The Stackpole House, as we have said, is no more; but the old parsonage-house in Eastern Connecticut, where he whose singular fortunes we have traced was born, is still standing in the same rustic quiet as of old. The birds of the air still sing about it, and build their nests in the trees. The cattle and sheep graze peacefully upon the neighboring hill-sides, as though this world had no trouble and sorrow. The meeting-house still stands upon the top of the rocky hill-not the same, but on the same spot-and the people from the scattered farmhouses still gather there Sabbath by Sabbath, to worship the God of their fathers. Life follows death, and death follows life in endless succession.

A few years ago, from an old barrel of sermons then standing in the attic of that house, which had been many times picked over by children, and grandchildren, the writer of this obtained the manuscript which has been described in these pages. It was not comely enough to attract the attention of those who had gone before, and unless the inner contents of it had been discovered, it would doubtless still have been passed by and left behind. But those interior treasures gave it a value, which no other sermon in the pile was likely to have.

ARTICLE IX.-THE FRIENDSHIP OF GOETHE AND

SCHILLER.

IT is often said of Goethe that he was over-conscious in the matter of his superiority in the world of letters, and that as a consequence he was inclined to attach extravagant meanings to the extraordinary things he said and did. It may not be amiss to look at that portion of his literary career in which his rare powers culminated, with reference to his own estimate of his ability in directing those powers, and for the purpose of judging whether indeed egoism had any inordinate sway in their exercise.

The tender relation he established between himself and Schiller, when the growth of both minds had passed the period of their literary adolescence, will furnish a field most inviting for such inquiry. The account he gives of it, as an alliance avowedly contracted in the interest of the highest of all art, and under the influence of discoveries which now we see to have been far in advance of his time, instead of suggesting vanity, will, I think, on impartial examination, add a tender lustre to the great glare of his fame, and afford a better clew to the subtlety of his genius than all the other events of his life put together.

First, we should say that the friendship of these two great men, like that we so often note between the antipodal figures of a marked epoch, is interesting as illustrating not the caprices of genius, but some of the profounder processes by which its triumphs are achieved. Genius is not a lawless force in the world of mind. The sentiment now pretty generally prevails that the times of its coming, and the work it will do, are in some sense the predestined data of the era it will represent. The scientific intellect of our age refuses to be baffled by the Byronic frenzy or the madness of Heine, and so takes hold vigorously of the challenging riddle of the Sphinx. All things must be inductively considered; genius shall be no exception; we have the thread to that labyrinth, and will penetrate its pro

foundest secrets, and bring its most concealed treasures to the light of day.

There may be some presumption in this, but the boldness. and energy with which the physicists take hold of the confounding problems of human nature cannot be without promise of good results. The method, it is true, is too rigidly circumscribed. If scientific enquiry must be limited to investigations wholly physical, then the inference is forced, that this high power we call genius is subject to no freer law than that which shapes the crystal and drives the planet in its changeless round. We cannot help revolting from this. And then it is difficult to believe, with Mr. Maudsley, that consciousness should not be the chief witness in such matters. For, supposing the new philosophers to have succeeded to their heart's content, in the application of their grand doctrine of the persistence of force, in proving that mind is but a differentiated form of matter, still it is inevitable that thought must report itself to us in consciousness, and facts of this kind cannot well dispense with a philosophy of their own. Nevertheless, it has been the good fortune of the older metaphysics that they have been jostled from their scholastic ruts by the indiscriminate rush and panic created by the grosser methods of these days. The good effects are already quite manifest. The human intellect and allied problems are taken up with an awakened interest; and then it is easy to see that the narrowness and imperiousness of our scientific era will give way to an ampler and more liberal spirit, in proportion as the themes which by their subtlety and vastness were the despair of philosophy, become equally the despair of science also. Both schools, wrestling with the same problems, in a region where the most assured results are still but proximate in their character, will be in a better frame for mutual helpfulness and concession, and the great work will be pushed on by what each will bring to the other's aid.

