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monly falls below it; while the reserved | and fancy, you may walk pleasantly and self-contained, making no promise, through sunny paths and meadows, and holding out no hope, is ever in advance of pull sweet flowers as you go. It is only his own word, and the smallest act of when you would enter upon the avenues kindness comes from him like a deed of of feeling that you run against the high grace. "Dark, and true, and tender is closed gate. the north," says the poet; and "fierce, and false, and fickle is the south."

But this is rather in semblance than in fact.

The cold and silent north seems true by refraining from speech; the hot and forward south seems fickle, by speaking too much; for it is certain that no human being is altogether constant and consistent; only as long as he suppresses his opinions and feelings, the changes they undergo are not found out, while those who are given to much speaking, furnish the record of their own fluctuations, and are judged or misjudged accordingly, being often accused of insincerity where they should be the rather praised for their candor in admitting the error of a preconceived opinion, too great a haste in publication being the only fault of which they are really guilty.

The danger of the ready speaker lies in an expenditure of force. He runs the risk of being satisfied with the good word, to the neglect of the good deed; while the reserved man runs the risk of totally extinguishing the fire that he seeks to hide; for affection at last will languish to death for want of expression-and life of all kinds will lose itself in darkness.

If a nature be nobly stamped, is it not a pity to call in art to alter its face? Let vice have recourse to the screen, let the deformed visage be thickly covered, but let virtue show us something of the fairness of her aspect, and let the vail she wears be delicate, that we may discern through it the sweetness of her counte

nance.

Reserve is often mistaken for shyness, and sometimes for pride; with shyness it has in truth no kindred. Shyness is a timidity, an embarrassment in the presence of others, which proceeds rather from the physical condition of the nerves, than from any peculiar mental quality. Reserve is a mental effort. A baby may be shy, but a baby can not be reserved. Reserve is steadfast and not troubled; and except where the emotions are called into play, does not affect the flow of social intercourse. With the reserved man, so long as you remain in the regions of taste

Wordsworth in describing a poet has described a reserved man:

"He is retired as noontide dew,

Or fountain in a noonday grove;
And you must love him, ere to you
He will seem worthy of your love.
The outward shows of sky and earth,
Of hill and valley he has viewed,
And impulses of deeper birth

Have come to him in solitude." But how, cries the hasty reader, can a poet be reserved? Is it not the business of his life to proclaim his passion, to detail to the public all the conflicts, struggles, and agonies of his fighting soul? Does he not confide his griefs, and open the inner shrine of his heart, to printer and publisher?

It is true, and yet he could not do it to a friend. He can address a public whom he does not see, but not the friend whom he does see, because he knows the exact boundary of his friend's sympathies; while in that large mass of unknown, there are unsounded depths of sensibility to appeal to, and to them, as the player to his audience, he may make his soliloquy aloud.

The hight and depth of the love cherished towards the reserved has been spoken of. It is so deep, because we admire the more reverentially whatever is beyond the extent of our perception. "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter yet." And there is "the unknown joy that knowing kills." Is not the fascination of the difficult and the dark entrancing in its kind? See how navigators are pressing on constantly to the north pole, at the risk of being icebound, wrecked, and miserably starved, merely because there is something to be discovered.

This affection is so high, so exalted, because it is free from the taint of self-love, and does not venture to ask for a return; content with the happiness of esteeming a true excellence and of giving without expecting to receive.

The impulsive man trusts his friend too much: the reserved man trusts only himself. The impulsive man may be despised, but can not be hated. The reserved man

may be hated, but can not be despised. asked by too indulgent parents what he He occupies the fortress; he holds the would wish to be in after-life, he would strong, impregnable position. He is be- unhesitatingly reply, "a reserved man," hind the walls, and our shots whiz past in order to taste those peculiar pleasures, him. He reveals no front to the foe. He that timid homage, that proud sense of will tire out the besieger. Only let him impenetrability, which have here been take care that while he makes his lines described. There is no wizard's wand; of defense against the enemy so strong and no such choice is offered to him; he he does not also close the way to friendly has nearly run his course out, and there is supplies. no turning back. He can not disguise from himself (not being apt at disguise) that he has not been hitherto a reserved man; but he may do his best with the little space that remains; and in writing at the present moment, he is conscious of viewing himself with a respectful satisfaction for the concealment that he practices while he holds back his name.

