a price which has introduced it to four thousand libraries, we must regard the publishers as benefactors to modern theology. The editor has consecrated all his learning and all his industry to his labor of love; and, by all accounts, the previous copies needed a reviser as careful and as competent as Mr. Goold. Dr. Thomson's memoir of the author we have read with singular pleasure. It exhibits much research, and a fine appreciation of Dr. Owen's characteristic excellences, and its tone is kind and catholic. Such reprints, rightly used, will be a new era in our Christian literature. They can scarcely fail to intensify the devotion and invigorate the faculties of such as read them. And if these

readers be chiefly professed divines, the people will in the long-run reap the benefit. Let taste and scholarship and eloquence by all means do their utmost; but it is little which these can do without materials. The works of Owen are an exhaustless magazine; and, without forgetting the source whence they were themselves supplied, there is many an empty mill which their garner could put into productive motion. Like the gardens of Malta, many a region, now bald and barren, might be rendered fair and profitable with loam imported from their Holy Land; and many is the fair structure which might be reared from a single block of their cyclopean masonry.

SOME fifty-five years ago, a young woman of prepossessing appearance was seated in a small back-room of a house in Copenhagen, weeping bitterly. In her lap lay a few trinkets and other small articles, evidently keepsakes which she had received from time to time. She took up one after the other, and turned them over and over; but she could scarcely distinguish them through her blinding tears. Then she buried her face in her hands, and rocked to and fro in agony.

"Oh!" moaned she, "and is it come to

All my dreams of happiness are vanished-all my hopes are dead! He will even go without bidding me farewell. Ah, Himlen! that I have lived to see this bitter day! Lovet være Gud!"

At this moment a hasty tap at the door was followed by the entrance of the object of her grief. He was a young man about twenty-five years of age, his person middlesized and strongly-built, his features massive, regular, and attractive-his long hair flaxen, his eyes blue. This was Bertel Thorvaldsen -a name which has since then sounded throughout the world as that of the most illustrious sculptor of modern times. His step was firm and quick, his eyes bright, and his features glowing as he entered the room; but

when he beheld the attitude of the weeping female a shade passed over his countenance as he gently walked up to her, and laying his hand on her shoulder, murmured, "Amalie!"

66

Bertel!" answered a smothered voice. The young Dane drew a chair to her side, and silently took her tear-bedewed hands. Amalie," said he, after a pause broken only by her quivering sobs, "I am come to bid thee farewell. I go in the morning."

She ceased weeping, raised her face, and releasing her hands, pushed back her dishevelled hair. Then she wiped her eyes, and gazed on him in a way that made his own droop. "Bertel," said she in a solemn tone, but void of all reproach-" Bertel, why did you win my young heart?—why did you lead me to hope that I should become the wife of your bosom ?"

"I-I always meant it; I mean it now."

She shook her head mournfully, and taking up the trinkets, continued: "Do you remember what you said when you gave me this— and this-and this?"

"What would you have, Amalie? I said I loved you: I love you still-but-—"

"But you love ambition, fame, the praise of men far better!" added she bitterly.

"Min Pige! you are cruel and unjust. I shall come back to my old father and mother -come back to thee, and we shall all be happy again."

"Never, Bertel!-never! When once you have gone there is no more happiness for us. In heaven we may all meet again; on earth, never! O no, never more will you see in this life either your parents or your poor broken-hearted Amalie!"—and again her sobs burst forth.

Thorvaldsen abruptly rose from his chair, and paced the room in agitation. He was much distressed, and once or twice he glanced at Amalie with evident hesitation. His past life, the pleasures of his youth, the endeared scenes and friends of his childhood, the affection of Amalie, the anguish of his parents at the approaching separation, all vividly passed in review, and whispered him to stay and be happy in the city of his birth. But a vision of Rome rose also, and beckoned him thither to earn renown, wealth, and earthly immortality. The pride of conscious genius swelled his soul, and he felt that the die was cast for ever.

He reseated himself by the side of Amalie, and once more took her hand. She looked up, and in one glance read his inmost thoughts. "Go," said she, "go and fulfil your destiny. God's will be done! You will become a great man-you will be the companion of princes and of kings, and your name will extend the fame of your country to the uttermost parts of the earth. I see it all; and let my selfish love perish! Only promise this: when you are hereafter in the full blaze of your triumph, sometimes turn aside from the highborn, lovely dames who are thronging around, and drop one tear to the memory of the lowly Danish girl who loved you better than herself. Bertel, farvel!"