And yet it is true that the older systems erred in making their appeal too exclusively to consciousness. They overlooked the rich mines of discovery which the outward products of mind embody, and thus lacking that strong objective ballast which linguistic science and letters so abundantly yield, they wandered off into transcendentalism and mist. Here is evi

dently a field in which the mind may be inductively studied. The languages of men, the arts of expression they have perfected, the literatures they have created, the experiences they have recorded, biography, history, drama, song, the whole world of letters, and even the dryer detail of philological inquiry, whereby but recently language has taken the rank of a science;-all articulated sounds and symbols in which the evanishing mental power is wont to embody itself, are now felt to be a wide and comparatively unexplored territory, into which the scientist is invited to enter with promise of the grandest results. It has been noticed with what avidity the leading nations of the earth have taken up afresh their respective literatures, with the view of making their classics, and indeed all the accessible documents of their language, the material for profounder and more philosophical research;—to this end eminent men, not a few, going into voluntary exile, and through years of toil with foreign tongues and obscure dialects, noting the psychological traits and aspects of human nature which the strange clime and alien speech develop.

Now, in keeping with this frame of inquiry, we shall find genius everywhere exciting a novel interest; its experiences; its confessions; its works; its idiosyncrasies even, becoming as never before, the prominent and comprehensive facts for such broad and liberal generalizations in philosophy, as were not possible under the à priori and subjective methods.

This much it seemed necessary to say, that this effort of ours to interpret the friendship of two celebrated German poets may not be held as wholly gratuitous, but as a contribution, however small, to a current of learned inquiry setting in this way.

To begin then, it is a fact worthy of note that the date of this friendship constitutes an epoch in the literary labors of both these men. Goethe's prodigious powers did not fully flower out until after 1794, when he flung himself, so to speak, into the quickening embrace of Schiller's genius. Confessedly there appeared a new element in his Hermann and Dorothea, an air of spring-tide, a tone of purity, simplicity, vigor, youth, which he could have caught only in his association with the artless professor at Jena. On the other hand, Schiller may be said to have almost begun his career as a poet under the personal direction and friendly stimulus of Goethe. His youthful

performances were indeed of extraordinary promise: The Robbers; Fiesco; Cabale und Liebe; and his maturer tragedy of Don Carlos had thrown the German people into a ferment of excitement. Yet it is altogether likely that this last would have closed his career as a poet but for his timely acquaintance with Goethe, and the palingenesis he thereby experienced. The Kantian metaphysics had well nigh clipped his wings. He was tired of fiction. The wide-spread struggle for liberty among the nations, and the appalling excesses of the French Revolutionists, had made the poet's heart more sensitive to the stern realities of history, than to the magical creations of his own ideal world. His History of the Revolt of the Netherlands, which won for him the position at Jena, clearly marked him out as an aspirant in this line of literary effort worthy to be ranked with the foremost; and what could he do more now, than apply himself assiduously to the duties of his department in a great university.

There was, however, in reserve for this man a destiny incomparably greater than that of a drudging professor, albeit the wealth of the unexplored mine of philosophical history was inviting him to an easy conquest. The poet's high calling was his. He had deliberately relinquished it, it is true; but just then Goethe met him with the high theme of Meister on his tongue: "The poet is a teacher, a prophet, a friend of gods and of men. How! Wouldst thou have him descend from his height to some paltry occupation? He who is fashioned like a bird, to hover round the world, to nestle on the lofty summits, to feed on flowers and fruits, exchanging gaily one bough for another, ought he to work at the plough like an ox, like a dog train himself to the harness and the draught, or, perhaps, tied to a chain, guard a farm-yard with his barking?" The timely interposition saved the poet. But what we have particularly to note is, that the charm of this friendship lies not in mutual concessions, and a gradual harmony of feeling springing up thus between two eminent men thrown much into each other's society, but in a deep personal attachment, rationally devised by Goethe, and determining in its main features the literary destiny of both. It exemplifies how cultured minds feed upon one another, and the kind of nourishment with which in extraor