when despair is wringing and crushing her innocent young soul into an utter wreck, she seems not to know the source of her affliction; and the dreadful truth comes forth only when her sweet mind, which, stringed and tuned in heaven, once breathed such enchanting harmony, lies broken in fragments before us, and the secrets of her maiden heart are hovering on her soul-deserted tongue.

One of the bitterest ingredients in poor Ophelia's cup of sorrow, is the belief that by her repulse of Hamlet she has scared away the music of his mind; and when, forgetting the wounds with which her own pure spirit is bleeding, over the heartrending spectacle of that "unmatched form and feature of blown youth, blasted with ecstacy," she meets his fatal "I loved you not," with the despairing sigh, "I was the more deceived," we see that, she feels not the sundering of the ties that bind her sweetly-tempered faculties in harmony. The singing of this innocent sweet bird has but betrayed her to the hunter's aim; and she feels not the fatal shot because it strikes to the very source of her spirit's life.

And yet we blame not Hamlet, for he is himself but a victim of the same relentless, inexorable power which is spreading its ravages through him over another life as pure and heavenly as his own. Standing on the verge of an abyss which he sees is yawning to ingulf himself, his very effort to frighten her back from it, only hurries her in before him. To snatch a jewel from Mrs. Jameson's casket, "he knows he can neither marry her nor reveal to her the terrific influences which have changed the whole current of his life and purposes; and in his agony he overacts the painful part with which he has tasked himself; like the judge of Athens who, engrossed with graver matters, flung from him the little bird which had sought refuge in his bosom with such violence that he unwittingly killed it."

Ophelia's insanity absolutely exhausts the fountains of human pity. The breaking of her virgin heart lets loose the secrets which have hitherto enriched it, and their escape reveals the utter ruin of their own sweet dwelling-place. It is one of those pictures surcharged with unuttered and unutterable woe, over which the mind

can only brood in silent sympathy and awe; which Heaven alone has a heart adequately to pity, and a hand effectually to heal. Its pathos were too much for our hearts to bear, but for the sweet incense that rises from her crushed spirit, as "she turns thought and affliction, passion, hell itself, to favor and to prettiness.' The victim of crimes in which she has no share but as a sufferer, we hail with joy the event which snatches her from the rack of this world; and, in our speechless pity for such helpless innocence, we seek the sure consolations of hope in the arms of religious faith. In the death of this gentle creature there is a divine depth of sorrow which strikes expression dumb. In their solemn playfulness, the songs with which she chants, as it were, her own burial service, are like smiles gushing from the very heart of woe. Over this picture so awful in its beauty, we can but repeat the sighs of its most gifted commentator: "Ophelia ! poor Ophelia ! O, far too soft, too good, too fair, to be cast among the briars of this working-day world, and fall and bleed upon the thorns of life. What shall be said of her! for eloquence is mute before her. So exquisitely delicate is her character, it seems as if a touch would profane it; so sanctified in our thoughts by the last and worst of human woes, that we dare not consider it too deeply. Her love, which she never once confesses, is like a secret which we have stolen from her, and which ought to die upon our hearts, as it dies on her own. Her sorrow asks not words but tears; and from the spectacle of her insanity we feel inclined to turn away, and veil our eyes in reverential pity, and too painful sympathy."

The queen's. affection for this lovely being is one of those unexpected strokes of character so frequent in Shakspeare, which surprise us into reflection by their very naturalness. Mrs. Jameson compares it to the nightingale of Sophocles singing in the groves of the Furies. That Ophelia should disclose a vein of goodness in the wicked queen, was necessary, perhaps, to keep us both from underrating the influence of the one, and from overrating the wickedness of the other. The love, too, which she thus awakens in one so depraved goes to prevent the pity which her condition moves from lessening the respect

which her character deserves. It tells us that Ophelia's helplessness springs from innocence, not from weakness, and thus serves at once to heighten our impression in favor of her, and to soften our impression against the queen. Besides, the good which Ophelia thus does affords some compensation to our minds for the evil which she suffers, and tends to deepen and prolong our pity by calling in other feelings to its relief and support.

Almost any other author would have depicted Gertrude without a single alleviating trait in her character. Beaumont and Fletcher would probably have made her simply frightful or loathsome, capable of exciting no feeling but disgust or abhorrence; if, indeed, in her monstrous depravity, she had not rather failed to excite any feeling whatsoever. From their anxiety to produce effect in such delineations, most authors would strike so hard and so often as to stun the feelings they wished to arouse. Shakspeare, with far more effect as well as far more truth, exhibits her with that mixture of good and bad which neither disarms censure nor precludes pity. Herself dragged along in the terrible train of consequences which her own guilt had a hand in starting, she is hurried away into the same dreadful abyss along with those whom she loves and against whom she has sinned. In her tenderness towards Hamlet and Ophelia, we recognize the virtues of the mother without palliating in the least the guilt of the wife; while the crime in which she is an accomplice almost disappears in the crimes of which she is the victim. Corrupted by the seductions which swarm about her station, her criminal passions blind her to the designs of her wicked but wily associate; and she stops not to consider the nature of her conduct, until its fearful results come in to stab her affections and murder her peace.

