"I was instructed by the best preceptors Hamburg could afford, always under my father's eye; and was at the same time initiated into the mysteries of commerce and the routine of the counting-house. I learned the latter mechanically, as the millhorse learns to pace unvarying round his track-the mind little engaged in the matter, never dreaming indeed that in these or any later days I should return to the labours of my early youth, and forsake the quiet but too mind-stirring paths of academic repose. Let me try and bring a, day's life of those far-off times before your mental vision. My studies were commenced early in the morning, under a tutor who instructed me in science and philosophy. With him I read Leibnitz and Bacon, Kant and Descartes, devouring what I read ; for he made it all interesting, and brought me as carefully along the undulating path as the mother would her toddling child upon a stony road. Before breakfast I sallied out with my father for a walk from the neighbourhood of the Hopfen Market, opposite St. Nicholas' Church, where we lived, making our way to the green fields, either through the MilTern Gate on the west, or the Deich on the east-or skirting, perhaps, in our varying rounds, some of those picturesque canals and sheets of water with which Hamburg and its neighbourhood abound, and which more than compensate for its crooked, timeworn streets and narrow lanes. The Inner Alster was a peculiar favourite of mine; its walks, and the lofty trees and the broad sheet of water, and the never-ending variety caused by the crowds of business and pleasureboats, all combined to lure me often to its sides; and, as we paced round it, I spoke to my father of my morning's reading, or puzzled him with curious questions, or listened to his accounts of commerce and of Germany-subjects on which he was eloquent-believing, as many do in these days, that there is no happiness or prosperity for the multitude in countries which neglect or discourage commerce; and, perhaps, there is some truth in the dogma, for. But no! My day's life I must proceed with, not fly off to commerce and political philosophy.

"Our morning meal ended, I had

an hour or two to myself-an hour or two often spent in making acquaintance with novelists and poets, but sometimes too in active physical exercise-riding along the banks of the Great Alster, or pulling a boat on its waters; for, although I had but few companions of my own age, and was for the most part an unloved boy, yet I enjoyed physical exercise and gloried in physical strength. There

are even men, I believe, who glory in that in which every horse, every bull, nay, every miserable donkey, excels them; so that you must not blame me, boy and boy-like as I was, if I plumed myself on my muscular arms, and proudly spoke of lifting puny weights above my head-of leaping over small pieces of wood raised a few feet from the ground, or making springs over insignificant ditches and streams, which might have been more easily passed by the ordinary roads or bridges. However ridicu lous to you or me glorying in such things may now-a-days seem, yet I distinctly remember such feelings; and in a boy, I have no doubt, they have their use-incitements to exercise which the body needs and must have or die.

"An hour or two so passed-whother in devouring the dreams of poets or of novelists, or in boating, riding, running, leaping or walking--brought me to my father's office, where I had regular work to do, which I knew it would offend my father if I neglected. I tried to do it well, and forthe most part succeeded, thereby obtaining information which qualified me for my present post. Three hours of such fabour brought us to our mid-day meal-dinners, not of the Calcutta order, where they become the labour of the day and the graves of unused hours, but simple dinners-such as German merchants, poor or rich, indulge in-all the more wholesome, too, depend upon it, for their simplicity.

"The interval between dinner and supper, which my father usually spent at the Exchange or about the city, was devoted to study. With a grim, moody-looking preceptor, who seemed to be out of sorts with the world, I ground through Latin and Greek verbs laboriously; sometimes quietly pushing on, sometimes grumbling and rebelling. Mathematics,

too, were studied in these honts-4a subject I heartily disliked. My fa ther had himself given my mind an opposite tendency, to the speculative and the abstract, and ought not, therefore, to have complained. But he desired it, and I set myself down to the study with grimmest determination, working outwardly with great vigor at rs and ys, square roots and powers, surds and equations-nay, I have some indistinct recollection of having invaded, for a time, the territory of the calculus, differential or integral; a faint, dim recollection, telling of how little I did at it. Outwardly, I say, I worked vigorously with these tools, putting them into new positions, shifting and replacing, squaring and square-rooting, like a thimble-rigger pursuing a miserable pea; inwardly bestowing maledictions without number on the entire study. To this day I cannot regard Newton in the light in which he ought to be regarded; his Principia being inextricably woven in my mind with those ridiculous xs and yswhich are the delight of the mathematical world-a reflection capable of much moralizing. But I forbear. 12.