All virtues may be carried into an excess which converts them into faults; and reserve, which is, after all, control, may pass into a repelling stoicism. Such a danger attends its constant exercise. And yet, if the present writer could be transported by the touch of a wizard's wand back into childhood, and then be

From Fraser's Magazine.

POEMS AND BALLADS OF GOETHE.*

THIS volume of translations is one of very considerable merit. The work has been well done, and it is but little to say that the material has deserved all the pains that have been bestowed upon it. Among Goethe's smaller lyrical pieces are some of the most beautiful and most characteristic of his compositions, and the present translators have brought to the task of turning them into English an unusual amount of literary skill and poetical experience. They have a fair claim to venture in so good a cause upon that most difficult form of original composition -the translation of poetry into poetry.

The two great objects and two great difficulties of all such translations may be stated as follows: We have first to give the meaning, the spirit, and tone of the original; and secondly, to make the work really native in the new language. Our labor is first to be faithful, and then to be

vernacular.

Pope in his Homer and Dryden in his Virgil are conspicuous instances of success in the latter respect. They have signally

Poems and Ballads of Goethe. Translated by W. EDMONSTOUNE AYTOUN, D.C.L., and THEODORE MARTIN. Edinburgh and London: Blackwood and Sons. 1859.

fallen short in the former. Dryden's Virgil is Dryden not Virgil; and Pope has utterly failed to reproduce, what he himself in his preface extols-the simplicity and directness of Homer. But he has written a real English book, quite as truly and thoroughly English as any of his own satires or epistles. Considering the extent of the work, we can not be surprised at hearing it called, as Johnson called it, the noblest version in any language. Dryden has passages of greater spirit, and here and there has performed miracles of execution. Witness some parts of the Tyrrhena regum progenies, and the opening of the Quarrel of Ajax and Ulysses:

The chiefs were set, the soldiers crowned the
field:

To these the master of the sevenfold shield
Upstarted fierce, and kindled with disdain,
Eager to speak, unable to contain

His boiling rage, he rolled his eyes around
The shore, and Grecian galleys hauled aground;
Then stretching out his hand, O Jove! he cried,
Must then our cause before the fleet be tried;
And dares Ulysses for the prize contend,
In sight of what he durst not once defend,
But basely fled that memorable day
When I from Hector's hand redeemed the flam-
ing prey?

So much 'tis easier, etc., etc.

But Dryden is sadly negligent and 1 It should be said, however, at once that dreadfully unequal; and as a whole we the two chief poems of the volume-both may say of Pope's Iliad that there is no of them exceedingly difficult-have both translated book in which, with less abso- of them been very fairly rendered. The lute variation from the text, you have less Bride of Corinth, though for the sake of sensation of the uneasy process of render- obtaining the essential double rhymes it ing sentence by sentence, verse after verse, deviates here and there rather widely and phrase for phrase, or in which you from the letter, is in spirit faithful enough could more easily suppose that you were to "the awful and undefined horror" of reading an original. Hence its popularity that wonder of the critics; and The God and the great influence it has exercised. and the Bayaderé is equally successful. Certainly it is not obligatory in all cases to translate in the same meter. Who would try to turn Virgil into English hexameters? But in these instances we think the translators have judged wisely that it was their duty at all hazards to make the attempt.

These two singular pieces are extremely characteristic of Goethe, and may very well serve to establish for the English reader the point of view from which the great German writer regarded the world, and the things of the world, visible and invisible, sensual and supersensual. But were we asked to name the compositions which above all others bring before us the man Goethe, and place us in communion with his mind and spirit, we should turn to such poems as Prometheus, Mohammed's Song, The Limits of Humanity, The Song of the Spirits over the Waters, and Ganymede. It is satisfactory to find that these, given in English, as in German they were written in rhymeless lyrical meter, have been carefully and scrupulously recomposed. They may be accept

