CECIL; OR THE ADVENTURES OF A COXCOMB. CHAPTER I. So regeln wir die Mond und Sonnentage Zu der Volker Hochgericht Und Versiehen kein Gesicht. GOETHE. My poetry is the dream of the sleeping passions. When they are awake, I cannot speak their language-only in their somnambulism. BYRON. DEAR reader!-wert thou ever in Germany? I do not mean, didst thou ever steamboat it up or down the Rhine, or swallow the natural VOL. III. B physic of the waters of Baden or Aix-la Chapelle; -for who hath not?-I mean, didst thou ever abide in the soft bosom of a recht herzliche German family,-drink of their beer,-smoke of their tobacco,—and chaw metaphysics with them; -the extraordinary exaltation of their minds justifying itself to yours by anxiety to lose sight of degradation of body, so preposterously gross and nasty. By Jupiter! if the spitting-box and beerbottle do not incline a man to refine with hairbreadth casuistry upon some psychological theory capable of propelling the soul into the clouds at the rate of the Nassau-balloon, the devil himself would not make a metaphysician of him !— But I say again, dear reader, wert thou ever in cordial, kind-hearted, boozy, foozy, Deutschland? - Kennst du das Land, not where the Citronen bluhn, but where the lindens shed their summer bloom?-where the round-polled acacia, like a green mop or a sham orange-tree, adorns the beer-garden?-where weeping-willows hanging over a pond enlivened by fancy ducks, wring poesy out of the soul of the pale student?where learning hath run herself to earth,—where poetry hovereth in the air,-where the drama, as the Transcendental School would say, "kindleth eternally her terrible Energies, like the Destinies spinning a thread of Asbestos;—where Classical Lore hath found an inner Temple, in which the Law to lay down-the Divinities re-inshrining, wherewith he hath run away charged, like some old Corinthian, from the sack of his City, with his Household Gods upon his back,—and where all that is Coarse, Uncivilized, and Matter-of-fact in Human Existence, with all that is Heroic,Sublime, - Creative, -Soul-refining,-Purposeexalting, Hope-exciting, for evermore united is ?" If not, trust me thou art incapable of appreciating-guess what!-I give it thee in ten,I give it thee in twenty,-as Madame de Sévigné said or wrote to her daughter. It is neither Goethe,-Jean Paul,-Beethoven, the Sonnets or Glyptotheca of Ludwig I.-nor the policy of |