The next day Thorvaldsen quitted Copenhagen for Rome, where he resided nearly the whole remainder of his long life, and more than realized his own wildest aspirations of fame. But the prophecy of poor Amalie was literally fulfilled-he never more beheld his parents, nor her, his first true love!

Nearly half a century had elapsed, and again the scene was Copenhagen. The streets were densely crowded with eager, sorrowing

A withered old woman was seated at the upper window of a house, and when the cry was taken up, she raised her wrinkled countenance, and passed her hands over her eyes, as though to clear away the mist of more than seventy winters. An immense procession drew nigh. Appropriate military music preceded a corpse being conveyed to its last earthly abiding-place. The king of the land, the royal family, the nobility, the clergy, the learned, the brave, the gifted, the renowned, walked after it. The banners of mourning were waved, the trumpets wailed, and ten thousand sobs broke alike from stern and gentle breasts, and tears from the eyes of warriors as well as lovely women showered like rain. It was the funeral of Bertel Thorvaldsen, with the Danish nation for mourners! And she, the old woman who gazed at it as it slowly wound by-she was Amalie, his first love! Thorvaldsen had never married, neither had she.

"Ah, Himlen!" murmured the old woman, wiping away tears from a source which for many long years had been dry, "how marvellous is the will of God! To think that I should live to behold this sight! Poor, poor Bertel! All that I predicted came to pass; but, ah me! who knows whether you might not have enjoyed a happier life after all had you stayed with your old father and mother, and married me? Ah, Himlen, there's only One can tell! Poor Bertel!"

Four years more sped, and one fine Sabbath morning an aged and decrepit female painfully dragged her weary limbs through the crowded lower rooms of that wondrous building known as Thorvaldsen's Museum. She paused not to glance at the matchless works of the sculptor, but crept onward until she reached an open doorway leading into the inner quadrangle, in the centre of which a low tomb of gray marble incloses the mortal remains of him whose hand created the works which fill the edifice. Step by step she drew close to the tomb, and sank on the pavement by its side. Then she laid down her crutch, and pressed her bony hands tightly over her skinny brow. "Ju, ja!” murmured she; "they told me he lay here, and I prayed to God to grant me strength to crawl to the spot-and He has heard me. Ah, Himlen, I can die happy now!"

She withdrew her hands, and peered at

the simple but all-comprehensive insciption | of "BERTEL THORVALDSEN," deeply cut on the side of the tomb. Then she raised her fore-finger, and earnestly traced with it every letter to the end. Smiling feebly, she let fall her hand, and complacently sighed, while an evanescent gleam of subtile emotion lighted up her lineaments. "Tis true: he moulders here. Poor Bertel, we shall meet again—in heaven!"

Her eyes closed and her head slowly sank

on her breast, in which attitude she remained until one of the officers of the museum, who had noticed her singular behavior, came up. "Gammel kone," (old wife,) said he, "what are you doing?"

She answered not; and he slightly touched her shoulder, thinking she was asleep. Her body gently slid to the ground at the touch, and he then saw that she slept the sleep of death!

PROUD I am to be the countryman of the many-sided Goethe, and the impassioned Schiller, and Jean Paul the Only One, and Kant and Fichte, Tieck and Fouqué, Klopstock and Herder, Wieland and Körner. And I contend that there are characteristics in which Germany towers 'pre-eminently above all other peoples and tongues-intellectual traits wherein no other nation under heaven approximates to her likeness. But, as a literature, the English, I confess, seems to me superior to ours-in effect at least, if not in essence. It is vastly our master in style; in the art of saying things to the purpose, and not going to sleep-to sleep? perchance to dream-by the way. If we have authors who stand all alone in their glory, so have they-and more of them. We have no current specimen of the man I am going to write about-we have no Christopher North.

When I visited in May the exhibition of the English Royal Academy,* much as I was interested in Landseer's "Titania and

Bottom," and Maclise's homage to Caxton, and other kindred paintings, on no canvas did I gaze so long and so lovingly as on that whereon the art of a Watson Gordon had depicted the form and features of Professor Wilson. One thing saddened me to see him an old man, and leaning on his staff. The ideal Christopher North of the "Noctes," and yet more of the "Dies Boreales," is indeed preternaturally aged-old as the hills, the gray hills he loves so well. But I was not prepared to find so many traces of eld on the face of one whom Scott, it seems but the other day, was chiding with merry enjoyment the while for his tricksy young-mannishness.

