C

arouses-what shall be perplexes. Egoistic vanity, at the best, leavens the quality of noble sentiments; and contracts eternal universalities into finite individualities.

It is a beautiful idea of Victor Hugo's, that the function of modern art is to rehabilitate man-and he has beautifully worked it out in his works, wherein he presents for the most part the fallen creature only to restore it to its proper standing, whether by love or wrath or self-devotion. But in the prosecution of this and other religious ideas-he analyses too much, and indeed falls greatly below those criteria which the true poet ought prothetically to rule. He soon becomes too the slave of the symbols that he employs, and idolises the image which his own hands have created. Nevertheless, even in this process he shews, how creative is the power of an idea. By this he is carried to the most remote analogies, and conducted to the last types-incarnating the law in the humblest as well as the highest instances. Thus while on the one hand he raises his heroes and heroines from the mire of degradation, social or moral-on the other, he reduces the purest principles to the grossest concretes-so that somewhere, in the descending and ascending line, the two may meet and blend. From the material, he seeks to raise the fallen spirit-and to that end brings down spirit to extreme material levels. Better to have stopped midway at some synthesis, which should have left the spirit spiritual still, while it purified the corporeal by blessed contact with the heavenly and divine.

Before we dismiss the present paper, we are desirous of saying a word or two on JULES JANIN; the cleverest writer in France. But then it is confessed, that "he is a Conservative, a Legitimist, and a Christian;" also, that, "he admires De Lamartine and pities Victor Hugo." The articles of this quaint and sarcastic writer appear every Monday in the Feuilleton of the Journal des Debats. In some of these he ventures to express a better opinion of Fourier's disciples, than might have been expected from one who "lingers upon the ruins of the ancient dynasty." The tale of The Orphan, quoted by Mr. Reynolds, is worth all the other extracts in his two volumes. The principal works of this equally witty and wise author, are Le Chemin de Traverse, Les Contes Fantastiques et Littéraires, Les Contes Nouveaux, Timon Alceste, Barnave, La Confession, L' Ane Mort et la Femme Guillotinée, Un Cœur pour deux Amours, La Piedestal, and Paris, depuis La Revolution de 1830.

Eminent as a critic, original as an author, his merits, unlike those of writers already mentioned, are admissible by the English as well as by the French mind-and his productions might have been read at any other period with the same satisfaction. For genius is not of climes and times, though some theorists seem to think so. theorists always err-do and must. Then why theorise?

(To be continued.)

But

N. S.-VOL II.

4 F

578

FRANCE AND ENGLAND.

AN ODE.

BY JOHN A. HERAUD, Esq.

THEIR fathers in madness confessed themselves slaves,*
And spurned at the turf on their ancestors' graves :
They looked down in scorn on the ancient of earth,
They gazed with disdain at the Ancient of heaven;
And Time was ashamed of all things that had birth,
And Faith watched in awe the dread swell of " the leaven,"
Whose stroke was to shake the whole world with a shock,
As blinding and chill as the desert siroc:

Let it smite to a wreck the old mass that it measured ;
Let the Truth perish never, for which it was treasured!

Ye sons of the Gaul! did ye deem, from the wreck,
A world would be born without wrinkle or speck?
The perfect that lived in the thoughts of the mind,
Why lived it not, too, in the acts of the hand?
Bad artists, who mar what is truly designed,
How vainly for you is the Beautiful planned !
The chains, ye ne'er wore, ye were proud to avow,
Ye forged them yourselves-ye are wearing them now!
What are chains to the men who are free in the spirit?
They care not for them, but the souls they inherit!

Rebellious in vain! Ye are slaves broken loose!
Not such were your sires, whose dread names ye accuse !
The visions of truth and of good that ye dream,
Your fathers possessed, and bequeathed them to you!
They were in their hearts more than what ye would seem,
And rejoiced in the strength that so fondly ye woo!
Their armour imprisons your recreant limbs,

Their glass that shone clearly your poison-breath dims—
The bow that they bent than your sinews is stronger—
The weapons they wielded have masters no longer!

