number of applications for advice were daily made to the association, which were answered thus and thus; but that many people wrote in particular for recipes of happiness; all that, he adds, was laid on the shelf, and not answered at all. Now this thing gave me great surprise when I read it. 'What!' I said, 'is it not the recipe of happiness that I have been seeking all my life, and isn't it precisely because I have failed in finding it that I am now miserable and discontented?' Had I supposed, as some people do, that Goethe was fond of paradoxes, that this was consistent with the sincerity and modesty of the man's mind, I had certainly rejected it without further trouble; but I couldn't think it. At length, after turning it up a great while in my own mind, I got to see that it was very true what he said that it was the thing that all the world were in error in. No man has a right to ask for a recipe for happiness; he can do without happiness; there is something better than that. All kinds of men who have done great things-priests, prophets, sages-have had in them something higher than the love of happiness to guide them, spiritual clearness and perfection, a far better thing that than happiness. Love of happiness is but a kind of hunger at the best, a craving because I have not enough of sweet provision in this world. If I am asked what that higher thing is, I cannot at once make answer, I am afraid of causing mistake. There is no name I can give it that is not to be questioned; I couldn't speak about it; there is no name for it, but pity for that heart that does not feel it; there is no good volition in that heart. This higher thing was once named the Cross of Christ-not a happy thing that, surely."

The whole of German literature is not to be reduced to a seeking of this higher thing, but such was the commencement of it. The philosophers of Germany are glanced at.

"I studied them once attentively, but found that I got nothing out of them. One may just say of them that they are the precisely opposite to Hume. . . . This study of metaphysics, I say, had only the result, after bringing me rapidly through different phases of opinion, at last to deliver me altogether out of metaphysics. I found it altogether a frothy system, no right beginning to it, not

Compare with this passage "the Everlasting Yea" of "Sartor Resartus."

right ending. I began with Hume and Diderot, and as long as I was with them I ran at atheism, at blackness, at materialism of all kinds. If I read Kant I arrived at precisely opposite conclusions, that all the world was spirit, namely, that there was nothing material at all anywhere; and the result was what I have stated, that I resolved for my part on having nothing more to do with metaphysics at all."

After the Werther period Goethe "got himself organised at last, built up his mind, adjusted to what he can't cure, not suicidally grinding itself to pieces." For a time the Ideal, Art, Painting, Poetry, were in his view the highest things, goodness being included in these. God became for him "only a stubborn force, really a heathen kind of thing." As his mind gets higher it becomes more serious too, uttering tones of most beautiful devoutness. "In the West-östlicher Divan,' though the garb is Persian, the whole spirit is Christianity, it is Goethe himself the old poet, who goes up and down singing little snatches of his own feelings on different things. It grows extremely beautiful as it goes on, full of the finest things possible, which sound like the jingling of bells when the queen of the fairies rides abroad." *

Of Schiller the principal characteristic is "a chivalry of thought, described by Goethe as the spirit of freedom struggling ever forward to be free." His "Don Carlos "

"is well described as being like to a lighthouse, high, far-seen, and withal empty. It is in fact very like what the people of that day, the Girondists of the French Revolution, were always talking about, the Bonheur du peuple and the rest. There was a noble

*

A defence of Goethe from the charges of over-serenity and political indifference follows.

ness in Schiller, a brotherly feeling, a kindness of sympathy for what is true and just. There was a kind of silence too at the last. He gave up his talk about the Bonheur du peuple, and tried to see if he could make them happier instead."

The third great writer in modern Germany is Richter,

"Goethe was a strong man, as strong as the mountain rocks, but as soft as the green sward upon the rocks, and like them continually bright and sun-beshone. Richter, on the contrary, was what he has been called, a half-made man; he struggled with the world, but was never completely triumphant over it. But one loves Richter. . . . There is more joyous laughter in the heart of Richter than in any other German writer."

We have then much reason to hope about the future; great things are in store for us.

"It is possible for us to attain a spiritual freedom compared with which political enfranchisement is but a name. . . . I can't close this lecture better than by repeating these words of Richter, Thou, Eternal Providence, wilt cause the day to dawn.

"Nothing now remains for me but to take my leave of you-a sad thing at all times that word, but doubly so in this case.

When

I think of what you are, and of what I am, I cannot help feeling that you have been kind to me; I won't trust myself to say how kind; but you have been as kind to me as ever audience was to man, and the gratitude which I owe you comes to you from the bottom of my heart. May God be with you all !”

SHELLEY'S "PHILOSOPHICAL VIEW OF

REFORM."

(A TRANSCRIPT.)

THROUGH the kindness of Sir Percy and Lady Shelley, I have had the privilege of reading an unpublished prose work by Shelley, of greater length than any other prose writing of his except his boyish romances, a late product of that annus mirabilis which gave birth to the "Prometheus Unbound" and "The Cenci." It treats of a subject which often occupied Shelley's thoughts and profoundly interested his feelings. To have introduced a full account of this work into the Life of Shelley on which I have been long engaged would, I found, have interrupted the narrative with à digression of unsuitable length, yet it seems desirable that those persons-and they are many-who would make themselves acquainted with the total achievement, in all its breadth and variety, of Shelley's extraordinary thirty years, should, in common with me, possess some acquaintance with a piece of writing belonging to his period of full maturity, which may be viewed in a certain sense as a prose comment on those poems that anticipate, as does the "Prometheus Unbound," a better and happier life of man than the life attained in our century of sorrow, and toil, and hope. Within the limits of an article in a Review, I can do no more than

give an outline of Shelley's treatise, with extracts which may serve to represent the whole.* It is to be hoped that on some fit occasion Sir Percy Shelley may decide to place the entire work-a posthumous gift of its author--in the hands of English readers.†

On

The manuscript occupies upwards of two hundred pages in a small vellum-bound Italian note-book. the outer side of one of the covers is a pen-and-ink drawing by Shelley—a landscape with water and trees, filled in with more detail than is common in the delicate pieces of fantastic pencilling or pen-work found among his papers. At one end of the little volume is the fragment, "On Life," which has been assigned, on the internal evidence of style, to the year 1815, but which would hardly have had a place in this Italian note-book if it were of earlier origin than the year 1818 or 1819.‡ The principal manuscript in the volume is evidently, in great part if not altogether, a first draft, showing many corrections, alterations, interlineations, and cancelled sentences; yet, except in a few passages, it is not a very difficult manuscript to read. The work remains unfinished, and the closing pages yield rather a series of fragments than a continuous treatment of the subject under consideration. Nevertheless, it presents with sufficient clearness an aspect of Shelley's mind which some readers will think it worth their while to study, if * Where I condense and cannot use marks of quotation I yet retain, as far as may be, the words of Shelley.

"A Treatise on Political Reform," wrote Mrs Shelley in her Preface to Shelley's "Essays, Letters, &c.," "and other fragments remain to be published when his works assume a complete shape."

‡ Of course, it may have been copied from an earlier draft into the note-book, but this is unlikely.