hearts; and yet through him the universal heart of Humanity throbs and dilates with a new life, and all men are greater than they were for his words. In vain do you search for his power in any arts of language, although he is master of them all; and words are never his fetters, but the wings on which he soars singing, filling heaven and earth with his songs, and fanning as he rises the hot brow and cooling the fevered heart of the world with the airs of Paradise. As little constrained by critical rules as any bird on the trees, he reveals those deep laws of thought and expression to which, by the instinct of his genius, he renders a free and filial obedience. He stands here in the ever-various and ever-moving world of Nature and of man in the dignity and wisdom of his manhood, and yet with the open heart of a little child; and that heart is a magic chamber from which everything that enters there returns with music and in beauty, to charm mankind and awaken into activity whatever is best and greatest in their nature. He is, in fine, an incarnation of the life and love of things. His is among the very highest offices in the great Commonwealth of Humanity. And he is all this chiefly because his eye is single and his whole being full of light. Thus Schiller has done a Poet's work in the world. Has done, do I say? His influence is active now. It is unceasing and immortal. He kindles noble sentiments in men, through sympathy with the same sentiments breathing through his words. We feel, we can not choose but feel, that what he says he says because he himself believes it and knows it. It is no hearsay, no matter of tradition or conformity, but the genuine emotion, the unborrowed convictions of his mind. So that all he writes becomes him as his own, And seems as perfect, proper and possest, As breath with life, or color with the blood. Such is the potent charm of all personal influence. In Literature it makes us sensible of a presence behind and above the printed page. It renders a word, spoken or written, as telling a stroke of character as a deed. It is this that has made the words of Luther to be called "half-battles," and Luther's Hymn the Marseillaise of the Reformation. It signifies and represents the man in the heroic action and attitude of his manhood. The poetry of the present day seems greatly devoid of this living personal power. It is fanciful, or it is metaphysical. It astonishes and delights with its surprises, or it overawes us with a sublime obscurity, or dazzles us with multiplicity of ornament and sparkling turns of thought and expression. It has little in common with the homely, rugged strength of Ancient Poetry of the old Greek tragedies, for instance, where one act of concentrated passion, in unadorned simplicity, blazes out from "the burning core" of human nature, a part and portion of the inmost life of all men; and therefore of universal and everlasting interest. Have we much poetry of this kind in modern times, always excepting some of the old English Ballads and Shakespere? But Shakespere (thanks to German genius for helping us to understand him! ) — Shakespere is an exception in all things, uniting as he does the insight of a god with a fancy of inexhaustible variety, and a boundless humor, and a perfect command of all the harmonies of expression. His mastery over whatever he touches is so complete that it is all mere play, the play of a child as genuine as it is joyous. But in sincerity, in earnestness of meaning, in truthfulness, Schiller is second to none. This gives him his power. Thus inspired, a true poet, once more I say it, he gives us, not merely fancies or melodies, but he imparts himself to us, transfusing his own convictions warm and glowing into the hearts of men, so that they throb and swell with a new life. Who now can compute the gift? Who can measure and repay the service, the generous service which a true poet, like Schiller, renders us! Honor, immortal honor to him! Be his memory glorious forever! Schiller thus adds another to the grand attestations that we have to the fact that the great men of our race are the next of kin to all The highest are blood-relatives of the lowest. We are ac men. customed to look upon great men, the men of rare and beneficent genius, as dwelling high up, apart from the common mass of mankind, as beings of different mould, cut off from all real sympathy with us; and accordingly little men who would be great, and who climb up upon some official pedestal to make themselves so, deem it a sign of greatness to despise their fellow-men, to look with contempt upon human nature. Whereas it is only ordinary men, men of feeble sympathies and faculties, who stand apart, aliens, strangers to one another, dumb, unable to communicate. And what with our mediocrity and the many things there are to separate man from man, we should be strangers to one another forever, were it not for the men of genius, the great and the strong, who have in them, not a different nature, but only more than common of the divine stuff which we are all made of. These it is - these great ones who come close to us, breaking through all artificial distinctions, because they have power to affect us. They are able to reach and stir into activity the dynamic forces, the primal instincts of our better nature. They awaken a new life in us. We are begotten by them into a loftier condition of existence. They are our spiritual fathers, and we are their children. As one touch of Nature, only one, makes the whole world kin, how close is the kindred when Genius touches us with its searching magnetism, and touches us in the marrow and the quick! Then the whole world become not merely kin- then the whole world becomes one. Men of Genius, then, are the vital elements, the creative forces of the world's power and growth. Thus Shakespere is the soul