"It was reserved," says Niebuhr, in the first edition of his Roman History, "for our days to see the fruits of that madness, which led our fathers, with an unexampled kind of arrogance, to brand themselves falsely with being a degraded and slavish race, at the same time that they falsely asserted they were called to an unparalleled degree of perfection; of that madness which bragged it would form a new earth, by demolishing the old one. Only once has the world beheld-and we have been the spectators-universal contempt invoked upon the whole of the past, and people proud of the title of slaves broken loose. Something similar, indeed, and attended with similar results, had been experienced in religious revolutions: the Protestant communities have cast away the saints and fathers of the Church-and they have not done so with impunity: it has been the same in the revolutions of science and literature."

O, they were adorned like the brave and the free,
As warriors in arms, as the valiant, should be!

"Now hence with the mail that oppresses the weak, Away with the sword that but burthens the hand!

The furnace shall melt them, the hammer may break-
Convert we to chains what would cumber the land!
Their weight, that makes slaves of the people they doom,
Shall best be declared if that shape they assume—
We'll wear them, to rend them—a sign and a token—
And boast of the shackles that freemen have broken !"

A Tyrant looked on at the blasphemous mirth,
And laughed in his heart, with a scorn not of earth.
He gathered the fragments they scattered in sport,
And linked them anew; they are whole once again!
Where the wassailers slept, there his watchers resort,
And fast on the slumberer rivet his chain!

He binds them in bands, and he trains them to war;
He carries them with him to battle afar-
They follow his Eagle wherever it flieth-

For him moans the widow--for him her son dieth!

Then Britain upstood with her trident of power;
The beacons are lighted on temple and tower.
The Spaniard replied to the voice of her spell-
The Portuguese echoed the magical sound;
Was heard on the mountains the battle-shout swell;
Was heard in the valleys the fearful rebound;
Was heard on the ocean that dreadfullest roar,
That stills the loud tempest-tones raging before;
The thunder is silenced, wind hushed, and the surges
Are calm, while man's anger outpeals Demiurge's.

Let Prussia rejoice in the name of the Lord!

The arm that would save thee must save with the sword!
The
pen must be mute-for its freedom abused,
The worst of all license, sent Liberty mad!
The king and the country by faction accused-
The sufferings that made the rapt patriot sad-
All these must in silence be veiled-for the weak,
Of centuries long past, are too timid to speak-
The good must suppress in the soul the strong throbbing,
While violence rampant is slaying and robbing.*

The Prussian Correspondent, in April, 1813, contains the following paragraph in an address which is said to have come from the pen of Niebuhr:

"We made a bad use of the freedom of the press: it was employed by miserable fools, by atrocious criminals, against their country. Therefore have we been constrained to live without it, until the abuse of it was rendered impossible by the sound state of popular feeling. It is an inexpressible blessing that we have lived to witness the day when the words of our king are the utterance of the best feeling of every citizen, from the highest to the lowest. This is true liberty, this is true equality, in the place of those idols of hell to which their names were given twenty

years ago.

'We have lived through years, during which we were forced to sit mute. We

The angel of God has been strong in the north!
His premature frost from his chambers came forth!
His hurricane answered the waive of his hand,
His fire to its breath like a whirlwind replied-
His rain from on high made a flood of the land—*
By Ulm or by Jena shall these be defied?
What magic is there in the Day of their Fame ? +
Two days, and we think on a martyred Queen's name!
Two days, we remember the year that has vanished,
When wind wed the flame, and refused to be banished.‡

O Victor! thy heart is an oracle now!

Or smitten with blindness, its victim art thou?
The morn brake in mist, darkling, rainy, and cold—
Yet ardent both armies to slay and be slain :

The night looks with awe on the brave and the bold,
As rooted they stand where they stood on the plain.
Nor yet had the terrors apparelled the sky,

That circle thy holy-hill, oh! thou Most High!
The Angel of Death is yet waiting thy mandate,
Unheard since the Russ spoiled the troops of the Bandit!

