"A puff! and a flash of light! To the heart's red roots, And we know that the fight's begun." The next song, if it be not a desecration of the name of song so to call it, purports to be a description of a wreck, and of two persons left alone upon it. The concluding stanzas will suffice: "Oh, how the storm doth follow us! and hearken to the wind! From thee! from thee! Stay! stay! I hear a sound amid the washing of the tide, It glideth by our vessel, now, wherever we do glide; 'Tis the whale,-it is the shark! Ah, see! he turns upon his side! Let's flee! let's flee! Ha! the billows they are rising! we are lifted up on high; We are informed, in a parenthesis, that "the boat strikes;" with which striking conclusion we are left. If this be forcible writing, the less we have of it the better. The hero, it should be noted en passant, is so selfish a personage when it comes to the last, as merely to exclaim, "Have pity for I die!" forgetting entirely the companion, from whose side he was so fearful of being torn in a previous stanza by the wind, that "maniac, so cruel and so blind." One more specimen of another kind, and we have done. In a song, "To our Neighbour's Health," (page 29,) we are told, among other things, that the person whose health is to be toasted is not a soldier, and does not kill his kin, Pampering the luxurious grave that he is not a judge, "making hucksters' bargains plain;" nor an abbot, "champing the golden tithe;" but something "between a beggar and a king," who is so honest and true and independent, that "From morning until eve, And through autumn into spring, From which it follows, indubitably and mathematically, that if he only kept his honest course for the time specified, he may have been a very great scoundrel after all, seeing that he had the whole of every night for his rogueries, besides the summer of every year. It is useless, however, to pursue any further the subject of the vulgarity, the carelessness, the prosiness, and the forcible feebleness of our author, who has quite mistaken his vocation in fancying that he can write songs. He has, we must allow, written some beautitul lyrics,-amongst which we would particularly cite the exquisite pieces entitled "When Friends look dark and cold," (page 99); "Without and Within," (page 8); King Death," (page 77); "The Night is closing round, Mother," (page 103); "Hermione," (page 124), and five or six others; and this justice we are ready to render him. But it is not to be expected that he who does not understand what a song is, and who avowedly considers it a thing of small importance, could ever have attained any great skill in its composition. We are therefore, after a careful review of all that has been yet attempted in England in the way of song-writing, of the opinion with which we started, that the great song-writer of our nation has yet to be born. A glorious career will be his when he appears, a noble mission, which, if well and truly performed, will hand down his name to the latest posterity. If he have skill to discover the secret of the English heart of his day; if he can make this now barren rock yield the delicious spring; if he can sing for Englishmen as Beranger has done for the French, or as Robert Burns has done for the Scotch; and being a man of the people, yet far beyond the people,-of sympathies with them, but of a vision more extended, of common suffering with them, but with a prophetic hope which they know not now, but which they will understand if he teach it;-there is not a poet in the bright page of English literature whose glory will surpass his, unless it be Shakspeare's. In the mean time let us hope for his advent. ART. IV.-1. German Experiences: addressed to the English, both stayers at home and goers abroad. By William Howitt. London: Longman & Co. 1844. 2. A Rosary from the Rhine. 1844. Unpublished. 3. Der Main von seinem Ursprung bis zur Mündung. Menk Dittmarsch. 1844. Mainz, von Zabern. Von F. 4. Die Donau von die Einmündung des Ludwigskanals bis Wien, &c. Von Adalbert Müller. 1844. Regensburg. Manz. THE twelfth of August is hardly expected by weary members of parliament, vacant military men, briefless barristers, et id genus omne, with greater impatience than are the first days of Rhinesummer awaited by a multitude of persons who, in former years, stayed economically at home, or ventured their extravagance among the Lakes, or, at furthest, the Highlands. All England, old and young, Whig and Tory, now rushes up that great highway to the Continent with an inundating force, violent enough to startle our quiet ancestors in their graves. So that the association of English Tourists and German Rivers is not one of mere euphony. A principle, or, to adopt the jargon of the day, "a great fact" of our social life, is therein comprehended; one, too, bearing with no unimportant influence upon European civilization. And while-in place of "babbling of green fields" at Midsummer-time-our talk is of foreign streams and cities, we are not merely falling in with the fancy of the hour, but also availing ourselves of an opportunity to offer a few considerations and comparisons, too seldom, we fear, impartially stated. Though not aspiring to be numbered among the pedantic company who cannot "drink their tea without a stratagem," we are convinced that good service is done on every side, as often as an honest writer can "point the moral" of a pleasureespecially when that moral tends to brotherly love and peaceful citizenship of the world. We are the more urgently led to intersperse what would be a mere notice of Guide Books with graver matters of remark, from the fact that most recent continental tourists, especially those who have treated of Germany, seem to have fallen behind