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34 Schiller, and Mrs Austin's Characteristics of Göethe. Nevertheless, the work from which we shall presently make a few extracts is a most valuable addition to those links that are daily uniting us with more endearing bonds to the Saxon brotherhood beyond the Rhine; it is a step, and a bold one, in advance. We have now almost to satiety made a survey of the neat classical Weimar, and we are plunging at once, with bold fearless swoop, into the very centre of the Fatherland, into the midst of the untrodden fir forests of the Fichtelgebirge, where many great hearts billow out sublime thoughts—hearts that never saw that which is most kindred to them in nature—the sea. So it was with Richter literally. Born at the little mountain town of Wunsiedel, between Bayreuth and Bohemia, and shifting about with a migratory elasticity from Bayreuth to Berlin, from Berlin to Coburg, from Coburg to Heidelberg, he died without having ever feasted his eyes (what a feast to a man like him!) on the glowing blue of the Mediterranean, or drunk in with his ears the "" the multitudinous laughter of the Baltic wave. A genuine German!—in this respect certainly, and in how many others! A German in imagination—Oh, Heaven! he literally strikes you blind with skyrockets and sunbeams (almost as madly at times as our own Shelley), and circumnavigates your brain with a dance of nebulous Brocken phantoms, till you seriously doubt whether you are not a phantom yourself: a German for kindliness and simplicity and true-heartedness—a man having his heart always in his hand, and his arms ready to be thrown round every body's neck; greeting every man with a blessing, and cursing only the devil, and—like Robert Burns—scarcely him heartily: a German for devoutness of heart, and purity of unadulterated evangelic feeling, without the least notion, at the same time, of what in Scotland we call orthodoxy, much less of what in England they call church; a rare Christian; a man whom you cannot read and relish thoroughly unless you are a Christian yourself, any more than you can the gospel of John. For Richter also is a preacher in his own way—a smiling, sporting, nay a jesting preacher at times, but with a deep background of earnestness: his jests being the jests not of rude men, but of innocent children; his earnestness the earnestness not of a sour presbyterian theologian, but of a strong-sighted seraph that looks the sun in the face, and becomes intensely bright. A German further is Richter, and better than a German, in the profoundness of his philosophy and the subtlety of his speculation: a speculation profound, but not dark; a subtlety nice without being finical, and delicate without being meagre. A German further, and specially, is this man, in his vast and various erudition, and in that quality without which learning was never achieved, hard laboriousness and indefatigable perseverance. It is incredible what books he read: not merely literary books, but also and principally scientific books; natural history especially in all its branches from the star to the star-fish; quarto upon quarto of piously gathered extracts were the well-quarried materials, out of which his most light and fantastic, as well as his most solid and architectural fabrics were raised: a merit of the highest order in our estimation; an offence and a scandal to many; for nothing offends conceited and shallow readers so much as to find in an imaginative work allusions to grave scientific facts, of which their butterfly-spirits are incapable. Then, over and above all this, Richter possesses a virtue which only a few Germans possess: he is a man of infinite humour; humour, too, of the best kind; sportive, sunny, and genial, rather than cutting and sarcastic; broad without being gross, refined without being affected. Then his faults, also—and their name is legion—how German are they! His want of taste, his mingled homeliness and sublimity, his unpruned luxuriance, his sentimental wantonness! But let these pass; he who notices them seriously is not fit to read Richter. It requires a certain delicate tact of finger to pluck the rose on this rich bush without being pricked by the thorn; John Bull especially, with his stone and lime church, his statutable religion, and his direct railroad understanding, is very apt to be exasperated by the capricious jerking