"Studies ended, and the evening set in, I read to my father, or conversed with him and his friends. Early admitted to an equality, I felt little awkwardness, and obtruded my immature observations without a blush. They were kindly or smilingly received, and however absurd they might be proved to be, I was quite ready to launch forth similar remarks -equally unripe immediately after. I ran a fair risk of being spoiled, indeed utterly, irretrievably spoiled-by presumptuous confidence and boyish vanity; but Bonn saved me. I was sent to its University; my father's fostering hand withdrawn; and then I found what it was to stand upon my own merits merits no longer seen through the magnifying medium of a father's love, but by the clear light of barschen wit and through the unflattering glass of bersehen judgment.

66

Matriculation at a university is the great era in a young man's life, if he be not a native of the place. To me Bonn was a new world. I had reached it with high anticipationsanticipations not altogether fallacious in the end, but completely so in the

beginning. To my father, our separation was a sore-trial. I felt it also, but not so deeply. The young heart winds itself about the old as the misletoe about the oak. I had been his friend and companion for years, as well as his only son, and he loved me even beyond the love of a father. For me, however, the picture had its bright side, at which I loved to look. The long sighed-forburschenleben, (studeut-life), the Rhine scenery, and the students' boating-parties, the university routine with its strange mixture of grave and gay, its study and its boisterous enjoyment, were things I had dreamt of for years and loved to idealize. The reality was far different. I had not calculated on the rude repulse that would be sustained by my holiest feelings-on the ribaldry and profanity, the vulgarity and the obscenity, which the new student must hear and witness, and which shock and disgust him in his first jostlings with collegiate life. These are trials, however, which, at an earlier or later period, all must endure

not peculiar by any means to Germany, as I understand. Large companies of youths, some selfish, some generous; some coarse, some refined; some blustering, others timid; will always present lights and shadows in their moral aspect to the observer's eye bright lights, deep shadows. Well for the new comer if he mistake not the two, and fancy the shadows lights, as many do.

"In one respect our German colleges are very strikingly contrasted with yours in England. There is far less of the spirit of aristocratie coterie-ship in them. I judge, of course, by what I have heard of Oxford and Cambridge time-honored names, that through all future ages will suggest admiration and reverence to the cultivated hearer! Your different orders of students, your numerous colleges, some aristocratic, others more plebeian tend to this result. An unhappy one, in my mind. If distinetinctions of outward rank should anywhere be laid aside and forgotten, particularly by the young, it is in the house of learning and in the house of God. Not that there ought to be any difference between these two houses; the house of learning and the house of God are one in reality, but man, particularly in these latter days, tries

hard to separate them, and to produce a learning which is not god-like or godly. In Germany all are more on an equality; the highest and the lowest enter their alma mater as equally beloved by her. Practically, you will tell me, the same result follows in Oxford and Cambridge. Generally speaking, I think not, for the young man admitted as a Nobilis, a Filius Nobilis, or an Eques, knows full well that he is entitled to a degree per specialem gratiam, not like the Pensioners or Sizars, who must labor hard for it. I have myself heard a gentlebuan from Cambridge-a Professor' in one of the Hindu schools, here called colleges-remark of another man from the same seat of learning and in the same employment, "What can you expect from him? he comes from snobbish Sidney Sussex.' On enquiry I found that Sidney Sussex was the name of the college in Cambridge to which the young man accused of vulgarity had belonged; whilst a third party remarked of the first who had depreciated his coadjutor, He comes from Queen's, almost equally snobbish, if not quite.' Thus you see the aristocratic element pervades the institution, and is recognized by the students themselves as a ruling principle. To me this appears a thing to be deplored.

