His grand excellency was this, that he was genuine. As his primary faculty, the foundation of all others, was intellect, depth and force of vision, so his primary virtue was justice, was the courage to be just. A giant's strength we admired in him; yet, strength ennobled into softest mildness; even like that "silent rock-bound strength of a world,” on whose bosom, that rests on the adamant, grow flowers. The greatest of hearts was also the bravest; fearless, unwearied, peacefully invincible. A completed man; the trembling sensibility, the wild enthusiasm of a Mignon can assort with the scornful world-mockery of a Mephistophiles; and each side of many-sided life receives its due from him.

Goethe reckoned Schiller happy that he died young, in the full vigor of his days; that he could “figure him as a youth forever." To himself a different, higher destiny was appointed. Through all the changes of man's life, onward to its extreme verge, he was to go; and through them all nobly. In youth, flatterings of fortune, uninterrupted outward prosperity cannot corrupt him; a wise observer must remark, only a Goethe, at the sum of earthly happiness, can keep his Phoenix wings unsinged." Through manhood, in the most complex relation, as poet, courtier, politician, man of business, man of speculation; in the middle of revolutions and counter-revolutions, outward and spiritual; with the world loudly for him, with the world loudly or silently against him; in all seasons and situations, he holds equally on his way. Old age itself, which is called dark and feeble, he was to render lovely; who that looked upon him there, venerable in himself, and in the world's reverence, ever the clearer, the purer, but could have prayed that he too were such an old man? And did not the kind Heavens continue kind, and grant to a career so glorious the worthiest end?

Such was Goethe's life; such has his departure been-he sleeps now beside his Schiller and his Carl August; so had the Prince willed it, that between these two should be his own final rest. In life they were united, in death they are not divided. The unwearied workman now rests from his labors; the fruit of these is left growing and to grow. His earthly years have been numbered and ended; but of his activity (for it stood rooted in the eternal) there is no end. All that we mean by the higher literature of Germany, which is the higher literature of Europe, already gathers round this man as its creator; of which grand object, dawning mysterious on a world that hoped not for it, who is there that can assume the significance and far-reaching influences? The literature of Europe will pass away: Europe itself, the earth itself will pass away; this little life-boat of an earth, with its noisy crew of mankind, and all their troubled history, will one day have vanished, faded like a cloud

speck from the azure of the All! What then is man? What then is man? He endures but for an hour, and is crushed before the moth. Yet in the being and in the working of a faithful man is there already (as all faith, from the beginning, gives assurance) a something that pertains not to this wild death-element of TIME; that triumphs over time, and is, and will be, when time shall be no more.

And now we turn back into the world, withdrawing from this newmade grave. The man whom we love lies there: but glorious, worthy; and his spirit yet lives in us with an authentic life. Could each here vow to do his little task, even as the departed did his great one; in the manner of a true man, not for a day, but for eternity! To live, as he counselled and commanded, not commodiously in the reputable, the plausible, the half, but résolutely in the whole, the good, the true.

From Carlyle's Life of Stirling.

Nothing could be more copious than Coleridge's talk; and, furthermore, it was always, virtually or literally, of the nature of a monologue; suffering no interruption, however reverent; hastily putting aside all foreign additions, annotations, or most ingenuous desires for elucidation, as well-meant superfluities which would never do. Besides, it was talk not flowing any whither like a river; but spreading every whither in inextricable currents and regurgitations, like a lake or sea; terribly deficient in definite goal or aim—nay, often in logical intelligibility; what you were to believe or do, on any earthly or heavenly thing, obstinately refusing to appear from it. So that, most times, you felt logically lost; swamped near to drowning in this tide of ingenious vocables, spreading out boundless as if to submerge the world.

To sit as a passive bucket and be pumped into, whether you consent or not, can in the long run be exhilarating to no creature, how eloquent soever the flood of utterance that is descending. But if it be withal a confused, unintelligible flood of utterance, threatening to submerge all known landmarks of thought, and drown the world and you! I have heard Coleridge talk with eager, musical energy, two stricken hours, his face radiant and moist, and communicate no meaning whatsoever to any individual of his hearers, -certain of whom, I for one, still kept eagerly listening in hope; the most had long before given up, and formed (if the room were large enough) secondary humming groups of their own. He began anywhere; you put some question to him, made some suggestive observation. Instead of answering this, or decidedly setting out towards answer of it, he would accumulate formidable apparatus, logical swim-bladders, transcendental life-preserv

ers, and other precautionary and vehiculatory gear, for setting out; perhaps did at last get under way, but was swiftly solicited, turned aside by the glance of some radiant new game on this hand or that, into new courses, and ever into new, and before long into all the Universe, where it was uncertain what game you would catch, or whether any.

His talk, also, was distinguished, like himself, by irresolution; it disliked to be troubled with conditions, abstinences, definite fulfilments; loved to wander at its own sweet will, and make its auditor and his claims and humble wishes a mere passive bucket for itself! He had knowledge about many things and topics, much curious reading; but generally all topics led him, after a pass or two, into the high-seas of theosophic philosophy, the hazy infinitude of Kantian transcendentalism, with its "sum-m-mjects" and "om-m-mjects." Sad enough; for with such indolent impatience of the claims and ignorances of others, he had not the least talent for explaining this or anything unknown to them, and you swam and fluttered in the mistiest, wide, unintelligible deluge of things, for most part in a rather profitless, uncomfortable manner. Glorious islets, too, I have seen rise out of the haze; but they were few, and soon swallowed in the general element again. Balmy, sunny islets, islets of the blessed and the intelligible;-on which occasions those secondary humming groups would all cease humming, and hang breathless upon the eloquent words; till once your islet got wrapt in the mist again, and they would recommence humming. Eloquent, artistically expressive words you always had; piercing radiances of a most subtle insight came at intervals; tones of noble, pious sympathy, recognizable as pious, though strangely colored, were never wanting long; but, in general, you could not call this aimless, cloud-capt, cloudbased, lawlessly meandering human discourse of reason by the name of excellent talk, but only of "surprising;" and were reminded bitterly of Hazlitt's account of it, "Excellent talker, very-if you let him start from no premises and come to no conclusion."