To speak of this play as a whole, is a task which we dare not attempt. Nearly all the events of the play seem the work of an inscrutable Providence, or rather they are the work of an inscrutable Providence, and seem the work of an inexorable destiny. The plan of the drama seems to be, to represent persons acting without any plan in the words of Goethe, "the hero is without any plan, but the play itself is full of plan." The characters, accordingly,

are, for the most part, but the victims of what is done and the authors of what is said. The play forms a complete class by itself; it is emphatically a tragedy of thought; and of all Shakspeare's, this undoubtedly combines the greatest strength and widest diversity of faculties. Sweeping round the whole circle of human thought and passion, its alternations of amazement and terror; of lust, and ambition, and remorse; of hope, and love, and friendship, and anguish, and madness, and despair; of wit, and humor, and pathos, and poetry, and philosophy; now, congealing the blood with horror; now, melting the heart with pity; now, launching the mind into eternity; now, shaking the soul to its centre with thoughts too deep for mortal reach; now, startling conscience from her lonely seat with supernatural visitings;-it unfolds a world of truth, and beauty, and sublimity, which our thoughts may indeed aspire to traverse, but which our tongues must despair to utter.

Of its manifold excellencies a few of the less obvious only need be mentioned. For picturesque effect the platform scenes have nowhere been surpassed. The chills of a northern winter midnight seem creeping over us as the heart-sick sentinels pass before us, and, steeped in moonlight and in drowsiness, exchange their meeting and parting salutations. The train of thoughts and sentiments, which arises in their minds, is just such as the anticipation of preternatural visions would be likely to inspire. As the bitter cold stupefies their senses, an indescribable feeling of dread and awe steals over them, preparing the mind to realize its own superstitious imaginings. The feeling one has in reading these scenes is not unlike that of a child passing a graveyard by moonlight. Out of the dim and drowsy moonbeams apprehension creates its own confirmations; our fancies imbody themselves in the facts around us; our fears give shape to outward objects, while those objects give outwardness to our fears. The heterogeneous elements which are brought together in the graveyard scene, with its strange mixture of songs, and witticisms, and dead men's bones, and its still stranger transitions of the grave, the sprightly, the meditative, the solemn, the playful, and the grotesque, make it one of the most wonderful yet most natural

scenes the poet has given us. Of various other scenes the excellencies are too obvious to need remark. The overpowering intensity of interest in the miniature scene, with its Niagara of thoughts, and images, and emotions, can have escaped no mind that has not escaped it.

The catastrophe of this play is a frightful abyss of moral confusion over which the mind shudders with horror and awe. As we gaze into its dark chaotic bosom, where the guilty and the guiltless have been relentlessly swept away and overwhelmed in indistinguishable ruin, as if by some furious tornado of destiny, our thoughts, affrighted at the awful confusion before us, fly for refuge to the heaven above us.

Most truly hath a wise man

FOREMOST among the living bards of Germany, stands the name of Ludwig Uhland; and if popularity be the test of poetic excellence, and the pledge of lasting distinction" that life to come in every poet's creed," the evergreen chaplet of laurel has seldom encircled a worthier brow. Throughout the length and breadth of Germany, and especially among the youth of that country, the songs of Uhland are familiar as household words; scattered through the land, "like flow'r seeds by the far winds strown," they call forth, whenever they fall on a kindly and genial soil, sentiments of a noble and generous nature; a love of the home circle, and that wider circle of the Fatherland, a lively appreciation of the beauties and harmonies of nature, and a warm sympathy with all that is great or venerable in the ruined monuments of the past. It has been objected by that utilitarian school of critics, who estimate the merits of a work of art as they would the efficiency of a steam engine, by its value as a means of increasing our pecuniary wealth, or ministering to our physical wants, that the poems of Uhland are the puny offspring of a sickly sentimentalism, or the idle fancies of a

"mind diseased;" that he fails or neg lects to express the advancing spirit of the age; that he lingers too long among the mouldering relics of feudal grandeur, and too carefully avoids all contact with "tower'd cities and the busy haunts of men," preferring to loiter among the forest paths and hold converse with the elfin bands who people the greenwood shades, till he seems spell-bound by their mysteri: ous influences; that his poetry is utterly deficient in strength and vigor, and is, after all, but "such stuff as dreams are made of." These bagmen of literature, with the mercenary quere ever on their lips,