But now he descends, and the lightning grows weak
In the eagle's keen eye-and its thunderous beak
Is shorn of the clouds that hung over the same,
And threatened the nations with fury and ire-
That eye, in the glare of the terrible flame,

Grows pale, and those shades are dispelled with the fire
That flashes for ever and ever from out

The sword in his hand, and his plumes round about:

They look, and they flee from the path of his dooming;

And the Star falls from heaven, that the earth was consuming.

were compelled to stifle every word that our love for our king and our country would have called forth, when we beheld and mourned over their sufferings. We were forbidden to admire what was great and virtuous among the living: things bad already reached such a pitch, that the timid were afraid to speak of centuries long past away. The good kept silent with regard to the wretchedness and the atrocities they saw around them: the timid submitted to debasing acts of homage. Daily and hourly had we to suppress our indignation and grief at what we saw and suffered: and the frivolous were already trying to find themselves comfortable in their chains: yet a little while, and we had become utterly corrupt."

* The Prussian Correspondent notices these occurrences as miraculous. "Who can see nothing," says the writer, beyond a natural phenomenon, in that premature frost, by which the whole army was destroyed? in the hurricane of the 16th October, which made it impossible to extinguish the flames of Moscow? the floods of rain at the end of last August?" [1813].

Napoleon was supposed by the Leipsigers to prefer those days on which he founded his claims to glory, in order to distinguish them by new achievements. They, therefore, expected an engagement on the 14th October; that day being the battles of Ulm and of Jena.

It was the 16th October that the Queen of France was guillotined—and it was on the 16th October, 1812, as we have seen in a previous note, that the bur ricane aforesaid occurred.

With madness sure Heaven smote the Warrior's wild heart!
In vain was his strength, and his wisdom and art—
His plans are short-sighted—his motions are slow-
The scourge that God sent he now means to recall;
Its work is accomplished-" So far shalt thou go,
But no further!"-he saith, and redeemeth the thrall.
Ye nations! rejoice, for salvation is come-

The Comforter sits at the hearth of each home!
The powers of nature, his cherubim, own him!
The hearts of the people, his seraphim, throne him!

Not yet is the advent, O man!still the theme
Of omen and oracle, vision and dream!*

The banished shall break from the isle of his shame,
The captain shall come with the hosts of a king-
Again shall the world stand in awe of his name,
Again shall the eagle exult in his wing.
The nations are banded together again—
The Britons are there with the hero of Spain--

The field where they fought is now covered with glory,
And Waterloo's name is transcendant in story.

Not yet is the advent complete, which shall be
In the clouds of his Providence hidden from thee-
Not yet, sorrowing man! doth Messiah appear;
Of his coming-again, hope but dreameth as yet:
Yet the dawn of a day hath revealed itself here,
Whose brightness and blessedness never shall set.

It is thus, that Niebuhr speaks of these events, while reviewing one of the Thanksgiving Sermons preached on the occasion. "Have not events, which according to all former experience must have filled us with dismay, been the undeniable means of our success? Has not Napoleon in a number of cases been evidently stricken with blindness? Has it not been visible, that the iron strength of his character, the lightning rapidity of his perception and decision, which were the foundations of his power, and the greatness of which no lover of truth can refuse to acknowledge, have departed from him? Has all this been mere chance? Or has it been the work of the Lord? Who was moved to compassion for his people that cried to him, who repented him of what he had done, and who said: I will no more destroy Israel, but save him out of the hand of the oppressor.

"And was the spirit which animated our people, and that chosen part of it, the army, excited or to be accounted for by human motives? Does strength, according to human experience, grow with exhaustion, the contempt for property with the loss of it? What is it that has converted these peasants, who a year since were calmly stooping under mal-treatment, into heroes, such as have never appeared in our military history? Who is it that has endowed our army, the great and the little, with virtues of which the whole of Germany before scarcely contained a few solitary instances? with patience, with disinterestedness, with humility, with selfdenial, with mildness, with orderliness?

"In all these ways has God made himself manifest amongst us. It is a new revelation, and woe to them who do not believe! Already in a period, when such a number of institutions formerly beneficial had perished root and branch, many an opprest heart had been striving in secret after a new revelation, attested by wonders and signs, after the appearance of the promised Comforter, the spirit of God. We have witnessed it, and again woe to us if we do not acknowledge it."