with that poet, and made superior to him, in the happy and subtle blending of the philosophical and poetical imaginations in his mental adjustment. It is even probable that his warm, personal relation with Hegel, induced him to look favorably on that great philosopher's theory of the Identity of Subject and Object, thought and thing, and especially to sympathize with the application of his Method to nature, in which, by the way, a systematic attempt was made to escape pantheism, by making nature but the exteriority (aeusserlichkeit) of God. However this may be, he did not formally espouse the Method, but simply took from it what any one might rightfully appropriate, to wit: First, the principle that, both for thought and thing, there is a substratum of the divine; and, second, that the highest reality for the human mind is in the synthesis of opposites, the coming together of subject and object, the most intimate blending of thought with the thing upon which it is exerted. The idea is in its fullness only when its polarized elements are brought into complete coalescence and unity. Considered apart from any special system, simply, as an invariable process, more or less conscious, in the economy of thought, the fact that opposites compose all our rational ideas, and that the eternal Reason is concerned in the movements of our minds, from point to point in all mental evolution, is worthy of the acceptance of every reflecting person; and all that Goethe did was to turn it to tremendous practical account in the new culture he set on foot.

Now assuming this to be in the main a correct statement of Goethe's attitude toward philosophy on the one hand, and poetry on the other, it becomes apparent what a wide and deep gap there was between him and Schiller in this rencounter at Jena. Schiller had espoused the philosophy of Kant, and its tendency was to shut him up in the idea, and prevent his going out into any universality of conception. An idealism was superinduced in which the thought and the thing were in unnatural estrangement, and, to that extent, his great poetical abilities were withheld effectually from the eternal truth of things. To Schiller, therefore, Goethe could supply a realistic element, and be the occasion of letting out his fine genius to the ample and generous scope it ought to have.

The result was as he anticipated. Schiller owned the ser vice. On the 23d August, 1794, Schiller thus writes to Goethe: "On much in regard to which I could not obtain perfect harmony within myself, the contemplation of your mind-for thus I must call the full impression of your ideas upon me,—has kindled in me a new light. I needed the object, the body of many speculative ideas, and you have put me on the track of it." Previous to the composition of Wallenstein, he concedes he had no just conception of Nature. Shakspeare he had not comprehended. "He was," says he, "the object of my reverence and zealous study for years, before I could yield him an enthusiastic homage. I was not capable of comprehending Nature at first hand. I had but learned to admire her image reflected in the understanding, and put in order by rules." A sigh this is over his long enslavement to the Kantian criticism, from which he would not have been released but for the timely interposition of Goethe. The effect of that friendship was not. to supplant criticism, but to put Schiller into a juster conception of his art, to cause the scales to fall from his eyes with reference to Shakspeare, and to supply him with enough realism to put him on the way, in constructing the drama especially, of throwing his vigorous genius into each of the characters he would bring on the stage.

And so, lifted up thus by the hand of Goethe, we hear him saying: "Criticism must now make good to me the damage she herself has done. And damaged me she most certainly has; for the boldness, the living glow which I felt before a rule was known to me, has for several years been wanting. I now see myself create and form. I watch the play of inspiration; and my fancy, knowing she is not without witnesses of her movements, no longer moves with equal freedom. I hope, however, ultimately to advance so far that art shall become a second nature, as polished manners are to well-bred men; then imagination will regain her former freedom, and submit to none. but voluntary limitations." What a change! He who, in writing Don Carlos, had reveled in the pernicious maxim that the poet must not be the painter, but the lover, of his heroes, now, while preparing Wallenstein, at the special request, and under the direction of Goethe, ingenuously confesses to a friend that

his sentiments and method of work have undergone a radical change. "I do my work very differently from what I used to do. The subject seems so much outside of me that I can hardly get up any feeling for it. The subject I treat leaves me cold and indifferent, and yet I am full of enthusiasm for my work. With the exception of two characters to which I feel attached, Max Piccolomini and Thekla, I treat all the rest, and particularly the principal character of the play, only with the pure love of the artist. But I can promise you that they will not suffer from this. I look to history for limitation, in order to give, through surrounding circumstances, a stricter form and reality to my ideals." How easy it is to trace the distinct and delicate marks of Goethe's influence in every word of this!

