agreeable prerogative to hold in contempt; but who, by virtue of this blindfolded divinity's unbounded grace, had mounted rapidly to posts of distinction in society far above our head. Our uncle's clerk of the counter, for example, had become one of these roseate favorites, who, at an early day, left us for Texas, and a career of glory, when we all thought he had left for Texas, and a career of ruin. The misery of the thing was, however, that all such phenomenal exemplifica

tions of American progression, afforded no healthful moral lessons for the proper culture of the little school of hearts before us. For the life of us, we could not mould them, at the end, after the manner of useful apologues, to any good purpose. We have accordingly concluded that it is better, as a general rule, for a prudent parent to exclude fast men and filibusters from his fireside tableaux. The steady, systematical growth of fortune, by sober industry (with a side lift, perhaps, from the railroad), as disclosed in the conservative life of the farmer, or fruit-grower, makes a much safer picture for the young scions of the homestead. It is not so charming, we know, and your boys upon the rug may soon become drowsy; but when you observe this tendency, consider, for your solace, that the orthodox scheme of moral culture is analogous, in many elementary respects, to the practice of medicine, and is based upon the doctrine, that the heart of childhood is replete with morbific germs of evil; consider that your "olive plants," bobbing at your feet, form no exception to this organic law, and therefore that the prints of frugal virtue you are sketching from life for them, may, in the manner of other opiates, after all their drowsiness, preserve them in the end to become useful members of society.

The farm and orchard are the country's anchor of hope. Our public men and political journalists, with some few exceptions, have evinced but little sympathy with the tranquil enterprise of fruit-growers, and the astonishing recent improvements of the orchard, which, nevertheless, are diffusing through the country its truest wealth, and providing all classes of society with cheap and healthful luxuries. Higher grades of political science-for example, the policy of protective duties-are more fascinating, and engross, accordingly, both the facile plasticity of the newspaper press and the lucubrations of more systematic economists. Thus, some proposed change in the tariff, which, perhaps, promises, at best, benefits of little or no perceptible advantage to the aggregate of society, will elicit, for months, daily animated comments from the press, that serve to awaken public attention, from one extremity of the Union to the other; whereas, a fine exotic pear or grape-procured and

naturalized, with much expense and trouble, by some rural philanthropistor a valuable seedling apple-patiently obtained, after years of experiment, and liberally propagated by ingraftment -is suffered to pass as a sterling contribution to our national wealth, without a notice from our metropolitan journalism. The public good effected and the name of the benefactor are virtually doomed to attract the interest of no wider circle of readers than that of the congenial few who peruse the agricul tural monthlies. The prototypes of our pomologists, in the old Roman republic, had their services rewarded in a very different manner. Those, especially, who introduced foreign fruits into the domestic orchard, were publicly honored, as the great benefactors of their country. Sir William Temple has noticed the fact with his usual felicity: "The great captains, and even consular men, who first brought them over, took pride in giving them their own names; by which, they ran a great while in Rome, as in memory of some great service, or pleasure, they had done their country; so that, not only laws and battles, but several sorts of apples and pears, were called Manlian and Claudian, Pompeyan and Tiberian." Delille, in his "Les Jardins," charmingly paints this feature of Roman appreciation, as it appeared at the triumph of Lucullus, who had brought home the cherry-tree, from Pontus:

"Quand Lucullus vainqueur triomphoit de l'Asie,

L'airain, le marbre et l'or frappoient Rome éblouie;

Le sage dans la foule aimoit à voir ses mains

Poster le cerisier en triomphe aux Romains."

We augur better things, however, in the future, from the patriotic genius of our own model republic. The American Pomological Society, aided by the numerous horticultural institutes disseminated over the country, is rapidly accumulating the statistics of the American orchard; and, we doubt not, the day is close at hand, when its important claims, having become palpable, will be honorably acknowledged by the great moulders of national sentiment.

But the American orchard has not yet attained its perfect symmetry. From some inexplicable cause, the quincetree, especially, has been much neglected by our industrial votaries of Pomona.

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