Coleridge was not without what talkers call wit, and there were touches of prickly sarcasm in him, contemptuous enough of the world and its idols and popular dignitaries; he had traits even of poetic humor; but, in general, he seemed deficient in laughter, or indeed in sympathy for concrete human things either on the sunny or on the stormy side. One right peal of concrete laughter at some convicted flesh-and-blood absurdity, one burst of noble indignation at some injustice or depravity, rubbing elbows with us on this solid Earth-how strange would it have been in that Kantian haze world, and how infinitely cheering amid its vacant air-castles and dim-melting ghosts and

shadows! None such ever came. His life had been an abstract thinking and dreaming, idealistic, passed amid the ghosts of defunct bodies and of unborn ones. The moaning sing-song of that theosophic and metaphysical monotony left on you at last a very dreary feeling.

The constant gist of his discourse was lamentation over the sunk condition of the world, which he recognized to be given up to atheism and materialism, full of mere sordid misbeliefs, mispursuits, and misresults. All science had become mechanical; the science not of men, but of a kind of human beavers. Churches themselves had died away into a godless, mechanical condition, and stood there as mere cases of articles, mere forms of churches; like the dried carcasses of once swift camels, which you find left withering in the thirst of the universal desert,— ghastly portents for the present, beneficent ships of the desert no more. Men's souls were blinded, hebetated, sunk under the influence of atheism and materialism, and Hume and Voltaire: the world for the present was as an extinct world, deserted of God, and incapable of well-doing till it changed its heart and spirit. This, expressed, I think, with less of indignation and with more of long drawn querulousness, was always recognizable as the ground-tone.

De Quincey.-"De Quincey ranges with great freedom over the accumulated wealth of the language, his capacious memory giving him a prodigious command of words. His range is perhaps wider than Macaulay's or Carlyle's, as he is more versatile in the pitch of his style, and does not disdain to use the slang of all classes, from Cockney to Oxonian. In his diction, taken as a whole, there is a great preponderance of words derived from the Latin. Lord Brougham's opinion, that 'the Saxon part of our English idiom is to be favored at the expense of that part which has so happily coalesced from the Latin and Greek,' he puts aside as 'resembling that restraint which some metrical writers have imposed upon themselves-of writing a long copy of verses from which some particular letter, or from each line of which some different letter, should be carefully excluded.' From various causes he himself makes an excessive use of Latinized phraseology. First, his ear was deeply enamoured of a dignified rhythm; none but long words of Latin origin were equal to the lofty march of his periods. Secondly, by the use of Latinized and quasi technical terms, he gained greater precision than by the use of homely words of looser signification. And, thirdly, it was part of his peculiar humor to write concerning common objects in unfamiliar language.

Although De Quincey complained of the 'weariness and repulsion'

ers.

of the periodic style, he carried it to excess in his own composition. His sentences are stately, elaborate, and crowded with qualifying clauses and parenthetical allusions to a degree unparalleled among modern writHe maintained, and justly, that stateliness the most elaborate, in an absolute sense, is no fault at all, though it may be so in relation to a given subject, or to any subject under given circumstances.' Whether in his own practice he always conforms to circumstances is a question that must be left to individual taste. There is a certain stateliness in his sentences under almost all circumstances—a stateliness arising from his habitual use of periodic suspensions.

Explicitness of connection is the chief merit of De Quincey's paragraphs. He cannot be said to observe any other principle. He is carried into violations of all the other rules by his inveterate habit of digression. Often, upon a mere casual suggestion, he branches off into a digression of several pages, sometimes even digressing from the subject of his first digression. The enormity of these offences is a good deal palliated by his being conscious that he is digressing, and his taking care to let us know when he strikes off from the main subject and when he returns.

The melody of De Quincey's prose is pre-eminently rich and stately. He takes rank with Milton as one of our greatest masters of stately cadence as well as of sublime composition. If one may trust one's ear for a general impression, Milton's melody is sweeter and more varied; but, for magnificent effects, at least in prose, the palm must probably be assigned to De Quincey. In some of his grandest passages the language can be compared only to the swell and crash of an orchestra.”William Minto.

From De Quincey's Essay on Style.

There were two groups, or clusters, of Grecian wits-two depositions, or stratifications, of the national genius; and these were about a century apart. What makes them specially rememberable is the fact that each of these brilliant clusters had gathered separately about that man as central pivot who, even apart from this relation to the literature, was otherwise the leading spirit of his age. It is important for our purpose to notice the distinguishing character, or marks, by which the two clusters are separately recognized—the marks both personal and chronological. As to the personal distinctions, we have said that in each case severally the two men who offered the nucleus to the gathering happened to be otherwise the most eminent and splendid men of the period. Who were they? The one was PERICLES, the other was ALEXANDER OF MACEDON.