The million-handed painter pours And the tints of heaven reply. Yet the effect on the whole is not pleasing. Bewildered with a multitude of beautiful objects, we ask for the genius which can reduce them to order, and give them significancy. Sevensyllable lines, moreover, are too jingling to satisfy the ear except in brief lyrics. No amount of exquisite fragments will produce a whole without an adequate design. All Emerson's poems are fragments, and these again are fragmentary. His disjecta membra want a uniting idea. What are oases of surpassing beauty, if severed from each other by sands, and brushwood, and swamp? Of all he has written in verse the "Poet" and the "Humble Bee" are the least open to this censure. There we find a store of poetic ideality, the finest perception, and a way of expressing things truly original. If he only had a true system in his head, he would be a glorious poet in spite of artistic defects. But he has none. He has all his life been striving to elaborate one, and he has not succeeded. An oppressive vagueness and insufficiency pervades his verse, because he is ever teaching what he has not learned. He would be an apostle of truth, and he knows not what truth is. Beauty, that is created beauty, he knows and loves. He has been from his youth A forest seer Minstrel of the natural year, Wise harbinger of spheres and tides; A lover true, who knew by heart It seemed that Nature could not raise It seemed as if the breezes brought him, As if by secret sight he knew Many events are in the field Which are not shown to common eyes, To please and win this pilgrim wise. And the shy hawk did wait for him. And guessed within the thicket's gloom, And at his bidding seemed to come. Almost all the requirements of poetry are fulfilled in these suggestive lines; but it is not often that we find in his verse a long passage so well sustained, so delicate and perspicuous. Thirty-five years have passed since public attention was called to the strangely perplexed system of thought which he had to propound. It was on a Sunday evening in July, 1838, that he delivered an address to a senior class in Divinity College, Cambridge, and discussed from the most transcendental point of view the questions of man in his relations to the universe; of Christ and Christianity; the actual state of religion, and similar lofty themes. He developed in his lecture what some termed a "Sublime Creed," and others described as an "Idealistic Pantheism." It was, in fact, like many of his subsequent works, a rifacimento of the speculations of Carlyle and Coleridge, hard to be understood, and strongly spiced with the transcendentalism of Germany. A definite creed only can support a solid superstructure of verse. The mythology of ancient Greece and Rome had a certain grandeur, artistically considered, because it was at least definite, and the same may be said of Protestant poetry, so far as it retains the fundamental doctrines of the Faith; but when a poet's brains are addled by the pantheistic doctrines of Hegel, Schelling, Fichte, and Jean Paul, his verses are inevitably marked by feebleness and obscurity. This it is which mars the music of many a mighty master of German song, and often makes their hymns and aspirations like sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. And this leads us to observe another fatal blemish which Emerson has in common with many writers of the Victor Hugo stamp. He insults the majesty of the Son of God by extolling Him as a man, by placing Him in the list of heroes and sages, side by side with reformers and legislators, "kings and saviours" of high repute. Thus in his "Song of Nature" he speaks of One in a Judæan manger, [Christ] And one by Avon stream, [Shakspeare] One over against the mouths of Nile, [Saul of Tarsus] And one in the Academe. [Plato] And so again in one of those quatrains in which he was fond of completing a thought, in imitation of Goethe and Schiller : I see all human wits Are measured but a few, Unmeasured still my Shakspeare sits, "Hans Breitmann's Ballads," by Charles G. Leland, are one of the many offshoots of Lowell's "Biglow Papers." They have imported, however, a new element into the composition of American humorous poetry. The hero, Hans Breitmann, is a native of Germany, and has not been long in the United States. His language, therefore, is a ludicrous mixture of two others, easily amalgamated, because of kindred origin. De Quincey informs us that "the absurdissimo proposalio" of making English more musical by introducing Italian forms and terminations, "met with no encouraggiamento whaterino;" but he would not have said as much of an alliance between English and German, if he could have read Hans Breitmann. There is a coarseness in these poems which will often be offensive to a