"A pipe for fortune's finger To play what stops she please;"

It is not in a literary point of view alone, that the name of Uhland deserves

honorable mention: his services in the

cause of freedom have been neither few nor unimportant, and the universal admiration in which he is held throughout Germany, is a tribute of praise to the virtues of the citizen, as well as to the genius of the poet. A patriot in the war of 1813, he has proved himself, since the overthrow of the common enemy of the German Confederation, a vigilant guardian of the popular liberties from the encroachments of domestic tyranny. In the year 1815, a period of great political excitement in Wurtemburg, his songs were echoed from every tongue; and from the time of his election as a member of the Diet of that principality, in 1809, until his resignation, which occurred a few years ago, in consequence of the liberal complexion of his political views, and the boldness with which he expressed them, he was the constant and unwavering advocate of those great and important constitutional rights which despotism is always most eager to suppress. In this respect he manifests a vast moral superiority over the great oracle of German literature, the "many-sided" Goethe, whose facility of disposition led him to regard with comparative indifference the dangers that threatened his country both from hostile armies without, and arbitrary rulers within its borders, provided only that his individual quiet remained undisturbed and his literary pursuits uninterrupted. He viewed everything from an artistical point of view; even the most momentous interests, present and future, of humanity, seem to have been regarded by him merely as subjects of philosophical speculation. Indeed, his character and principles were none of the strictest, nor was his temperament capable of enduring those restraints to which men of sterner mould easily submit. He was, far more than is com

and it is well for his reputation that his life flowed on in a smooth and even current, exposed to few of those dangers and trials that call forth the exercise of the loftiest and most self-denying virtues.

Uhland has withdrawn entirely from public life, and now enjoys a competency which renders him independent of the smiles and frowns of princes. His residence is thus described by Howitt, in his "Rural and Domestic Life in Germany:"

"He lives in a house on the hill-side over

looking the Necker bridge, as you go out toward Ulm; above lie his pleasure garden and vineyard, and here he has a full view of the distant Swabian Alps, shutting in with beautiful and animated landscapes in that their varied outlines one of the most rich, pleasant Swabian land."

Professor Wolff, of the University of Jena, in a paper on German Literature contributed to the London Athenæum for 1835, says, in reference to Uhland:

"I could write through whole pages and yet tion, for his patriotism, his love of mankind, his not praise him thoroughly to my own satisfacnoble nature, and all the beautiful qualities of his character. Never was a man so universally loved and revered in Germany, and I never read or heard his name mentioned, without demonstrations of respect, and declarations of sincerest affection."

Uhland is considered by the critics of Germany, as belonging to the Romantic School of poetry, which numbers among its followers the Schlegels, Tieck, Novalis, Gleim, Chamisse, and a host of others of less distinction. The characteristics of this class, which dates its origin from the German War of Liberation in 1813, are described by Dr. Wolff as a true perception of the nature of romantic poetry, and its relation to that of the classical school, a more thorough recognition of the intellect and the poetry of the German middle age, a more profound understanding of Shakspeare's greatness, and of the rich treasures of Spanish and Italian poetry, for a true and noble estimation of the treasures of which Germany was indebted

to Lessing and Goethe, and for an unrelenting warfare against characterlessness in literature, wherever it appeared.

The works of Uhland consist of a collection of poems published in 1815, which are the most popular and well known productions of his pen, and two dramas which appeared in 1818 and 1819, in which his powers are displayed to less advantage. He has also written a commentary on the works of Walter Von Dervogelweide, one of the ancient Minnesingers; an "Essay on the Scandinavian Myth of Thor," and "Researches concerning Poetical Traditions." For the last twenty-five years, his poetical energies seem to have been allowed to slumber, either according to Goethe's prediction, because the politician has swallowed up the poet, or because his civic and professional duties have occupied his time to the exclusion of more congenial pursuits. Without entering into a critical analysis of the character of his writings, we shall give translations of a few of his

poems, selected chiefly from his ballads and romances, in order that our readers may form some estimate of his poetical powers. Should a feeling of disappointment be experienced in reading them, we beg that some allowance may be made for the difference between American or English and German taste, as well as for the obvious disadvantage presented by the appearance of an author under a foreign garb. Other specimens may be found in Longfellow's Poets and Poetry of Europe," in "Gostick's Survey of German Poetry," and in the "Foreign Quarterly Review " for 1837. The Democratic Review" for 1846, also contains "some translations from the Songs and Ballads of Uhland," by W. A. Butler, prefaced by some introductory verses of considerable merit.

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The following ballad, which is among the best of the collection, has lately furnished the subject of a beautiful painting [ from the pencil of Munchen.