guage, as exemplified in the dialect of Victoria, we shall here quote them :

"But further researches will strengthen this link, and add new traces of their common origin, though we have hardly a right to expect many, considering that we have to deal with languages in which grammatical elements are, as it were, at the mercy of every speaker, in which roots are of the vaguest character, and can, by means of accents and determinate syllables, be made to express every conceivable shade of meaning,-languages which had received no individual impress since their first separation, and have grown up since under the guidance of but few logical or grammatical principles, so as to make us sometimes doubt whether we should call them works of art or products of nature, or mere conglomerates of an irrational chance."

Did our space allow, one or two statements regarding the notions of the aborigines on their relations to God and a future state, would not only corroborate the views already expressed, as to the depth of moral darkness and physical degradation in which they are sunk, but would also show that there are still such fragments of truth cast up by the deep tides of hoary tradition and the dim impulses of conscience, as to invite the earnest labours of Christian love for their highest good. In reading those passages of the evidence in which the native religion is described, we were forcibly reminded of the following profound and touching words of Dean Trench, in his precious little work on "Words:"

"Yet, with all this, ever and anon in the midst of this wreck and ruin, there is that in the language of the savage, some subtle distinction, some curious allusion to a perished civilisation, now utterly unintelligible to the speaker, or some other note which proclaims his language to be the remains of a dissipated inheritance, the rags and remnants of a robe which was a royal one once. The fragments of a broken sceptre are in his hand, a sceptre wherewith he once held dominion (he, that is, in his progenitors) over large kingdoms of thought, which now have escaped wholly from his sway."

Meanwhile, the opportunities of reclaiming the Australian black from the withering bondage of increasing evils, and restoring him, by the blessings of Divine love and worship, to the consciousness of true manhood and the hopes of heaven, are rapidly passing away. The many pregnant sources of decay that existed long ere the white man set his foot on their old sea-beaches and hunting-grounds, have been immeasurably quickened into activity of influence and enlarged extent by the infusion of foreign mischiefs. By the earnest and persevering prayers and toils of Christian missionaries and other benevolent men-and by these only-can that unhappy race be rescued from speedy annihilation.

Poems by Heinrich Heine.

389

ART. V.-The Poems of Heine, complete: Translated in the Original Metres. With a Sketch of Heine's Life. By E. A. BOWRING. London, Longmans, 1859. Pp. 553.

SHERIDAN, in the "Duenna," speaks of an Israelite who had left his religion without adopting any other, as standing like a dead wall between church and synagogue, or like the blank leaves between the Old and New Testaments. Such was the religious position of Heinrich Heine. He, in early life, relinquished the Judaism of his fathers; and the multiplied evidence of both his prose and poetical works shows that he never, even in a very lax sense of the term, became a Christian. What a contrast is published between his moral and religious history, and that of a distinguished contemporary, a few years older, who obtained a churchwide reputation as Augustus Neander. Neander abandoned Judaism to devote himself to the service of Evangelical Protestantism, with genius ever fresh, and learning never pedantic, to cause a new era in the study of the history of the Church, and to be carried to his grave amid the tears of thousands, and the lasting regret of all good men in Europe and America. Heine relinquished the Israelite faith apparently to get a freer opportunity to assail all creeds alike, and to win the questionable reputation of a German Voltaire, with weaker health, and a career cut far sooner short than that of his French prototype.

Mr Bowring, already known as the translator of the poems of Schiller and Goethe, has given, in thirteen pages, a sketch of Heine's life. It is free from the unmeaning panegyric which deformed his sketch of Goethe, and which stands in such thorough contrast to the careful, though in some respects we think mistaken, criticism pervading the pages of the life of Goethe by Lewes. But Mr Bowring, by this time a practised author, should have given his readers some idea of the relation in which Heine stood to all the immediately previous and actually contemporary intellectual agencies of Germany. This he has failed to do. In what way Heine was affected by Goethe and Schiller, by the Schlegels and Tieck, remains to be shown by some future biographer. The biography opens thus: "Although little more than three years have elapsed since Heinrich Heine was first numbered among the dead!" the dead!" We were not previously aware that the enumeration in question admitted of being repeated! Further on, we read that he " is beyond question the greatest poet that has appeared in Germany since the death of Goethe." But the poetical reputation of Heine had been won long before the death of the patriarch of German literature, which occurred in 1832, after the poet before us had finally left Germany for

Paris. The whole memoir is disfigured by such slovenliness of writing. Far more might have been done, even within the compass of thirteen pages, to prepare the merely English reader to appreciate the very peculiar, the strikingly unique author, whom Mr Bowring has undertaken to naturalize among us.

