heaven; having lived on earth, and having known the heavenly King, thou wilt be a companion of God, and a fellow heir with Christ, not subject to lust, or passions, or sickness. For thou hast become God (yeyovas yàp eɛóc). For whatever hardships thou hadst to suffer when a man, He gave them to thee because thou wast a man; but that which is proper to God, God has declared that he will give thee when thou shalt be deified, being born again an immortal, having known God who has made thee. This is the meaning of Know thyself. For to know oneself befalls him who is called by him, in the very act of being known by him.

"Therefore, O men, persist not in your enmity; and doubt not that you will exist again. For Christ is he whom the God of all has ordered to wash away the sins of mankind, renewing the old man, having called him his image from the beginning typically, showing forth his love to thee. If thou art obedient to his solemn behests, and becomest a good follower of him who is good, thou wilt become like him, honored of him."

We take leave of M. Bunsen and his book with regret. It has been impossible more than to glance at a few salient points. We have said nothing about a large collection of beautiful and thoughtful Aphorisms; we have not thanked our author for his critical synopsis of the Apostolic constitutions and canons, or for his republication of old liturgies. We hope to meet him again, and shall always be glad to walk with him among the monuments of antiquity, feeling sure there is no inscription so timeeaten that he cannot restore it and expound its meaning. We are sure he would pardon us for sometimes failing to see all that he sees, and to see as he sees. He will pardon, if we sometimes think him rash in judgment, and too well content with the affirmations of his own intuition upon questions of criticism. We believe him to be honestly looking for the truth; and if the time ever arrive when Christians shall agree upon the great facts and leading doctrines and most essential rules of order designed for the Church in all ages, it will be when men of honest minds and of sufficient learning shall explore the Disbuted Regions.

ARTICLE III.-MISS BREMER'S NOVELS.

The President's Daughter. By FREDERICA BREMER. Translated by MARY HOWITT. Bohn's Library.

It may seem late to review Miss Bremer's works; but the imprimatur of the Editor of Bohn's Library, and their recent publication in that series of books, call our attention to them anew. The title above is that of the last of the only three of the fair author's works that we have read. Of the other two, we remember not the titles; but they may be identified, perhaps, by certain ear-marks. In one, a good and gentle wife gives her good and gentle husband the sobriquet of bear, and the hero is an odd compound of thief, adventurer, gambler, brute, and gentleman, who comes, nevertheless, to the prescriptive fortunes of that set type of heroes, who, after long and sore travel in the thorny paths of life, are at last rap into the elysium of love and marriage, riches and honors. Of the other, the principal interest consists in the success of a pattern plan of domestic education, applied to the training of a house full of daughters, under the immediate superintendence of virtuous and enlightened parents. The tutor employed to assist in the education of these young ladies even falls deeply in love with their paragon of a mother; who, after long observing the not-spoken yet not equivocal homage of his passion, with a tolerance not far removed from flirtation, at last dismisses him with a lecture full of dignity, softened with gentle and compassionate admonitions; all overheard, unknown to them, by her husband, who is more than ever delighted with his wife, and not at all displeased with her lover; so much the more pleased on the whole, as he was greatly relieved by what he had overheard from certain uneasy and irritated feelings, which turned out to have been incipient jealousy, unacknowledged to his own bosom. The tutor afterwards marries one of his fair pupils; while another of them waits till he is openly and solemnly betrothed to her own sister, before she takes it into her head to fall in

love with him; and then continues to nourish a secret passion for him after he has become her sister's husband, pastor of a church, and father of a flock of children, almost as numerous as his pastoral flock.

After these two, we confess we took up the "President's Daughter" with little or no expectation of pleasure or profit from its perusal, and we find it wearisome exceedingly, and, so far from any improvement on its two predecessors, more exceptionable for its positive, and less readable for its negative faults, than either; more especially than the first, oddly as its Bulwerian hero is compounded. Our only inducement to peruse it was our desire to have more ample materials for making up our final judgment of an author who gave promise of a prolific pen, and who had been ushered to the notice of the English and American public with very respectable recommendations of her writings, as being more especially designed to give a right direction to the culture of the female heart and understanding. But how apt are the critical judgments of the day to turn rather on relative than positive merits or defects, and on the adventitious circumstances of the author, rather than on the intrinsic quality of the book. When the novelty of a Swedish novel, understood to be an illustration of social manners, habits, and tastes in Sweden, written by a Swedish lady in her native tongue, scarce a recognized dialect of European literature-when such a work, in the most becoming dress that a popular translator could give it, first started to the view of foreign readers and critics, it was pretty sure to attract attention and curiosity, and perhaps more of praise or censure than it deserved. Readers and critics, in their surprise at such a work, from such a source, and abounding in rather bold flights from the common track, forgot how near the Swedish literati stand to the focus of influence exerted by the modern literature of Germany, and how likely that a Swedish novel would take after the German model, or at least be essentially Germanized in its taste and tone of sentiment. Nor was it sufficiently recollected how many causes concurred to diffuse among the upper classes in Sweden the influence not only of French literature, but of French modes and fashions of thinking and living. Notwithstanding these and other very proba

