had given the world assurance, full, and heaped, and running over, of what he meant, and of what was meant by him. While the premature departure of a Schiller, a Byron, or a Keats, gives us emotions similar to those wherewith we would behold the crescent moon, snatched away as by some 'insatiate archer,' up into the Infinite, ere it grew into its full glory-Wordsworth, like Scott, Goethe, and Southey, was permitted to fill his full and broad sphere.

What Wordsworth's mission was, may be, perhaps, understood through some previous remarks upon his great mistress-Nature, as a poetical personage.

There are three methods of contemplating nature. These are, the material, the shadowy, and the mediatorial. The materialist looks upon it as the great and only reality. It is a vast solid fact, for ever burning and rolling around, below and above him. The idealist, on the contrary, regards it as a shadow-a mode of mind-the infinite projection of his own thought. The man who stands between the two extremes, looks on nature as a great, but not ultimate or everlasting scheme of mediation, or compromise, between pure and absolute spirit and humanityadumbrating God to man, and bringing man near to God. To the materialist, there is an altar, star-lighted heaven-high, but no God. To the idealist, there is a God, but no altar. He who holds the theory of mediation, has the Great Spirit as his God, and the universe as the altar on which he presents the gift of his poetical (we do not speak at present so much of his theological) adoration.

It must be obvious, at once, which of those three views of nature is the most poetical. It is surely that which keeps the two principles of spirit and matter distinct and unconfoundedpreserves in their proper relations-the soul and the body of things-God within, and without the garment by which, in Goethe's grand thought, we see him by. While one party deify, and another destroy matter, the third impregnate, without identifying, it with the Divine presence.

The notions suggested by this view, which is that of scripture, are exceedingly comprehensive and magnificent. Nature becomes to the poet's eye' a great sheet let down from God out of heaven,' and in which there is no object 'common or unclean.' The purpose and the Being above cast such a grandeur over the pettiest or barest objects as did the fiery pillar upon the sand or the shrubs of the howling desert of its march. Everything becomes valuable when looked upon as a communication from God, imperfect only from the nature of the material used. What otherwise might have been concluded discords, now appear only stammerings or whisperings in the Divine voice; thorns and

analyzed. Kant distinguishes between anschauung, or the cognizance we take of phenomena, objectively, and empfindung, or our subjective sensation. To the former, he attributes extensive; to the latter, intensive magnitude. The tooth-ache, from a slight hint to the torture which it would be well if metaphysics or any other study could banish, is what he would call an intensive magnitude-but these sensations, however minute or however great, and all others of a like kind, do not, in themselves considered, involve space, though they involve time. We regret, too, that we cannot say that the doctrine of the categories, or that of analytical and synthetical judgments, as given in this work, is made intelligible to the student who, for the first time, looks into the Kantian philosophy, it may be with a deep and almost awful sense of mystery on his mind. It is of little use to give a mere dry table, or an abstract statement of a few lines, without any illustrations and explanations, even on these fundamental elements of the critical philosophywe may add, too, elements that are certainly among the most intelligible in the whole system; nor need the examples have taken up much room.

Our limits will not allow of our pursuing the author through the list of names which includes almost all that is really original in the metaphysical speculations of the Germans. These names are Kant, Jacobi, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Herbart. In a work of such extent, one volume might well have been devoted to the most original writers on German philosophy, which is so marvellous a phenomenon in the history of the human mind. All, however, that is devoted to the above celebrated names, does not amount, when summed up, to more than some seventy-five pages; of which about forty are distributed among the last five names, the rest being given to Kant. The consequence is, that the account of these writers, not excluding even Kant, will be found scanty, confused, and unsatisfactory to the student. This part of the work will not bear comparison with Morell's recent work on • Speculative Philosophy,' the German portion of which is done with considerable spirit and fidelity; though it also much suffers by the want of space; for it is almost hopeless to make German philosophy intelligible, so far as it can be intelligible to English thinkers, without entering into considerable detail and well-constructed illustrations.

We have not space for Mr. Blakey's criticism of Cousin's philosophical system; but we should not greatly differ from his estimate. It appears to us, in one word, to be an unsuccessful! attempt to combine into one system heterogeneous elementsthe ontological hypothesis of Hegel, with the cautious inductions and the psychological observations of the Reidean school. It

is no wonder that such an attempt should be repudiated as it has been by Germans; and that, on the other hand, it should be far enough from coalescing, naturally, with the spirit of the Scottish philosophy.

Cousin, however, will always be the historical head of the new Eclectic school. Never, perhaps, before, was a professor of philosophy so popular as Cousin was, at one time, in Paris. He rivalled, at least, the most popular of preachers, in the audiences he drew to hear him lecture on a theme proverbially dry and abstract; but which he adorned with the greatest felicity of language. Some two thousand students hung on his lips; and so intense was the curiosity, throughout France, to know what he said, that the political journals found it more profitable, for a season, to leave politics to swell and ferment, like the sea itself, without any attempt to control them; and rather to publish, at full length, the certainly very eloquent periods of the fortunate student, whom philosophy made a Peer of France; and who, for once, reversed the words of Petrarch:

'Povera e nuda vai filosofia;

Pochi compagni avrai per la tua via.'