To return, however, to my life in Bonn. My fondness for athletic sports speedily made me rub off the stiffness and shyness contracted by my solitary life in Hamburg-a shyness that prevented my seeking the society of my compeers, although I was forward enough, as I have said, in the presence of men of more advanced years. The sociality which such sports encourage is, perhaps, their best aspect, although I soon found that the friends they gave me were of the shallowest, intellectually. Anxious to shine in oratorical displays, for which I was quite unsuited, I thrust myself forward into conversation and debating societies, where I soon found that I was out of place. Disgusted with the mental shallowness of my athletic friends, I deserted them; and before eighteen months of my university life had passed, was almost quite alone, sympathizing little with those who surrounded me, neglected by those who regarded themselves as the ornaments of the aca

demy, and despised by my former companions for my bookishness and the little devotion I then gave to their favourite exercises. I began to grow moody and reserved, gloomy and unhappy. My studies, previously regarded as a bore,became a consolation, and I flew from the contemplation of my own solitary misery, as I believed it to be, to the difficulties of metaphysical research or the obscurities of Greek classical literature. This was my reading-time. I read much and digested what I read, for our professors are more accessible than yours, and delight to solve the difficulties or doubts of enquiring students. My father heard better accounts of me, and was delighted. What I believed to be misery was happiness to him. But I was mistaken in regarding it as misery. Solitude in a crowd, if not too long continued or too profound, is a good thing to the observing mind. My studies enlightened me; the professors became, for the first time, my preceptors; my mind studied the characters of those around me, and during that year I advanced more rapidly in intellectual growth than I had during the previous one in physical.

sen.

"At the end of the year a new phase of my existence was induced by the arrival, at Bonn, of Professor RoHe had studied metaphysics at Konigsberg, under the great Immanuel' himself (as we delighted to style Kant), and in the maturity of advanced manhood he was invited to fill the chair of mental philosophy in our university. My father had made acquaintance with him during some of his numerous trips to Berlin, and Herr Rosen received me more as a friend than as a pupil. His advent turned my attention entirely to the criticism of pure reason, to a study of man's cognitive faculty, almost to the exclusion of other subjects. delighted in Professor Rosen's lectures; and still more in his conversation, replete as it was with anecdotes of his great master, and not his only, but the great master of metaphysical science--nay, I might also have said, of metaphysical philosophy. We have wandered together, having crossed the river, up the steep hills that look down upon the low ground on which Bonn is built, up to the castled cray of the Drackenfels itself, conversing

I

happily of speculations which tend to no evil and excite noangry passions→→ one of the few subjects on which men can agree to differ without impugning each other's motives and conduct.

"But it was in the bosom of Herr Professor Rosen's family that I found most happiness. You fancy in England that domestic life is little understood elsewhere. Believe me, you are quite mistaken. A German's home, a true German home-such as Richter loved to paint is the perfection of domestic bliss. It is true, we have not in Northern Germany the thousand little festivities and harmless superstitions which throw such a glow over the life of the South German; but,in their place, we have a reverence for, and a worship of, the domestic circle, unequalled, in so far as I have seen, elsewhere. In France a man's home is nothing to him; he lives in the cafés, on the boulevards, in the theatres, anywhere but at home. In England, a man's home is much to him; he prides himself on its quiet seclusion, but he forsakes it much for his club, if of the higher orders; for the public-house, if of the lower. But in Germany the home is all in all. The true German enjoys what he has without asking for what belongs to others, without grumbling at what he has not; he cares little for sets and parties, nor is he continually hankering after a social position higher than that in which he has been placed by the dispositions of nature. Hence it is that you see so much variety in German ladies; they do not try and assume the airs of others, or follow what they believe to be the leading of superior classes. Distinct in her individuality, each forms her own ideal of what woman ought to be from the resources of her own mind, --acted upon, of course, by the bias of early education--and then sets herself vigorously to realize that idea, not to ape the manners and habits of those above her. But a truce to reflection, or I shall weary out your patience. Let me proceed with my narrative.

