written by Simonides, we could not help thinking that, if it were so, then it was precisely what Simonides could never have written, since he looked at the world through his own eyes, not through those of Linus or Hesiod, and thought his own thoughts, not theirs, or we should never I have had him to imitate.

Objections of the same nature, but even stronger, lie against a servile copying of the form and style of the Greek tragic drama, and yet more against the selection of a Greek theme. As we said before, the life we lead, and the views we take of it, are more complex than those of men who lived five centuries before Christ. They may be better or worse, but, at any rate, they are different, and irremediably so. The idea and the form in which it naturally embodies itself, mutually sustaining and invigorating each other, cannot be divided without endangering the lives of both. For in all real poetry the form is not a garment, but a body. Our very passion has become metaphysical, and speculates upon itself. Their simple and downright way of thinking loses all its savor when we assume it to ourselves by an effort of thought. Human nature, it is true, remains always the same, but the displays of it change; the habits which are a second nature modify it inwardly as well as outwardly, and what moves it to passionate action in one age may leave it indifferent in the next. Between us and the Greeks lies the grave of their murdered paganism, making our minds and theirs irreconcilable. Christianity as steadily intensifies the selfconsciousness of man as the religion of the Greeks must have turned their thoughts away from themselves to the events of this life and the phenomena of nature. We cannot even conceive of their conception of Phoibos with any plausible assurance of coming near the truth. To take lesser matters, since the invention of printing

and the cheapening of books have made the thought of all ages and nations the common property of educated men, we cannot so dis-saturate our minds of it as to be keenly thrilled in the modern imitation with those commonplaces of proverbial lore in which the chorus and secondary characters are apt to indulge, though in the original they may interest us as being natural and characteristic. In the German-silver of the modern we get something of this kind, which does not please us the more by being cut up into single lines that recall the outward semblance of some pages in Sophocles. We find it cheaper to make a specimen than to borrow one.

CHORUS. Foolish who bites off nose, his face to spite.
OUTIS. Who fears his fate, him Fate shall one day spurn.
CHORUS. The gods themselves are pliable to Fate.
OUTIS. The strong self-ruler dreads no other sway.
CHORUS. Sometimes the shortest way goes most about.
OUTIS. Why fetch a compass, having stars within?
CHORUS. A shepherd once, I know that stars may set.
OUTIS. That thou led'st sheep fits not for leading men.
CHORUS. To sleep-sealed eyes the wolf-dog barks in vain.

We protest that we have read something very like this, we will not say where, and we might call it the battledoor and shuttlecock style of dialogue, except that the players do not seem to have any manifest relation to each other, but each is intent on keeping his own bit of feathered cork continually in the air.

The first sincerely popular yearning toward antiquity, the first germ of Schiller's "Götter Griechenland's" is to be found in the old poem of Tanhäuser, very nearly coincident with the beginnings of the Reformation. And if we might allegorize it, we should say that it typified precisely that longing after Venus, under her other name of Charis, which represents the relation in which modern should stand to ancient art. It is the grace of the Greeks, their sense of proportion, their dis

taste for the exaggerated, their exquisite propriety of phrase, which steadies imagination without cramping it,

it is these that we should endeavor to assimilate without the loss of our own individuality. We should quicken our sense of form by intelligent sympathy with theirs, and not stiffen it into formalism by a servile surrender of what is genuine in us to what was genuine in them. "A pure form," says Schiller, "helps and sustains, an impure one hinders and shatters." But we should remember that the spirit of the age must enter as a modifying principle, not only into ideas, but into the best manner of their expression. The old bottles will not always serve for the new wine. A principle of life is the first requirement of all art, and it can only be communicated by the touch of the time and a simple faith in it; all else is circumstantial and secondary. The Greek tragedy passed through the three natural stages of poetry, the imaginative in Eschylus, the thoughtfully artistic in Sophocles, the sentimental in Euripides, and then died. If people could only learn the general applicability to periods and schools of what young Mozart says of Gellert, that "he had written no poetry since his death"! No effort to raise a defunct past has ever led to anything but just enough galvanic twitching of the limbs to remind us unpleasantly of life. The romantic movement of the school of German poets which succeeded Goethe and Schiller ended in extravagant unreality, and Goethe himself with his enerring common-sense, has given us, in the second part of Faust, the result of his own and Schiller's common striving after a Grecian ideal. Euphorion, the child of Faust and Helen, falls dead at their feet; and Helen herself soon follows him to the shades, leaving only her mantle in the hands of her lover. This, he is told, shall lift him above the earth. We fancy we can interpret the

symbol. Whether we can or not, it is certainly suggestive of thought that the only immortal production of the greatest of recent poets was conceived and carried out in that Gothic spirit and form from which he was all his life struggling to break loose.

CHAUCER.*

WI

"ILL it do to say anything more about Chaucer ? Can any one hope to say anything, not new, but even fresh, on a topic so well worn? It may well be doubted; and yet one is always the better for a walk in the morning air, a medicine which may be taken over and over again without any sense of sameness, or any failure of its invigorating quality. There is a pervading wholesomeness in the writings of this man, - - a vernal property that soothes and refreshes in a way of which no other has ever found the secret. I repeat to myself a thousand times,

"Whan that Aprilë with his showrës sotë

The droughte of March hath percëd to the rotë,
And bathëd every veine in swich licour
Of which vertue engendered is the flour,
When Zephyrus eek with his swetë breth
Enspired hath in every holt and heth

The tender croppës, and the yongë sonne
Hath in the ram his halfë cors yronne,
And smalë foulës maken melodië,"

and still at the thousandth time a breath of uncontami

*Publications of the Chaucer Society. London. 1869-70.

Étude sur G. Chaucer considéré comme imitateur des Trouvères. Par E. G. SANDRAS, Agrégé de l'Université. Paris: Auguste Dusand. 1859. 8vo. pp. 298.

Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury-Geschichten, uebersetzt in den Versmassen der Urschrift, und durch Einleitung und Anmerkungen erläutert. Von WILHELM HERTZBERG. Hildburghausen. 1866. 12mo. pp. 674. Chaucer in Seinen Beziehungen zur italienischen Literatur. Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung der Doctorwürde. Von ALFONS KISSNER. Bonn. 1867. 8vo. pp. 81.