No instance of such popular devotion to such a subject could have taken place, probably, in any country but France; nor even there, but under the peculiar moral and educational struggles which have characterised academical education in that country.. We quote for our readers a very short specimen of the kind of eloquence which brought together such large Parisian audiences. An improvement in the public taste would, at least, appear to have been effected since the Atheistic times of the great Revo lution; though the language has a Pantheistic sense, which, how-; ever, it is but fair to say, M. Cousin himself repudiates. But what would any English audience have thought of the following passage?

The God of consciousness is not an abstract being, a solitary king, reigning beyond the bounds of creation, upon a desert throne of eternal silence, and passing an absolute existence amidst surrounding nothingness. He is a God at once true and real, at once substance and cause; always substance and always! cause, and cause only as a substance; that is to say, being absolute cause, one and many, time and eternity, space and number, essence and life, individuality and totality; in fine, at once God, Nature, and Humanity. Indeed, if the Deity be not all, he is nothing; if he be absolutely indivisible in himself, he must be inaccessible, and consequently incomprehensible."

* Fragments, I. 76.

*

The work is dedicated, by permission, to Prince Albert. It appears to have cost the author little less than twenty years of intermitted labour; and is, with becoming modesty, sent forth to the public. It contains an immense mass of information; and there is nothing comparable to it, for extent, to be found in our literature. We cannot pronounce the work to be characterised by that high analytical power which marks many of our modern authors on psychology, both originally and as historians: witness Dr. Thomas Brown, and Cousin, for instance. Indeed, Mr. Blakey, unfortunately, as we think, for a metaphysician, appears repeatedly rather to depreciate the talent for acute analysis, than to cultivate it or to admire it. But, on the whole, the work is a valuable contribution to our literature; and perhaps it is more calculated to excite a taste for the subject among certain classes of readers, than one of profounder analysis and of a more rigidly scientific character. One strong recommendation of it we must not omit: it is evidently the work of one who is a cordial believer in Christianity, and who is always prominently on the side of piety, humanity, and the real advancement of mankind in every thing that is great and good.

ART. IV.-An Easter Offering. By Fredrika Bremer. Translated from the Swedish, by Mary Howitt. London: Colburn.

In this little volume Miss Bremer has combined one of her cheerful and humanizing stories, and a sketch of life in Denmark, where, shortly before her voyage to America, she made a considerable sojourn. It is principally for the sake of the latter article that we bring the volume under the notice of our readers. The story, which occupies only about one-third of the volume, is of the simplest kind. It is intended to show the effect of an isolated place of abode on the human mind; and this effect is tested by the insensible, but melancholy change which has stolen over an attached and virtuous couple whose lot has been cast in such a spot.

Axel Örn, a young man appointed to a government post on the wild western coast of Sweden, has brought his young bride thither. She is from the city-young, gay, accustomed to society; yet amiable, affectionate, and imaginative. She is at first delighted with her wild and picturesque home, and the

brilliant splendours of the lonely light-house on the cliffs near it, whence the story derives its name.

'It was among the cliffs beside the sea. It was on the western coast of Sweden, among the sea-rocks of Bohuslän. I do not say exactly where it stood, because that is unnecessary. But it was a long way from the home of Ellina's childhood, and very unlike its beautiful dales. There were orchards and nightingales; here, merely an archipelago of naked, grey cliffs, and around them that restless sea, that roaring Cattegat. Such, for the greater part, is the rocky shore of Bohuslän. Many people think scenery of this kind unpleasing, horrible, repulsive. I love it; and it is to me more attractive, more agreeable, than scenery of real softness and verdure-than that of a cultivated and fertile character, which may be found everywhere.'-P. 13.

And so it at first delighted the young bride; and truly the place had its wild charms :

The wild sea-rocks of Bohuslän have their mysteries. They resemble those human characters which are outwardly hard and rough, but within them lie hidden valleys, lovely and fruitful. Make a closer acquaintance with the granite islands, and thou wilt scarcely find one amongst them which does not possess its grassy spots-its beautiful, flowery fields. These grey cliffs draw in the beams of the sun, and long retain their warmth within their granite breasts. They communicate them to the earth which lies at their feet, and within their embrace, and the organic life blooms luxuriantly thereupon. In wild abundance springs up the honeysuckle from every cleft of the rocks, and flings, with the shoots of the blackberry, its delicate blossoming arms around the mossy blocks of stone, converting them into beautiful monuments on the graves of the Vikings. Beds of irises and wild roses bloom beautifully in the bosom of the granite rocks; and up aloft, on the cool height of the hills, where only the wild goat and the sea-bird set their feet, small white and yellow flowers nod in the wind, above the breakers of the Cattegat, which foam at their feet. Upon the smallest of these cliffs the sheep find wholesome herbage, and thrive upon it; and upon the largest, in the midst of the granite fastnesses, may be seen an Eden, planted with roses and lilies, where a son of Adam, with his Eve, live, separated from the world, silently and-happily. We will believe so. But things go on queerly in these quiet, secluded Edens. It did not go on very well in the oldest, that we know; and in those of later days, but very little better as far, at least, as the human beings are concerned. Generally speaking, life upon a solitary island is not very beneficial. The uniformity in the surrounding circumstances; the monotony of the days, in which ever recur the same impressions, the same occupations; the want of employment, of active thought, and of living diversions; cause the soul, as it were, to grow inward, and the feelings and the thoughts to collect themselves around certain circumscribed points, and to grow firmly to them. We see this in Iceland,