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is with us no more. A possession from him does remain; widely scattered; yet attainable; not inconsiderable. It can be said of him, When he departed, he took a Man's life along with him. No sounder piece of British manhood was put together in that eighteenth century of Time. Alas, his fine Scotch face, with its shaggy honesty, sagacity and goodness, when we saw it latterly on the Edinburgh streets, was all worn with care, the joy all fled from it;-ploughed deep with labour and sorrow. We shall never forget it; we shall never see it again. Adieu, Sir Walter, pride of all Scotchmen, take our proud and sad farewell.

VARNHAGEN VON ENSE'S MEMOIRS.1

[1838.]

THE Lady Rahel, or Rachel, surnamed Levin in her maiden days, who died some five years ago as Madam Varnhagen von Ense, seems to be still memorable and notable, or to have become more than ever so, among our German friends. The widower, long known in Berlin and Germany for an intelligent and estimable man, has here published successively, as author, or as editor and annotator. so many Volumes, Nine in all, about her, about himself, and the things that occupied and environed them. Nine Volumes, properly, of German Memoirs; of letters, of miscellanies, biographical and autobiographical; which we have read not without zeal and diligence, and in part with great pleasure. It seems to us that such of our readers as take interest in things German, ought to be apprised of this Publication; and withal that there are in it enough of things European and universal to furnish-out a few pages for readers not specially of that class.

One may hope, Germany is no longer to any person that

1 LONDON AND WESTMINSTER REVIEW, No. 62.-1. Rahel. Ein Buck des Andenkens für ihre Freunde (Rahel. A Book of Memorial for her Friends). 3 vols. Berlin, 1834.

2. Gallerie von Bildnissen aus Rahel's Umgang und Briefwechsel (Gallery of Portraits from Rahel's Circle of Society and Correspondence). Edited by K. A. Varnhagen von Ense. 2 vols. Leipzig, 1836.

3. Denkwürdigkeiten und vermischte Schriften (Memoirs and Miscellaneous Writings). By K. A. Varnhagen von Ense. 4 vols. 1837-38.

Mannheim,

vacant land, of gray vapour and chimeras, which it was to most Englishmen, not many years ago. One may hope that, as readers of German have increased a hundredfold, some partial intelligence of Germany, some interest in things German, may have increased in a proportionably higher ratio. At all events, Memoirs of men, German or other, will find listeners among men. Sure enough, Berlin city, on the sandy banks of the Spree, is a living city, even as London is, on the muddy banks of Thames. Daily, with every rising of the blessed heavenly light, Berlin sends up the smoke of a hundred-thousand kindled hearths, the fret and stir of five-hundred-thousand new-awakened human souls ;marking or defacing with such smoke-cloud, material or spiritual, the serene of our common all-embracing Heaven. One Heaven, the same for all, embraces that smoke-cloud too, adopts it, absorbs it, like the rest. Are there not dinnerparties, 'æsthetic teas;' scandal-mongeries, changes of ministry, police-cases, literary gazettes? The clack of tongues, the sound of hammers, mounts up in that corner of the Planet too, for certain centuries of Time. Berlin has its royalties and diplomacies, its traffickings, travailings; literatures, sculptures, cultivated heads, male and female; and boasts itself to be the intellectual capital of Germany.' Nine Volumes of Memoirs out of Berlin will surely contain something for us.

Samuel Johnson, or perhaps another, used to say, there was no man on the streets whose biography he would not like to be acquainted with. No rudest mortal walking there who has not seen and known experimentally something, which, could he tell it, the wisest would hear willingly from him! Nay, after all that can be said and celebrated about poetry, eloquence and the higher forms of composition and utterance; is not the primary use of speech itself this same, to utter memoirs, that is, memorable experiences to our fellow-creatures? A fact is a fact; man is forever the brother of man.

That thou, O my brother, impart to me truly how

:

it stands with thee in that inner man of thine, what lively images of things past thy memory has painted there, what hopes, what thoughts, affections, knowledges do now dwell there for this and for no other object that I can see, was the gift of speech and of hearing bestowed on us two. I say not how thou feignest. Thy fictions, and thousand-andone Arabian Nights, promulgated as fictions, what are they also at bottom but this, things that are in thee, though only images of things? But to bewilder me with falsehoods, indeed; to ray-out error and darkness, misintelligence, which means misattainment, otherwise failure and sorrow; to go about confusing worse our poor world's confusion, and, as a son of Nox and Chaos, propagate delirium on earth: not surely with this view, but with a far different one, was that miraculous tongue suspended in thy head, and set vibrating there! In a word, do not two things, veracity and memoir-writing, seem to be prescribed by Nature herself and the very constitution of man? Let us read, therefore, according to opportunity,— and, with judicious audacity, review!

Our Nine printed Volumes we called German Memoirs. They agree in this general character, but are otherwise to be distinguished into kinds, and differ very much in their worth for us. The first book on our list, entitled Rahel, is a book of private letters; three thick volumes of Letters written by that lady; selected from her wide correspondence; with a short introduction, with here and there a short note, and that on Varnhagen's part is all. Then follows, in two volumes, the work named Gallery of Portraits; consisting principally of Letters to Rahel, by various persons, mostly persons of note; to which Varnhagen, as editor, has joined some slight commentary, some short biographical sketch of each. Of these five volumes of German Letters we will say, for the present, that they seem to be calculated for Germany, and even for some special circle there, rather than for England or us. A glance at them afterwards, we hope, will

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be possible. But the third work, that of Varnhagen himself, is the one we must chiefly depend on here: the four volumes of Memoirs and Miscellanies; lively pieces; which can be safely recommended as altogether pleasant reading to every one. They are 'Miscellaneous Writings,' as their title indicates; in part collected and reprinted out of periodicals, or wherever they lay scattered; in part sent forth now for the first time. There are criticisms, notices literary or didactic; always of a praiseworthy sort, generally of small extent. There are narrations; there is a long personal narrative, as it might be called, of service in the Liberation War' of 1814, wherein Varnhagen did duty as a volunteer officer in Tettenborn's corps, among the Cossacks: this is the longest piece, by no means the best. There is farther a curious narrative of Lafayette's escape (brief escape with recapture) from the Prison of Olmütz. Then also there is a curious biography of Doctor Bollmann, the brave young Hanoverian, who aided Lafayette in that adventure. Then other biographies not so curious; on the whole, there are many biographies: Biography, we might say, is the staple article ; an article in which Varnhagen has long been known to excel. Lastly, as basis for the whole, there are presented, fitfully, now here, now there, and with long intervals, considerable sections of Autobiography; — not confessions, indeed, or questionable work of the Rousseau sort, but discreet reminiscences, personal and other, of a man who having looked on much, may be sure of willing audience in reporting it well. These are the Four Volumes written by Varnhagen von Ense; those are the Five edited by him. We shall regard his autobiographic memorials as a general substratum, upholding and uniting into a certain coherence the multifarious contents of these publications: it is Varnhagen von Ense's Passage through Life; this is what it yielded him; these are the things and persons he took note of, and had to do with, in travelling thus far.

Beyond ascertaining for ourselves what manner of eye

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