child-like, artless, yet so guilty—she speaks from her failing heart such a voice of suppliant agony, that there should be a spirit found to give it an echo in reproaches—to aggravate her misery and drive her to despair, it is a thing too horrible for a poet even to imagine of the devil. We seem to feel her tears falling, to hear her sobs in the broken sentences, and to look round for her gentle form with words of comfort and reassurance rising to our lips—be of good cheer—thy sins are forgiven thee. Such feelings rise so irresistibly that one expects to find them every where, even in the child and father of perdition, and it is a disappointment and a new and deeper stain even on his character that he has them not.
The poem opens with an address of the author to the creatures of his fancy—the society of his declining age—the replacers of the companionships of his youth. It is very sweet and mournful and solemn, but seems to have no very direct bearing in any thing that follows. It has been done into English by Lord Levison Gower, and so done, that even to the mere English reader the vague melody of the original words conveys more of the spirit of the writer than all the sense of the translation. For the German is a language eminently poetical, of plastic ductility and infinitely rich, and admitting in a high degree of that suitableness of sound to sense, of which we talk so much and show so few examples. They who are ignorant and wish to be witty on this subject, may be witty if they can, or failing that, they may resort to the old story of the emperor who thought the German a fit language for his horse—fitter no doubt than for himself. But the initiated know, and the uninitiated may learn, if they will be reasonable, that no modern European language combines so many attractions as the German. Its facility for compound words—the versatility of its inversions—its faculty of appropriating entire foreign dialects to its own use, and working them in to its own texture—its energy, sweetness, and expression—these are the things to be weighed and estimated, and which the wise may be easily won to appreciate, in utter contempt of the small dust of the balance, of old saws about emperors and horses, and of studied bouquets of reiterated gutturals, and "acht hundert acht und achtzig achteckige hechs koepfe."
This poem is followed by a prelude in the theatre behind the curtain, where the stage manager appears between his clown and poet, as preparing for the first exhibition of the now