Heine was born in December 1799 at Düsseldorf, where his father was a merchant. In the prose part of his "Reisebilder,” he says of himself: "I first saw the light on the banks of that beautiful stream, where Folly grows on the green hills, and in autumn is plucked, pressed, poured into casks, and sent into foreign lands. Believe me, I yesterday heard some one utter folly, which, anno 1811, lay in a bunch of grapes I then saw growing on the Johannisberg. I am again a child, and am playing with other children on the Satlosplatz. There was I born; and I expressly note this, in case that, after my death, seven citiesSchilda, Krähwinkel, Bockum, Polkinitz, Dülken, Göttingen, Schaffenstadt-should contend for the honour of being my birthplace. Düsseldorf is a town on the Rhine; sixteen thousand people live there; and many hundred thousand lie buried there." After studying at Bonn and Göttingen, from the latter of which he was rusticated for duelling, Heine went to Berlin, where he remained for some years. Here for the first time he came into contact with a wide range of intellectual society. The fair translator of Byron, Elise von Hohenhausen, opened her house to him, and there he met Varnhagen von Ense, and his more celebrated wife, Rahel, Chamisso, and others. Heinrich Stieglitz, then in the blaze of his brief literary reputation, which his wandering life and his wife's suicide were afterwards fatally to impair, proclaimed on all sides the future greatness of Heine. But he was in a minority. For a time the indifference shown to his British master, Lord Byron, at his outset, was manifested to Heine. The cold reception of his first volume, published in 1822, was one cause of his leaving Berlin, and returning to Göttingen, where he took, in 1825, the degree of Doctor of Laws. He then settled at Hamburgh as a barrister, but did not gain much professional reputation. Literature engrossed more and more of his time and thoughts. We have various reminiscences of his Hamburgh life in his late poems, especially in "Deutschland:"— "Though as a republic Hamburg was seen, As great as Venice or Florence,

Yet Hamburg has better oysters; one gets
The best in the cellar of Laurence.

I went there with Campe at evening time,
When splendid was the weather,
Intending on oysters and Rhenish wine
To have a banquet together.

Dislike to England.

I found some excellent company there,
And greatly was delighted

To see many old friends, such as Chaufepié,
And new ones, self-invited.

There Wille was, whose very face

Was an album, where foes academic
Right legibly had inscribed their names
In the shape of scars polemic.
My Campe was an Amphytrion there,
And smiled and enjoyed the honour;
His eye was beaming with happiness,
Just like an ecstatic Madonna.

I ate and drank with an appetite good,
And these thoughts then crossed my noddle:
This Campe is really an excellent man,

And of publishers quite the model.

Another publisher, I feel sure,

Would have left me of hunger to perish;
But he has given me drink as well,

391

His name I ever shall cherish."-Bowring, p. 362–3.

The next publication of Heine exhibited him as a dramatic poet. "Almansor" and " William Ratcliff" appeared together in 1823. Large experience of men was not to be expected from a youth of three-and-twenty. These plays failed, then, to win attention on the stage, and even as closet dramas have found little favour. The latter tragedy is a weird poem of manaic love and revenge, of which the scene is laid in the Scottish Highlands.

An era in Goethe's mind dates from his Italian travels, the fulfilment of a long-cherished and deep-seated desire. The mind of Heine also received a strong impulse from his opportunities of travel, and his Reisebilder, appearing between 1826 and 1831, gave these forth to the public. He visited England, with which he expressed himself little pleased. After complimenting the small minority of Englishmen, who, especially the poets, were friends of liberty and intellectual development, he goes on to say: "The mass, the English blockheads, are hateful to me in my inmost soul; and I often regard them, not as my fellow-men, but as miserable automata-machines whose motive power is egoism. In these moods, it seems to me as if I heard the whizzing wheelwork by which they think, feel, reckon, digest, and pray; their praying, their mechanical Anglican church-going with the gilt prayer-book in their hands, their stupid wearisome Sunday, is most of all odious to me. I am quite convinced that a blaspheming Frenchman is a more pleasing sight to the Deity than a

praying Englishman!" England has attracted the respectful homage of most of the intellectual celebrities of the Continent in this century, and can afford to smile at the sceptical ravings of Heine.

For a short time, Heine occupied the post of editor of the Münich Allgemeinen Politischen Annalen. The Bavarian capital does not seem to have pleased him much, if we may judge from the stanzas in his "Romancero," entitled the Ex-Watchman :"With Cornelius also perished

All his pupils whatsoe'er;

They shaved off their tresses cherish'd,
And their strength was in their hair.

For their prudent master planted
In their hair some magic springs,
And it seem'd, as if enchanted,
To be full of living things.

Apropos! The arch-notorious
Priest, as Döllingerius known,-
That's, I think, his name inglorious,—
Has he from the Iser flown?

In Good Friday's sad procession
I beheld him in his place;
'Mongst the men of his profession
He had far the gloomiest face.

On Monacho Monachorum
Now-a-days the cap doth fit,
Of virorum obscurorum,
Glorified by Hutten's wit.

Ex-night-watchman, now be wiser!
Feel'st thou not thy bosom glow?
Wake to action on the Iser,

And thy sickly spleen o'erthrow.

Call thy long legs transcendental
Into full and active play;
Vulgar be the words or gentle,

If they're words, then strike away!"-P. 447-9.

The revival of "Catholic" art in Bavaria, through Cornelius and his school, and the patronage by King Louis of Romanist scholars, of whom Döllinger (next to Möhler, who only lived a short time after he was attracted from Tübingen to Munich) was the most distinguished, could not be pleasing to the sceptic poet, who held Christianity equally in all its forms. But the Protestant North soon became for Heine as intolerable as the Romanist