"Miss Rosen, the Professor's daughter, was at this time fourteen years of age, four years younger than I was. She was one of those German ladies whom I have just lauded-German-like, with a distinct individuality; not the copy of anything

else on this earth, but the result of a pure nature acting naturally-expanding like a flower into the beautiful object it was intended to be. Her mother had been some time dead; and, with a younger sister to attend to and to train, she was alone. Her father she reverenced and revered as a pious daughter full of filial sentiment, induced by early teaching or otherwise, should. Her mother had, indeed, poured into her mind that combination of ideas-that vast and complicated system, half æsthetic and half imaginative, called religion; and the youthful soul had drunk it all in greedily wanting food, and finding this most suited to its taste and capacity. You call my ideas on this subject peculiar, I know, if not worse; well, let that pass.

"Miss Rosen was just expanding into womanhood-a lady according to our German ideas, but not so according to your English prejudices. She had a cultivated mind, refined taste, carefully trained æsthetic perceptions, and, of extraneous knowledge, a fair, if not a large, share. But her father was not rich, and so according to your English ideas she could not have been a lady. Nay, nay, sir, believe me I have founded my convictions on the surest basis, on extensive analytic observation, both in England and here. Miss Rosen had to attend much to the house-work; she often prepared our dinner when I dined with her father, for they had but one servant, an untrained girl. According to English ideas Miss Rosen could not have ben a lady-according to German ideas she was. Her appearance had in it most of the characteristics of the German race--light blue eyes, light flaxen hair, an oval face, well-formed and delicate, but not perfectly beantiful, and a light graceful form, These, with a well-developed mind carefully nurtured in the religious sentiment by her mother, and in the cognitive faculties by her father, formed a being whose love lit up the household as with sunshine, whose influence was felt as a calm and holy influence by all.

"I loved her; and now, after having spent with her more than twenty years of wedded life, I can look back to those first fresh feelings without astonishment; for I saw her early cellencies reflected but a fev

X

AMONGST the many old-world notions which this marvellous age of progress is knocking out of our heads, there is one which, to our thinking, has been remarkably ill-treated. We mean that most ancient and respectable element of existence, whereby we, and those who through all ages have gone before us, were accustomed to measure all things-TIME. Long ago, when we were little boys and girls, our notion of distant countries, such as America or Australia, was expressed by the length of time which was required to reach them. Six weeks measured the distance of the one, and six months that of the other. The Swiss peasant told you that a certain town, to which you were wearily tramping a-foot, or jogging in a char-a-banc, was SO many hours distant from the spot on which you interrogated him. We were in the habit of calling New York a modern city, because it was built within the last three centuries; and looked upon Toronto and Cincinnati and such like, as civic infants scarcely out of their long-clothes. Again, we thought such a building as our post-office in Sackville-street was constructed in a short time, because it was completed in little more than two years after its commencement.

But how thoroughly changed are all our ideas in relation to this old standard. We either discard it altogether as a measure, or use it in a fashion that is truly astonishing, Were we, for instance, to ask any of "the rising generation" of precocious children to indicate to us upon the

face of the globe two regions which were distant respectively from the City of Dublin, six weeks and six months of travel, we should be, to a moral certainty, dealt with by the catechumen somewhat after this fashion. He would first mutely contemplate us with a quiet stare of astonishment, shewing that he enter tained suspicions of our mental sanity, or that he imagined us guilty of the irreverence of putting a hoax on one who had the high honour of being born in the middle of the nineteenth century. Upon a repetition of our question he would, perhaps, so far indulge our unaccountable humour as to proceed to the celestial globe, and place his finger successively upon Pallas and Neptune. Should we ask the youngster, then, the time-distance of the coasts of America or Australia respectively, he would tell us, and tell us truly, that the former can be reached in six days, and the latter may, by the proposed route, vilt Diego Garcia, as lately stated in the Times, be brought within forty-four days of Dover. May we not, then, call the Antipodeans our neighbours? And, then, the poor Switzer ; who would now believe him when he tells the tourist upon the new line of Alpine railway that he has still seven hours of travelling to the next town? And as to towns-Heaven protect us! -they spring up almost like mushrooms in a night; you may see them growing, as the Indian juggler will exhibit a mangoe passing in five minutes through all the stages of growth from the seed to a shoot six