ble sources of an artificial and superinduced tone of sentiment in Miss B.'s writings, the public would at first hear nothing in her performances but the echo of "her native wood-notes wild."

As to the plan and execution of her present work, we find not a single passage which is at the same time innocent of grave offense, and above the ordinary level in any one merit of thought or style; whilst, on the other hand, throughout all its more ambitious and laborious strivings to rise above the ordinary level, and to be particularly fine in sentiment, original or striking in thought or expression, pathetic or sublime in passion or imagery, it abounds in gross and innumerable vices of style, sentiment, and taste, and still worse in violent sophistications of the essential principles of morality and right feeling. Laying aside all more particular criticism on either the literary faults of the author, or her less venial sins against sound morals, there is one thing quite remarkable, nay, wonderful, considering the excellence of her private character, with her talents and accomplishments: seldom has woman been portrayed by woman in colors more degrading to the sex in general. Witness the new edition of Don Juan, which she gives us, by way of episode, in this work, and in particular his interviews with those paragons of virtue, delicacy, and refinement, Nina and Clara, who both in the same hour barely escaped from the onset of his seductive arts; the one, as by a sort of miracle; the other, by summoning up a desperate resolution to fly his too dangerous presence; after both, more especially the divine Nina, had been far too near falling by soft persuasion, skilfully adapted to the "mollia tempora fandi." The actual enticements, by the by, which had so nearly succeeded with these two damsels, do not seem, so far as the author gives us any distinct notion of their force, to have been such as any woman, whose virtue had been strong enough fortified to stand an ordinary siege or escalade, might not easily have withstood. The attacks on the virtue of these damsels, in such quick succession, seem rather sudden and blunt, with too little of the preparatory mining through the better affections of the heart. Be all this said, however, with due deference to the fair author herself, who may, without undue presumption, claim to be more deeply instructed in the moral and physical constitution VOL. III.-20

of her sex, and therefore better qualified to judge of the solidity of the foundations on which its virtue rests. Another paragon of virtue might also be called to witness-the aforesaid young lady, who fell in love with her sister's husband, without solicitation or provocation of any sort, driven on perhaps by that mysterious power of "inevitable fate," which the author is fond of calling in to cut all the harder knots of human motives and actions. Though this young lady was fresh from the chaste discipline of the author's pattern school, and deeply imbued with its purest principles, yet, in all the qualifications for a true heroine, she fell so far short of Nina and Clara, that her backsliding falls into comparative insignificance-backsliding, indeed, according to some prosaic and home-bred notions, but according to all German and Germanized philosophy and taste, the exquisite sensibility of a rapt soul that burns, but adores not, and scorns the coarse bonds by which vulgar souls submit to be bound to some positive duties, and to some fixed rules of virtue.

No stronger illustration, however, of the very disparaging estimation of the sex that results from the author's highest standards of its excellence, need be looked for than is to be found in the miserable catastrophe of this poor creature, Nina. The two sisters, by whose concurrent action this catastrophe is brought about, are of very different casts of character; still each, in her kind, is supposed to represent our author's most favorable conception of female excellence in all the best and brightest qualities that enter into its composition. Now, passing over all their other claims to this distinction, factitious and spurious as for the most part they are, let us come at once to the death-bed of the elder sister, whose stronger mind and dominating self-will had subjugated the mind and will of the younger: a death-bed, moreover, made disgusting by the levity of jesting speculations on "the state after death," ridiculous by the solemn absurdity of vain and unintelligible discussions with an academical pedant on the mysteries of the spiritual world-a truly Christian death-bed, as the author deems ityet a death-bed desecrated by dying injunctions revolting to all religion and morality: one sister, the tyrannous dictator; the other, the unreasoning and unprincipled slave of those in