But was Goethe in any measure profited by his association with Schiller? We need only answer that he avows incalculable assistance in keeping his mind in that state of free equipoise between the ideal and the real which was the coveted goal of the new intellectual regimen he set on foot. If Schiller was predominantly idealistic, he was predominantly realistic. Now, whether in philosophy, culture, art, or religion, he would find the true end of all well-directed intellectual effort to bring together these opposing elements into such harmonizing adjustment as the evolution of truth must require. With Goethe-and the principle challenges universal assent-truth lies between these mystic poles. His Faust has its profoundest significance in the fact that it is a sublime effort toward a reconciliation of the ideal and the real. In the Goethean culture this thought was talismanic. Without making it an imperious article in his creed, the great poet calmly gave himself up to its enchantment, and in all ways, literary and scientific, in penetrating the secrets of human hearts and of the blooming flowers, everywhere he aimed to exhibit, if he did not personally exemplify, its beautiful realization. The same aim, the same spell, bound him in his friendship with Schiller. Tender, deep, ingenuous, thoroughly Platonic, it was nevertheless an alliance contracted under the direction of the presiding maxim of culture he had espoused, and was subordinated to such rational ends as only two such great spirits, clinging each to each, could in helpful sympathy devise.

Of what value is the maxim? The theme awaits an exhaustive treatment by itself. It may savor some of enthusiasm, but such only as the splendid and challenging results of this happy incident will go far in justifying, to say, that as the inspiring principle of a very lofty species of culture, this maxim is comprehensive and complete. We could propose no better specific for the ills of our times. We are living in an age when the realistic or scientific element is in threatening preponderancy, and the idea is in a fair way of sinking to an abstraction. There is clamor enough for truth, it is true, but the ponderous reality is in danger of being miserably dwarfed, by the prevailing dogmatism of the experimental sciences, which do often persist in groveling with the facts and forces of nature, as if all beyond were a boundless inane. Our affinities must have room to play in a field so immeasurable as that which takes in the essence of things, and opens to us what in some sense is the substance whereof the worlds were made. Poetic exaltation has a legitimate and long-consecrated but now much desecrated place in all grand discovery, and there is no ground in reason that the stern utilities of our time should part company with so beautiful, so indispensable an evangel. Let Goethe be re-called that he may impress anew upon us the divine mission of his art, for if truth is not mainly the discovery of the poet, it is at least true that, after science has wrought her marvels, and unrolled her grand schemes of classification an use, there is yet behind her scrolls, and tables, and crucibles, and scales, a region of human capability and want, whither science unattended cannot come and minister, and to which she may pay tribute only by yielding her work to be taken up and transfigured in the light of poesy.

ARTICLE X.-NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS.

THEOLOGICAL AND RELIGIOUS.

MEYER'S COMMENTARY ON GALATIANS.*—The English translation of Meyer's great work on the New Testament, which has been promised for some time by the publishing-house of T. & T. Clark, makes its first appearance in this volume. It is introduced to this country, like all the publications of this house, by Messrs. Scribner, Welford & Armstrong, of New York. That it will meet a welcome reception and command an extensive sale can scarcely be doubted. Meyer is to be regarded as the leading commentator of the world. For forty years he has been engaged in the preparation of this work, devoting to it his time and energies, and by the successive editions and revisions he has kept it in the advance of the rapid progress of the studies in this department during the past generation. About four months since-in June of the present year he died at Hanover, where he had so long resided, and where he held a prominent position in the Church. His commentary is, thus, introduced to the American and English public just as he has closed his labors, and we have, in the translation now made, the work in its final form, as left by its author. We are glad that a new language has, as it were, taken up the results of his learning, and is about to present them to a new and wider circle, so that his fame, now that his life is ended, may become as wide-spread in these English-speaking nations as it is already in his native land.

The translation, as a whole, has been placed in charge of Professor Dickson of Glasgow, the translator of Mommsen's History of Rome, and was intended to contain the latest notes and suggestions of Dr. Meyer as each successive volume should appear. Provision was, thus, made for giving it the greatest possible accuracy and value. It is, of course, now impossible to hope for any further additions from the author, as his work must

* Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament. By HEINRICH AUGUST WILHELM MEYER, Th. D.. Oberconsistorialrath, Hanover. From the German. The translation revised and edited, with the sanction of the author, by WILLIAM P. DICKSON, D.D., Professor of Divinity in the University of Glasgow. Part VII. The Epistle to the Galatians. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark. 1873. 8vo, pp. 354.