refined English taste; but in sly satire and broad fun it would be difficult to find anything to surpass them. The bad spelling, the German pronunciation of English, and the admixture of German words, are not mere tricks ; there is, besides all this, a substratum throughout of genuine humour. The author's keen sense of the ludicrous is contagious, and he who does not laugh over Hans Breitmann's abandon has no laughter in him. He would be proof against Molière, and Liston could not have disturbed his gravity. The dash of sentiment-and German sentiment too, vague as a mist smitten with a sunbeam-that Hans often throws into his merriest strain is as perfectly amusing as the most patent jokes : Hans Breitmann gife a barty Vhere ish dat barty now? Vhere ish de lofely golden cloud Dat float on de moundain's prow ? Vhere ish de himmelstrahlende stern De shtar of de shpirit's light? Can anything represent more exactly the way in which Germans too often make sentiment take the place of virtue, and principle, in their words and writings, flies off in moonlit effervescence? In the "Philosopede," again, we have a most facetious skit on the nineteenth-century-men, each of whom strides his bicycle and outruns everybody if he can. Herr Shnitzerl make a philosopede, Von of de puttyest kind, It vent mitout a vheel in front, And hadn't none pehind. Von vheel vas in de mittel, dough, And it vent as sure as ecks, For he shtraddled on the axel dree, Of course Shnitzerl and his philosopede came to grief-a circumstance deplored with much pathos : Oh, vot ish all dis eart'ly pliss! Ve find a pank-node in de shtreedt, So vos it mit der Schnitzerlein His feet both shlipped outside-vard, shoost He felled oopon der vheel, of coorse; De vheel like blitzen flew ! And Schnitzerl he vos schnitz in vact, For it shlished him grod in two. Und as for his philosopede Id cot so shkared, men say, It pounded onward till it vent Ganz tyfelwards afay. Boot vhere ish now der Schnitzerl's soul? Vhere dos his shbirit pide? In Himmel droo de endless plue It takes a medeor ride. One of the editors of the Breitmann Ballads, in speaking of them has said, "There are abysses under abysses of cryptic and concealed fun"; and it would be difficult to invent a higher commendation. The grotesque language in which they are clothed is not unreal. It is the droll broken English (quite distinct from the Pennsylvanian German) spoken by millions of uneducated or half-educated Germans in America, immigrants chiefly from Southern Germany. They roll on a variety of subjects, social and political, and lay bare many of the rascalities of United States politicians no less than many of the absurdities of German philosophers. Thus in a poem in which the superiority of Germans to all the rest of mankind is maintained, and in which we are told Dat der Deutscher hafe efen more intellects dan he himself soopose, the speaker frankly avows his inability to understand himself, and adds: Ash der Hegel say of his system-dat only von mans knew Richter, too, Who saidt: "Gott knows I meant somedings vhen foorst dis Boot Gott only wise vot das buch means now-for I hafe forgotten it!" The same Some slight knowledge of German is necessary in order to take in the wit of these Ballads and even their sense, but the editions published by Trübner & Co. are amply provided with glossaries. Mr. Charles G. Leland has just published "Gaudeamus; Humorous Poems-translated from the German of Joseph Victor Scheffel and others." The translations are cleverly executed, but translated wit is always cumbrous. Even the "Jobsiad" of Kortüm is heavy in Mr. Brook's English. The best of the pieces in "Gaudeamus" are travesties of science, and some of them are occasionally rather coarse. may be said of the poems of Bret Harte, which have acquired a popularity in America and in this country far beyond what their merits justify. They are often not only vulgar but profane, and the only excuse for him is, that, having chosen to mould his characters out of clay of the commonest and coarsest kind, he puts such language into their lips as becomes their origin. Sometimes he glazes the clay; paints tender pictures on it; adorns it with little gems of virtue or feeling, all the more resplendent because set in a sordid frame. He finds, in short, noble qualities in the lowest and roughest of the human race. He has the dry, quaint humour of Artemus Ward and Mark Twain, plus a Bret-Hartean pathos. "That Heathen Chinee," the famous cheater at Euchre, or the American écarté, was Bret Harte's first and great success. There is, no doubt, a depth of humour in it which is very ingenious, but the wit of Jim and Dow's Flat has too much dross mixed with it to be recommended or approved. Reading poetry used to be regarded as a recreation; it is now made a |