style, which becomes frequently oppressive, and communicates an air of pedantry to his poem. Still Klopstock has exercised an important and beneficent influence upon German literature; he taught his country its own strength, and freed it at once and for ever from the leading strings of foreign authority.

Wieland (1733-1813) is more French in character than Klopstock, or rather he blends the luxurious and somewhat licentious spirit of the Italian romantic poets, with that tone of gay and heartless philosophy which the example of Voltaire had introduced into French literature; and yet, withal, he is no mere imitator, but possesses a decided individuality in his later and better works, and even a truly German spirit. The tendency towards the imitation of the French appears, however, chiefly in the earlier productions of his romantic muse, such as the Idris and Zenide, the New Amadis, and others, in which he has assailed with such persevering satire the Platonism of love. As he advanced in life, he began to entertain better views: he grew dissatisfied with that epicurism which he had inculcated as the basis of conduct, and that licentious gaiety which he had made the mainspring of his poetry; and in his Oberon he endeavoured to make amends for the levity with which he had treated the better feelings of the heart, by those charming pictures of conjugal love, true constancy, and chivalrous heroism, which, combined with the beauty of the descriptions, and the pure and simple flow of the style, have rendered the Oberon the only successful effort in later times to revive the tones of that Italian harp which has slumbered since the days of Ariosto.

Gessner (1738-1788) belongs to this period. His Eclogues at one time enjoyed great popularity; and he has certainly

in some of them, such as the First Navigation, displayed fancy and invention. But he deals in a species of poetry too remote from actual life; and there is a sort of sheepish modesty about his shepherds, and French coquetry about his nymphs and shepherdesses, which communicate something of a ludicrous character to his Arcadia.

The fame of Lessing (1721-1781) must rest more upon his vigorous, transparent, logical, and delightful prose style, than upon his poetry. His dramas, with the exception of Nathan the Wise, are written in prose; and the style of Nathan scarcely rises above the conversational pitch, though its Brahmin-like simplicity of tone, and the air of mild and tolerant wisdom which pervades it, leave a pleasing impression on the memory.

The two greatest names in German literature succeed, namely, Schiller (1759-1805) and Goethe (1749-1832). Of their dramas we have spoken elsewhere. Schiller, however, though greatest as a dramatist, is entitled to nearly equal eminence as a lyric poet. His odes, his short poems, mingling so much philosophy with so much feeling; his charming ballads, pitched on every key, from the simplicity of the Toggenburg and the Fridolin, to the rude force of the Diver, the fine chivalrous and devotional tone of the fight with the dragon, and the classic finish of the complaint of Ceres, or the cranes of Ibycus; would alone have been sufficient to place him second only to Goethe, had he never written William Tell, or the Maid of Orleans, or Wallenstein. In one particular he must rank far higher than Goethe; in the elevated aim which he always had in view; the attainment of noble ends by noble means; the rendering poetry what it always ought to be, not a mere specimen of plastic ingenuity, but something by which the

soul feels itself refined and the heart made better. His enthusiasm, impetuous, and yet tender and affectionate, clothed all the universe, moral and material, with forms of grandeur, and gave to all he uttered the stamp of purity and truth. "His greatest faculty," says the most eloquent of his biographers, "was a half poetical, half philosophical imagination, a faculty teeming with magnificence and brilliancy; now adorning or aiding to erect a stately pyramid of scientific speculation, now brooding over the abysses of thought and feeling, till thoughts and feelings else unutterable were embodied in expressive forms, and palaces and landscapes, glowing in ethereal beauty, rose like exhalations from the bosom of the deep."

Of Goethe we have already so very fully expressed our opinion (see the article GOETHE), that we shall not again enter upon the subject.

At the present day the aspect of German poetry is not the most imposing. Tięk, who had evinced high talent for the Mährchen, or Legendary Tale, to which he communicated all the charm of earnest belief, and the most musical versification, has for some time past exchanged poetry for

prose and polemical discussion. Uhland and Ruckert are at this moment the most eminent among the German lyric poets; for the effusions of Heine, wretched attempts to infuse a sneering imitation of Byronism into lyric poetry, have already, we believe, survived their popularity. The host of poets, besides these, is numerous, but not of any marked excellence or originality. Judging from a few of his compositions, we should be disposed to say there was more of poetical genius in Leopold Schefer, than in almost any of his contemporaries.

ENGLISH POETRY.

Ir is not our intention to enter into any minute details as to English poetry, with which we shall conclude the present sketch. Since we have already noticed, under separate heads, most of the individuals by whom it was adorned, we shall merely attempt to indicate generally the directions taken by poetical taste at different periods of our annals.

Even prior to the Norman conquest, we know from William of Malmesbury, that England, like all the Gothic nations, had been possessed by a large mass of ballads, written in Anglo-Saxon, though, as no fragments of these remain, we know nothing of their poetical merit. This earlier minstrelsy must soon have sunk into discredit, or been entirely suppressed, by the Norman conquest.

The English language, as it now exists, grew out of the mixture of the Anglo-Saxon with the Norman, and seems to have acquired a complete form by the middle of the thirteenth century. In 1297, we have the Rhyming Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, the first undoubted composition in the English tongue.

From the Norman conquest to the time of Edward III., the literature and poetry of England consists of little else than translations from, or imitations of, the Norman romances and chronicles; and, judging from the ridicule with

which they have been assailed by Chaucer in his Rhyme of Sir Thopas, they must have been of slender merit, since they are represented as shocking the taste, of course not particularly refined, of the host of the Tabard. The distance, at all events, which separates all our English versifiers of this period from Chaucer (born 1328, died 1406), is such as justly to entitle him to the honour of being the first of English poets, the sun that "flames in the forehead of the modern sky;" throwing out a splendour that showed at once his own lustre, and the dreary wastes that spread far and wide towards the literary horizon.

Much of Chaucer's time, however, was wasted in the school of those French allegorical poets, whose romances were at one time so influential in Europe. In fact, nearly half his life, as Mr Campbell remarks, was passed amongst the dreams, emblems, flower-worshippings, and courts and parliaments of love, of that visionary and tiresome school. He was fifty-four years of age before he commenced the Canterbury Tales, in which alone the peculiarities of his genius, its originality, and its extent, can be said to be completely manifested. This late discovery of the true bent of his powers is singular; for Chaucer appears peculiarly marked out as the poet, not of mysticism and allegory, but of clear observation of life, and of practical aims. In the Canterbury Tales, which were obviously suggested by the influence of Boccacio's Decameron, he first found full scope for the display of the various qualities of his mind, and of that mass of real knowledge of life with which his experience of society, in all its aspects, high and low, from the palace to the cottage, at home and abroad, had supplied his mind. His clear observation, and corresponding power of clear painting, giving the most