temptations, to which he succumbed,-but with feverish, miserable, undeceived heart. During a course of dissipation, when he was engaged as organist at the court of Wirtemberg, his wife left him, and took refuge in her father's care; and Schubart, never dead to religion, and really attached to his family, and still retaining a deep sense of his estrangement from God, wrote down the state of his mind in a paper remarkable for its deep pathos and clear self-sincerity. At this time, however, he had not the resolution to mend, and consequently grew worse. Very nearly did he profess himself a convert to Roman Catholicism, for the mere hope of a professional engagement. From this he was saved partly by his own repugnance, more by the fortunate exposure of his past life. From this period his external life at least took a turn for the better. His wife returned to him; he started a newspaper the Deutsche Chronik, the first popular German newspaper of any literary ability-in Augsburg, soon removing it to Ulm, which had immense success. Though still very dissipated, his ties to his family, or at least to his children, not to his wife, grew in strength. His letters at this period, however, are far more selfish, and show, we think, far less self-discontent than in the earlier and madder time. It is remarkable, that throughout his period of declension he had a deep foreboding of disaster, -as men always have who feel inward claims upon them which they resist. Suddenly the blow, which he had for eight years been expecting, fell. He had avoided the dominions of the Duke of Wirtemberg. He used to say a foreboding always seized him when he saw Herzog Karl,-he thought of the "thunderbolts in the hand of Jupiter." Yet he had never been threatened by the Duke. When he had offended, and might have been legally imprisoned, he was merely dismissed. Now, in Ulm, he was out of the Duke's territory. Suddenly, however, the Duke, either offended by his newspaper, or from some other secret motive, determined to capture him. He enticed him into the Wirtemberg dominions by sheer fraud, and then arrested and shut him up for ten years in prison.

During this time Schubart's life took a deeply religious colouring, which Strauss regards as pure deterioration. He prefers the coarse and sensual and generally very selfish tone of the letters from Ulm to the purer affection and passionate religious remorse which pours from him in prison, because something of religious superstition and apocalyptic tastes may be found with it. Nay, he even seems to prefer it to the calmer spirit and affectionate devotion of the letters which follow Schubart's release. He entered his prison a sensual and selfish man. After his freedom, he fell again into the

bon-vivant habits which he had been so long denied; but to his wife and children he was an utterly changed man-faithful, tender, considerate. He probably saw little harm in the luxurious indolence to which his physical temperament predisposed him, as his genius enabled him to earn the means for it with very slender application. Yet Strauss speaks strongly of the utter failure of religious influence to change him; and while admitting a real change, argues that it would have come on without the religion. In the letters immediately before his imprisonment, Schubart uniformly speaks of his wife with contempt, and almost derision,-far less affectionately than in previous days of the wildest dissipation. His conduct to her was the subject of his first deep remorse in prison; it totally changed with his deeper faith. Yet this is Strauss's treatment of it:

"In the full measure of her great worth he was now able to estimate his much-tried wife; and a fine spiritual bond united him with both his children, whose life-long enthusiastic attachment to their father, an attachment which was afterwards expressed by the son in his excellent book on Schubart's character,-again gave striking testimony what a good, love-giving and love-exciting father Schubart was. In the latter part of his imprisonment he had aptly said of himself, 'The devil can make no use of me, and God does not give up his hold on me.' This God, however, who held him, was not that seven-eyed Spirit of the Universe whom the beasts praise by the side of the crystal sea, as Schubart, in apocalyptic fashion, would call it up before his fancy; but it was in a quite simply human sense the God of the hearth and family. The blood that redeemed him from the pit of destruction was not the sacrificial blood of an imaginary God-man, but his own, which he found again in the excellent natures of his children, whose non-sensual and yet natural love ennobled his whole being. This ennobling effect of domestic life had, however, as we have seen, begun to operate in Ulm before his imprisonment; it would gradually have strengthened, and would scarcely have been disturbed more by the excesses which Schubart would certainly have committed, than it was disturbed by the violent revolution which his imprisonment caused in his inward nature and all his relations."

Thus Strauss simply refuses to admit that an access of religious life can have had any effect in producing a change, which, as a change, he cannot deny. In truth, nothing can be more mad than the belief that Germany will ever outlive her religious, unless she also outlive her moral, strength. It is the marked temperament of the people to learn duty through love, not to learn love through duty. Their real root of stedfastness is in the possibility of a hearty religious love. Schubart and Frischlin alike show a strange want of stedfastness of mind. Both bend before the first misery; both of them yield to the first push

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of real power. Schubart does not even resent injustice. He utterly forgets ten years of injustice as soon as it is past. This light and yet impulsive temperament may attain the selfmastery Strauss preaches, but it will be through love of a personal Righteousness. Make right into a mere idea-a philosophy-and you lose the only lever by which it can take homogeneous hold of a German mind. A German is not a Greek; and yet Dr. Strauss will talk as if he were. The idea of the following passage seems to us the most credulous of the dreams of incredulity:

"Man and poet were perfectly identical in Schubart; yet unfortunately both the man and the poet broke into two pieces. Spiritual' and 'secular' are the two divisions of his poems, but also of his essence and activity in life. Too weak to struggle with his sensual nature, the spiritual in him kept apart,-abode in the empty space of the unsubstantial ideal, and of unsupported enthusiasm,-sunned itself in the ether, while the animal in him rolled in the mud. The double tendency in the German literature of that time had the most destructive influence in exaggerating this double economy of his life. Klopstock and Wieland, with their schools, stood face to face in hostile array, like the Seraph and the Faun. But as a confutation in fact of this theoretic onesidedness, not only did Wieland pay respect in life to the morality which he satirised in fiction, but also on the side of Klopstock there was a reaction visible in many of the members of the poetic league, as also in Goethe's youth-the world of sense revolting against the stiff spiritualism of the day; and in the Sturm-undDrang school that solution of the problem was given which for a long time was in repute at the court of the Muses in Weimar, namely, to rob the sensual nature of its dangerous tendency by letting it have its swing undisturbed, in the meanwhile using it as a medium for introducing artistic materials into the mind. This had been Schubart's practice for some time before the proper Sturm-und-Drang period; a practice which we see carried out both before his imprisonment and after his liberation. On the Asperg, Christianity was tried on him as a cure; but, as we have seen, without permanent result. The schism between sense and spirit, the divergence of the two parts of the nature, it could not and cannot heal, because it does not touch its root. It might by rights exterminate Sense; but as it cannot do this, it shuts one eye, and secretly authorises it, so long as it only keeps within certain limits. But this is all; of due recognition of Sense, or any real modification of the idea of life to include it, there is no mention. The Christian is, at the best, an angel riding on a tamed animal-no homogeneous man. On that very account the danger always remains that the curbed animal will take occasion to emancipate itself, as we see was the case with Schubart on his liberation, and, indeed, immediately upon the lightening of his chains. Not to suppress, but, by culture, to humanise the natural groundwork of humanity, this the Greeks alone understood. It was in the reawaken

ing of their writings and their spirit that the idea of this true human existence first rose upon Christian nations. Nourished into greatness upon these writings, our own two great classical poets have represented, both in life and in poetry, and also in its two principal manifestations of a gradual growth and a hardly-won victory,-this penetration of nature by spirit-of the Sensuous by the Moral. In Goethe and Schiller, as poets and as men, that was accomplished which Schubart wanted, when, without even having discovered the way, he ended his fateful wanderings."

There is no more extraordinary statement than this, that Greece had solved the problem how to unite the spiritual and bodily life in one homogeneous harmony. The only truth in it is the mixture of beauty with which their material civilisation was penetrated. No Western nation ever infused less of spiritual and moral force into its outward life. Plato's dialogues are one continued wail that the physical life in Greece has enslaved the mind. And they describe a state of society which proves that this assertion was not the passionate delusion of an impatient moralist. The difficulty of attaining a homogeneous human life, of which Dr. Strauss speaks so much, is simply the difficulty of making the life of the body assist and strengthen that of the spirit, and the life of the spirit develop that of the body. Where is there this fusing power in the "service of the Idea," which, if it be any thing at all, would seem to be only abstract? It is admitted that a fusing power is needed; that, in fact, the mental and physical powers are divergent. Where, then, should this fusing power be, except in the worship of Another in whom there is no such conflictwhose life is the Life of the universe, and also the spirit of Righteousness and Love?

ART. IX. THE SLAVE EMPIRE OF THE WEST.

America Free, or America Slave: an Address on the State of the Country, delivered by John Jay, Esq., at Bedford, Westchester County, New York, October 8th, 1856.

A History of the Struggle for Slavery Extension or Restriction in the United States from the Declaration of Independence to the Present Day. By Horace Greeley. New York, 1856.

A History of the American Compromises. By Harriet Martineau. London: John Chapman, 1856.

American Slavery: a Reprint of an Article on "Uncle Tom's Cabin," of which a portion was inserted in the 206th Number of the Edinburgh Review, and of Mr. Sumner's Speech of the 19th and 20th May 1856. London: Longman and Co., 1856.

Kansas, the Seat of War in America. By Richard Bowlby. London: Effingham Wilson, 1856.

Dred: a Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. By Harriet Beecher Stowe. London: Sampson Low, Son, and Co., 1856.

IF to be moved by the same events and eager about the same issues be a natural evidence of sympathy and friendship, never was an instinctive congeniality more intensely marked than between England and America during the past autumn. The elections in the United States have been watched with an interest rarely felt in the domestic concerns of a distant country: and the steamer that brought Mr. Buchanan's numbers was held to be charged with a more momentous message than the telegraph which declared the vote for the "Elected of December." Nor had our own British affairs any thing to do with this excitement. It was a genuine self-identification with a struggle every-way great,-great in its principle, great in its scale, great in its consequences: and every thing was forgot except indignation at the lawless wrongs which preceded and embittered it, and admiration of the men by whom they had been worthily denounced. No doubt our English sympathies have been all on one side, and that the defeated one: but for no other reason than prevails with patriots of Massachusetts or New York; because resistance to the Southern policy appears essential to the true glory of the Republic and the best hopes of the world. If we are disappointed and disquieted at the issue of the contest, it is because we could desire better guarantees for the peace, the freedom, the permanently high example, of an empire nearest in kindred and youngest in promise.