of English Literature, the animating principle of English Thought, and the life of the Saxon Race. And whatever civil changes England may suffer, England can never die, so long as the genius of Shakespere lives in the mind of the nation. Though it were conquered and overrun, it would conquer its conquerors, just as the genius of Grecian Eloquence and Philosophy triumphed over all-governing Rome, and crowned the ancient Queen of the world with a brighter glory than the blood-stained renown of her arms. Thus the power of Genius annihilates all national distinctions, and brings together the most remote in the brotherhood of universal Humanity. To this splendid triumph of Genius, this hour and this assembly bear most significant witness. Brothers and sisters, where are the distinctions that separate us from one another tonight? They all vanish in the presence of him whose genius we now celebrate. There are no Germans here now. There are no Americans, either native or naturalized. A true Poet, by the mere necessity of his great nature, has leveled all the partition walls of language, all the differences of race, and gathered us here now as born citizens of the boundless Fatherland of the Intellect, an Empire in comparison with which the conquests of Alexander, of Cæsar and of Napoleon, are but a small, out-lying, barbarian province, and where he who serves all most faithfully, and shall reign over all most gloriously, be he of what country he may, and where accordingly, in the same broad spirit in which we are now met, "a shining procession of kings" as they have been called, German kings, Lessing, and Wieland, and Herder, and Göthe, and Schiller, and Tieck, and Schlegel, "have one after another thrown their votes into the urn, and," forgetful of all national distinctions, and anticipating his own countrymen, "elected" the Englishman, "William Shakespere, Emperor of all Literature," Emperor for life and his lifetime is Eternity. It was no barren sceptre with which Shakespere was thus invested. Under his imperial reign, German Literature was rapidly advancing to a state of high culture for nearly half a century before the best minds in England surmised what a resplendent fabric of literary genius and art was rising on the German soil. But it was not Shakespere alone that was read in Germany. All the eminent classical names of English Literature soon became familiar as household words among the scholars and writers of Germany, and this when the German mind was looked upon in England as wild and barbaric, and translations of German books were deprecated as a new eruption of the Goths and Vandals. Through the darkness of English prejudice and ignorance the clear beams of Schiller's genius were among the first to penetrate. He is still among the first to inspire us with admiration and respect for the mind of his country, and he weaves the tie which binds us together to-night. To him, then, we render the homage of our veneration and grateful love. We recognize in him one of the chief dignitaries of the Imperial Realm, one between whom and Shakespere there stands no other of equal dramatic power one whose influence shall prove to be, in the words of our immortal Emperor himself, "A hoop of gold to bind us brothers in, That the united vessel of our blood Shall never leak, though it do work as strong We are here this evening celebrating the advent of a noble and munificent spirit into our world one hundred years ago, November the 10th, 1759,-November the 10th, memorable two hundred and seventy-six years before as the birthday of the great Head of the Protestant Reformation. The coïncidence of these birthdays is not without significance. Luther was not only the leader of the great religious movement of the 16th Century, he is accounted by German scholars in his translation of the Scriptures, as the creator of the modern German language; a language, the principle of the mere articulation of which-namely, that all possible justice must be done, in pronouncing it, to the sound of every letter — is in fine accord with the downright honesty of Luther, who created it, and of Schiller, who, through this noble instrument, has poured into our minds the beauty and the music of his genius. Thus, already under obligations to Germany for the great miracle of the Printing Press, we acknowledge on this birth-day of illustrious men the gift of the Protestant Reformation and the gift of the language of Schiller. The death of Schiller, which took place in his 46th year, is memorable as well as his birth. It well became him — the manner of his departure. When the inevitable hour came, he bade farewell to his family and friends, and when one asked him how he felt, his reply was: "Calmer and calmer." Once afterwards he exclaimed: "Many things are growing plain and clear to me." And then he fell asleep in the fulness of his fame. His death was felt throughout Germany and Europe, to be a great public loss. "According to his own directions," says a German authority, the bier was to be borne by private citizens; but several young artists and students took it from them. It was between midnight and one in the morning when they approached the churchyard. The overcast heaven threatened rain. But as the bier was set down by the grave, the clouds suddenly parted, and the moon, coming forth in peaceful clearness, threw her first rays on the coffin of the Departed. They lowered him into the grave; and the moon again retired behind her clouds. A fierce tempest of wind began to wail, as if it were reminding the bystanders of their great, irreparable loss." But though, in the words of the now venerable Uhland, -months and years have vanished duly, And round his grave the cypress grows, Yet as the Spring is yearly showing Back to the living hath he turned him, The age, that thought him dead and mourned him, |