their time in liberality and catholicism of spirit. A few years ago matters were in the other extreme. Assuming that community of language gave identity of character to Prussian, Saxon, Bavarian and Austrian, (which wholesale assumption, as far as the general title of "German" goes, we shall retain for convenience sake,) it was a passion, especially among our enterprising VOL. VI.NO. I. H thinkers and linguists, to rhapsodize about the country as an El Dorado, peopled with angels, whose lightest talk was wisdom. Not stopping to inquire how far this outrageous admiration might or might not resemble Balaam's patronizing compliment to his quadruped in the old French Mystery, Mon âne parle, et même il parle bien,— we have seen such phenomena as clever and lucid writers eagerly adopting the peculiarities of a crotchetty style in their eagerness to do justice to a new literature. One has descanted on German simplicity; another performed the apotheosis of German drama; a third has bid us look at and be lessoned by modern German Art, as if we had not possessed in our own Hogarths, and Sir Joshuas and Gainsboroughs, fresher and more individual models. German cookery alone (and German beds) have escaped panegyric, and form the exception which proves the rule. Eager minds were thrown off the balance-steady heads turned-models set up little more rational than the dear China monsters of our great grandmothers-delicate differences of morals skimmed over-curiosities, not to say coarsenesses of life and manners, welcomed as the winning ways of a true people. The Old Man of the Brunnen, the authoress of "The Diary of an Ennuyée," and the writers of half-a-dozen rich and laboured articles in the leading Reviews, were all more or less accessory to the delusion, in honest enthusiasm of spirit. Families were tempted to emigrate by tales of impossible cheapness of living, and transcendental excellence of education. Free-hearted persons, wearied of "creeds outworn," and the social trammels of a high state of civilization, plunged into the society of continental cities in a condition essentially less prepared for the reality than that of a party of discoverers alighting on some island where a fish bone through the nose is the court suit of jewels for the aristocracy, and a wreath of macaw's feathers its warm winter-dress. Would-be cognoscenti, without power or knowledge to detect good from evil, strength from weakness, swallowed wholesale all they heard in the shape of music, all they saw in the form of pictures; led astray by the earnestness of the enactors of the same to mistake, as the superficial and insincere are ever apt to do, earnestness for achievement. For awhile we had comparisons drawn in a spirit of mournful pity" prepense" for poor Old England, the mothercountry. All that was new was found true; all that was unfinished voted genuine; all that was homely, on account of its very homeliness credited with honesty. The lengths of complaisance to which our travelled innocents of every class, sex and age went, would "fill a ream," as the song says. Some out of sheer insipidity, others from flagrant impudence, a third class, glad to get rid of principles which had been really only so many formalities, out-Heroded Herod in their extravagant eagerness to denationalize themselves. English women of rank, for instance, were delighted to dine in the eating-houses of Paris, as if there, and there only, the meal was procurable. Quiet citizens' wives, nay, and clergymen's too, were to be seen placidly overlooking the gambling tables of the German spas: who would shiver, sensitive souls, and cross themselves as undone in Mrs. Grundy's eyes for ever, if told they had sheltered from a shower on the steps of a street hell. Shrinking damsels, who would draw up in contamination at home, if a stranger Celadon ventured to approach them in a friend's house without formal introduction, might be heard frankly chattering to half-a-dozen at once of the whiskered miscellanies who swarm on every steam-boat, and at every table d'hôte-couriers, stage-supernumeraries, &c. &c. There was neither propriety, reason, nor keeping, in short, in this comical yet doleful saturnal-over which, to adapt one of Mr. Robins's flowery phrases, "Tact had ceased to preside." After the banquet comes the reckoning; and in the case of English appreciation of continental life the one has been no less exorbitant than the other. Between the Howitts, for instance, when writing "Which is the wiser?" and rapturously translating the trashy picture of boorish freaks and babyish eccentricity called "The Student Life of Germany," and when penning the bitter little book of "German Experiences" before us, there is all the difference between eager and credulous childhood, and maturity soured to cynicism by the disappointment of extravagant hopes. A somewhat vexatious residence at Heidelberg, marked by many disagreeable household adventures, and followed by a painful bereavement, seems to have changed the current of every thought and feeling. Writing too immediately under the spur of that taking-for-granted spirit which made an elder traveller assert that all the men of Alsace were landlords, and all the women red-haired, William Howitt's "German Experiences" consists of a warning against peculations, "up-stairs, down-stairs, and in my lady's chamber;" a caveat against all foreign establishments for private education, and a fearful picture of all the horrors of a system of state-teaching for the people! Most assuredly in the former essays by the Howitts on Germany there was nothing of this spirit. We who know them to be honourable, affectionate, poetical, and entitled to a poet's trust-which implies allowance for enthusiasm, prejudice, |