But in translating a great poem like the Iliad, or any work of a great writer like Goethe, the really important thing is to give the peculiar, individual, and distinctive character. And perhaps yet more than elsewhere is this the case where the poems are brief and lyrical-where the story is little and the style much. Even in Pope's heroics, Achilles shows who he is, and the march of events, though not of the narrative that tells them, is true to Homer. Calypso, Circe, and the Cyclops are original, though versified in Mr. Pope's manner by Broome or Fenton. But Goethe's lyrics will not be worth a great deal, if they are not presented in a style and manner very nearly approaching that style and manner in which Goethe wrote them and expressed himself. This is no case in which a pretty tale has but to be told again-a romaunt of the rose to be romanced once more. We have the portraiture of a particular human mind to re-portray, and the fine personal details of a human experience to reëxpress. Some delicate autobiographical confidence is perverted by every seemingly slight alter-ed as translations giving not the sense ation; some spiritual communication is recommunicated amiss; the scientific values of some subtle and exact psychology are, in the new notation, falsely conveyed. And there are bits of verse in the collection where the outlines and contours are as hard to copy as those of antique sculp

ture.

The translations in the present volume, made by two different hands, bear the impress of two different minds, and may be roughly divided into two classes following the two principles that have been mentioned. One of the two writers is remarkable for ease; and the other laudable for fidelity. There are efforts here, which readers tender of Goethe will find rather harsh, to make at all events an English poem out of a German. There are studies almost so careful as to be tame, to reproduce the exact original.

only, but, in kind if not in degree, the true tone and feeling of the original. They have not, indeed, the perfection either in diction or in rhythm which they have in the German, but they do produce (and that is the great thing) the same effect and impression.

LIMITS OF HUMANITY.

When the Creator,
The Great, the Eternal,
Sows with indifferent
Hand, from the rolling
Clouds, o'er the earth, his
Lightnings in blessing,
I kiss the nethermost
Hem of his garment,
Lowly inclining
In infantine awe.

For never against
The immortals, a mortal
May measure himself.

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ures.

It is in this serene ether of a divine intelligence that we seem most truly to meet the undying part (the unsterbliches) of Goethe. Here he is himself; elsewhere he is but striving to become himself. Next in value we should place perhaps the poems, such as those occurring in Wil helm Meister, brief, condensed, and telling more than meets the ear, of suffering, oppression, and long endurance. To these, strange as it may seem at first reading, belongs the famous "Know'st thou the land"

Kennst du das Land, wo die Citronen blühn, the perfect effect of which has not been given in any translation, though Mr. Martin's is careful and accurate. Another is Retribution, one of the Harper's fragments in the novel:

RETRIBUTION.

He that with tears did never eat his bread,

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Who never ate his bread in sorrow,

Who never spent the darksome hours
Weeping and watching for the morrow,
He knows ye not, ye gloomy powers.
the second stanza—

And

Ihr führt ins Leben uns hinein,

Ihr lasst den Armen schuldig werden;
Dann überlasst ihr ihn der Pein:

Denn alle Schuld rächt sich auf Erden.
To Earth, this weary Earth, ye bring us,
To guilt ye let us heedless go;
Then leave repentance fierce to wring us,
A moment's guilt, an age of woe.

It is curious, as a matter of the mechanics of
translation, to notice what little diversities, in
languages so nearly akin as English and Ger-
man, make a literal version impracticable, and

He that hath never lain through night's long send the translators off in different directions.

hours,

Weeping in bitter anguish on his bed—

He knows ye not, ye dread celestial powers.
Ye lead us onwards into life. Ye leave
The wretch to fall; then yield him up, in woe,
Remorse, and pain, unceasingly to grieve;
For every sin is punished here below.

The original words can almost be exactly given; but mächte, mights, which would rhyme to nights, nächte, must in English be turned into powers-nights must therefore in some way be paraphrased to introduce the word hours. There is a reluctance to force sate into a rhyming relation with ate, and an evident unwillingness to render himmlischen simply and without any

This also, with the labor of a year or addition by heavenly. two, might be better done.*

*Wer nie sein Brot mit Thränen ass,

Wer nie die kummervollen Nächte

Auf seinem Bette wienend sass,

Der kennt euch nicht, ihr himmlischen
Mächte.

is thus translated by Mr. Carlyle

Who ne'er his bread with tears hath ate,

Who never through the sad night hours Weeping upon his bed hath sate,

He knows not you, you heavenly powers.

Forth into life you bid us go,

And into guilt you let us fall,
Then leave us to endure the woe
It brings unfailingly to all.

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