The simplicity of the first of these passages is simplicité; that of the second, simplesse.-Last Words on Translating Homer.

HYMNS, ENGLISH AND GERMAN.

OUR German kinsmen and we are the great people for hymns. The Germans are very proud of their hymns, and we are very proud of ours; but it is hard to say which of the two, the German hymn-book or ours, has least poetical worth in itself, or does least to prove genuine poetical power in the people producing it. I have not a word to say against Sir Roundell Palmer's choice and arrangement of materials for his 'Book of Praise ;' I am content to put them on a level (and that is giving them the highest possible rank) with Mr. Palgrave's choice and arrangement of materials for his 'Golden Treasury;' but yet no sound critic can doubt that, so far as poetry is concerned, while the 'Golden Treasury' is a monument of a nation's strength, the 'Book of Praise' is a monument of a nation's weakness. Only the German race, with its want of quick instinctive tact, of delicate, sure perception, could have invented the hymn as the Germans and we have it; and our nonGerman turn for style,-style, of which the very essence is a certain happy fineness and truth of poetical perception, could not but desert us when our German nature carried us into a kind of composition which can please

Hymns, English and German.

49

only when the perception is somewhat blunt. Scarcely any one of us ever judges our hymns fairly, because works of this kind have two sides, their side for religion. and their side for poetry. Everything which has helped a man in his religious life, everything which associates itself in his mind with the growth of that life, is beautiful and venerable to him ; in this way, productions of little or no poetical value, like the German hymns and ours, may come to be regarded as very precious. Their worth in this sense, as means by which we have been edified, I do not for a moment hold cheap; but there is an edification proper to all our stages of development, the highest as well as the lowest, and it is for man to press on towards the highest stages of his development, with the certainty that for those stages, too, means of edification will not be found wanting. Now certainly it is a higher state of development when our poetical perception is keen than when it is blunt.-Study of Celtic Literature.

HYMNS AGAIN.

HYMNS, such as we know them, are a sort of composition which I do not at all admire. I freely say so now, as I have often said it before. I regret their prevalence and popularity amongst us. Taking man in his totality and in the long run, bad music and bad poetry, to whatever good and useful purposes a man may often manage to turn them, are in themselves mischievous and deteriorating

E

to him. Somewhere and somehow, and at some time or other, he has to pay a penalty and to suffer a loss for taking delight in them. It is bad for people to hear such words and such a tune as the words or tune of, O happy place! when shall I be, my God, with thee, to see thy face? -worse for them to take pleasure in it. And the time will come, I hope, when we shall feel the unsatisfactoriness of our present hymns, and they will disappear from our religious services. But that time has not come yet, and will not be brought about soon or suddenly.-Last Essays.

LATIN HYMNS AND THE IMITATION.

It is worth noticing that in our Indo-European Christendom the best productions of the pure religious sentiment have been works like the 'Imitation,' the 'Dies Iræ,' the 'Stabat Mater,'-works clothing themselves in the MiddleAge Latin, the genuine native voice of none of us. The perfection of their kind, but that kind not perfectly legitimate, they take a language not perfectly legitimate ; as if to show, that when mankind's Semitic age is once passed, the age which produced the great incomparable monuments of the pure religious sentiment, the books of Job and Isaiah, the Psalms,-works truly to be called inspired, because the same divine power which worked in those who produced them works no longer,—as if to show us, that, after this primitive age, we Indo-Europeans

must feel these works without attempting to remake them; and that our poetry, if it tries to make itself simply the organ of the religious sentiment, leaves the true course, and must conceal this by not speaking a living language. The moment it speaks a living language, and still makes itself the organ of the religious sentiment only, as in the German and English hymns, it betrays weakness; the weakness of all false tendency.-Study of Celtic Literature.

GERMAN STYLE.

ENGLISHMEN and Frenchmen have alike the same instinctive sense rebelling against what is verbose, ponderous, roundabout, inane,-in one word, niais or silly, - in German literature.

This ground of sympathy between Englishmen and Frenchmen has not been enough remarked, but it is a very real one. They owe it to their having alike had a long-continued national life, a long-continued literary activity, such as no other modern nation has had. This course of practical experience does of itself beget a turn for directness and clearness of speech, a dislike for futility and fumbling, such as without it we shall rarely find general. Dr. Wiese, in his recent useful work on English schools, expresses surprise that the French language and literature should find more favour in Teutonic England than 'the German. But community of practice is more

*

telling than community of origin. While English and French are printed alike, and while an English and a French sentence each of them says what it has to say in the same direct fashion, a German newspaper is still printed in black letter, and a German sentence is framed in the style of this which we quote from Dr. Wiese himself: Die Engländer einer grossen, in allen Erdtheilen eine Achtung gebietende Stellung einnehmenden Nation angehören!' The Italians are a Latin race, with a clearcut language; but much of their modern prose has all the circuitousness and slowness of the German, and from the same cause the want of the pressure of a great national life, with its practical discipline, its ever-active traditions; its literature, for centuries past, powerful and incessant. England has these in common with France. -Mixed Essays.

BLENDING OF TEMPERAMENTS.

Just what constitutes special power and genius in a man seems often to be his blending, with the basis of his national temperament, some additional gift or grace not proper to that temperament. Shakspeare's greatness is thus in his blending an openness and flexibility of spirit, not English, with the English basis; Addison's, in his blending a moderation and delicacy, not English, with the English basis; Burke's, in his blending a largeness of view and richness of thought, not English, with the Eng