Would that my countrymen were better acquainted with this "old man eloquent!" He deserves their pains. The Scotch assure me I cannot appreciate him, not being Scotch myself; and in principle they are rightdoubtless I lose many a recondite beauty, many a racy allusion, many a curiosa felicitas in his fascinating pages, through my comparative ignorance of the niceties of a language, for the elucidation of which he himself employs a recurring series of the marginal note

"See Dr. Jamieson." But there is many a cognate idiom and phrase which the German recognizes in the Doric, and appreciates better probably than does the denizen of

Cockaigne. However this may be, I exult with all my heart and mind and soul and strength in the effusions of Christopher North. Sure I am that every German who at my instigation studies the writings of Wilson will feel grateful for the hint. One will admire him as the gentle and pathetic tale-teller, as in "Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life," The Foresters," and "The Trials of Margaret Lyndsay." Another, as the refined, reflective, tender, and true poet, who has sung in sweetest verse, "The Isle of Palms," "Unimore," and "The City of the Plague.' A third, as the accomplished metaphysician and professor of moral philosophy, who can make his abstruse themes as rich with graceful drapery and jewelled front as with our ontologists they are withered and dry as dust. A fourth, as the imaginative commentator on the world's classics-Homer, Spenser, Shakspeare, Milton, Wordsworth-around whose immortal lines he throws a new halo, so that their old glory seems as nothing by reason of the glory that excelleth. A fifth, as the ardent politician, dashing like an eagle on a dovecot, among Whigs, Radicals-et hoc genus omne. A sixth, as the shrewd, satirical, caustic reviewer, dealing out retribution wholesale on a herd of poetasters. And as there are eclectics who will thus admire him in some one or other of his aspects; so there are syncretists (myself among the number) who admire him in all.

Six summers have now come and gone since I learned to know and love Christopher North. In 1845 I was lecturing to a drowsy class on certain obscure developments of transcendental philosophy, when I had to call to order a red-haired foreign student, who, in violation of lecture-room decorum, was intent on the perusal of some work of fiction, and whose eyes, as I saw when he raised them at my protest, were suffused with tears. After lecture I summoned him to my rooms. He was a Caledonian to the backbone--from the wilds of Ross-shire-as primitive a specimen in dialect, though not in intellect, as that memorable stripling who

told Dr. Chalmers before his class at St. Andrews that Julius Cæsar was the father of the correct theory of population. The book he had been crying over-and his eyes were still red-was Andersen's "Dichters Bazaar;" and the passage that affected the poor fellow was that descriptive of Andersen's rencontre at Innsbruck with a young Scotchman, on a sentimental journey, who

*Life, by Hanna, vol. iii.

manifested so much emotion at the resemblance of the scenery to his own native hills, and broke into a torrent of tears when Andersen, to intensify the association, began to sing a well-known Scottish air. Sentimental myself, I could not for the life of me scold one so susceptible to Heimweh; so instead of abusing I began to pump him, catechising him about the literature and national characteristics of his "land of the mountain and the flood." Of all living authors he panegyrized chiefly Professor Wilson, whom hitherto I had known by repute only as the editor of Blackwood. He dwelt enthusiastically on the critic, the poet, the novelist, and last, not least, the man; telling me many a tradition, apocryphal or otherwise, of his blithe boyhood, his Oxford career, and his doings at Elleray; how he threw himself into the roistering companionship of gipsies and tinkers, potters and strolling players; how he served as waiter, and won all hearts-Boniface's included-at a Welsh inn; how at Oxford he repeatedly fought a pugnacious shoemaker; and how, in all such encounters, he magnanimously recorded himself beaten when beaten he was. I returned to my rooms that day with a pile of Wilson's writings under my arm.

The critics en masse will support me, I apprehend, in preferring Wilson's prose to his poetry. The latter is apt to pall upon the taste; it is too dainty, too elevated, too ornamental a thing for the uses of this "working-day world." It is delicious when seen in an extract; but read in extenso, it is almost suggestive of a yawn. Moods of mind there are when it pleases almost beyond compare; but they are exceptional, transient. If you exult in it at soft twilight, and find that it then laps your senses in elysium, the probability is that at midday you will wonder what has come to it or to yourself that the spell is broken, the rapture diluted into satiety, the surge and swell of inspiration smoothened to a dead calm. According to Dr. Moir, its grand characteristics are delicacy of sentiment, and ethereal elegance of description-refining and elevating whatever it touches. It avoids the stern and the rug* Recorded also in Howitt's Homes and Haunts, vol. ii.

This is mentioned, too, in De Quincey's Autobiography.

See "Sketches of the Poetical Literature of the Past Half Century," by D. M. Moir: Blackwood & Sons. 1851. These sketches were lectures delivered to the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh in the winter of 1850-1 The volume is a faithful and generous estimate of the great poets of the age just