of universal knowledge: in each of these capacities he is great, but also in more; for all that he achieves in these is brightened and gilded with the touch of another quality: his maxims, his feelings, his opinions are transformed from the lifeless shape of didactic truths into living shapes that address faculties far finer than the understanding. The gifts by which such transformation is effected, the gift of pure, ardent, tender sensibility, joined to those of fancy and imagination, are perhaps not wholly denied to any man endowed with the power of reason; possessed in various degrees of strength, they add to the products of mere intellect corresponding tints of new attractiveness; in a degree great enough to be remarkable, they constitute a poet. Of this peculiar faculty how much had fallen to Schiller's lot, we need not attempt too minutely to explain. Without injuring his reputation, it may be admitted that in general his works exhibit rather extraordinary strength than extraordinary fineness or versatility. His power of dramatic imitation is perhaps never of the very highest, the Shakspearean kind; and in its best state, it is farther limited to a certain range of characters. It is with the grave, the earnest, the exalted, the affectionate, the mournful that he succeeds: he is not destitute of humour, as his Wallenstein's Camp will show, but neither is he rich in it; and for sprightly ridicule in any of its forms he has seldom shown either taste or talent. Chance principally made the drama his department: he might have shone equally in many others. The vigorous and copious invention, the knowledge of life, of men and things, displayed in his theatrical pieces, might have been available in very different pursuits: frequently the charm of his works has little to distinguish it from the charm of intellectual and moral force in general; it is often the capacious thought, the vivid imagery, the impetuous feeling of the orator, rather than the wild pathos, and capricious enchantments of the poet. Yet that he was capable of rising to the loftiest regions of poetry, no reader of his Maid of Orleans, his character of Thekla, or many other of his pieces, will hesitate to grant.

Sometimes we suspect that it is the very grandeur of his general powers which prevents us from exclusively admiring his poetic genius. We are not lulled by the Syren song of poetry, because her melodies are blended with the clearer, manlier tones of serious reason and of honest though exalted feeling.

Much laborious discussion has been wasted in defining genius, particularly by the countrymen of Schiller, some of whom have narrowed the conditions of the term so far as to find but three men of genius since the world was created, Homer, Shakspeare, and Goethe. From such rigid precision, applied to a matter in itself indefinite, there may be an apparent, but there is no real increase of accuracy. The creative power, the faculty not only of imitating given forms of being, but of imagining and representing new ones, which is here attributed with such distinctness and so sparingly, has been given by nature in complete perfection to no man, nor entirely denied to any. The shades of it cannot be distinguished by so loose a scale as language. A definition of genius, which excludes such a mind as Schiller's, will scarcely be agreeable to philosophical correctness, and it will tend rather to lower than to exalt the dignity of the word. Possessing all the general mental faculties in their highest degree of strength; an intellect ever active, vast, powerful, far-sighted; an ima gination never weary of producing grand or beautiful forms; a heart of the noblest temper, sympathies comprehensive yet ardent, feelings vehement, impetuous, yet full of love and kindliness and tender pity; conscious of the rapid and fervid exercise of all these powers within him, and able farther to present their products refined and harmonized, and

married to immortal verse," Schiller may or may not be called a man of genius by his critics; but his mind in either case will remain one of the most enviable which can fall to the share of a mortal.

In a poet worthy of the name, the powers of the intellect are indissolubly interwoven with the moral feelings; and the exercise of his art depends not more on the perfection

of the one than of the other. The poet, who does not feel nobly and justly, as well as passionately, will never permanently succeed in making others feel the forms of error and falseness, infinite in number, are transitory in duration; truth, of thought and sentiment, but chiefly of sentiment, truth alone is eternal and unchangeable. But, happily, a delight in the products of reason and imagination can scarcely ever be divided from at least a love for virtue and genuine greatness. The feelings are in favour of heroism, of the most exalted propriety. Happy he whose resolutions are so strong, or whose temptations are so weak, that he can convert these feelings into action! The severest pang of which a proud and sensitive nature can be conscious, is the perception of its own debasement. The sources of misery in life are many: vice is one of the surest. Any human creature tarnished with guilt will in general be wretched; a man of genius in that case will be doubly so, for his ideas of excellence are higher, his sense of failure is more keen. In such miseries, Schiller had no share. The sentiments, which animated his poetry were converted into principles of conduct; his actions were as blameless as his writings were pure. With his simple and high predilections, with his strong devotedness to a noble cause, he contrived to steer through life unsullied by its meanness, unsubdued by any of its difficulties or allurements. With the world, in fact, he had not much to do: without effort, he dwelt apart from it; its prizes were not the wealth which could enrich him. His great, almost his single aim, was to unfold his spiritual faculties, to study and contemplate and improve their intellectual creations. Bent upon

this with the steadfastness of an apostle, the more sordid temptations of the world passed harmlessly over him. Wishing not to seem but to be, envy was a feeling of which he knew but little even before he rose above its level. Wealth or rank he regarded as a means, not an end; his own humble fortune supplying him with all the essential conveniencies of life, the world had nothing more that he chose to covet, nothing

more that it could give him. He was not rich; but his habits were simple, and, except by reason of his sickness and its consequences, unexpensive. At all times he was far above the meanness of self-interest, particularly in its meanest shape, a love of money. Doering tells us, that a bookseller having travelled from a distance expressly to offer him a higher price for the copyright of Wallenstein, at that time in the press, and for which he was on terms with Cotta, of Tübingen, Schiller, answering, "Cotta deals fairly with me, and I with him," sent away this new merchant, without even the hope of a future bargain. The anecdote is small; but it seems to paint the integrity of the man, careless of pecuniary concerns in comparison with the strictest uprightness in his conduct. In fact, his real wealth lay in being able to pursue his darling studies, and to live in the sunshine of friendship and domestic love. This he had always longed for this he at last enjoyed. And though sickness and many vexations annoyed him, the intrinsic excellence of his nature chequered the darkest portions of their gloom with an effulgence derived from himself. The ardour of his feelings, tempered by benevolence, was equable and placid: his temper, though overflowing with generous warmth, seems almost never to have shewn any hastiness or anger. To all men he was humane and sympathizing; among his friends, open-hearted, generous, helpful; in the circle of his family, kind, tender, sportive. And what gave an especial charm to all this, was the unobtrusiveness with which it was attended: there was no parade, no display, no particle of affectation; rating and conducting himself simply as an honest man and citizen, he became greater by forgetting that he was great.

Such were the prevailing habits of Schiller. That in the mild and beautiful brilliancy of their general aspect, there must have been some specks and imperfections, the common lot of poor humanity, who knows not? That these were small and transient, we judge from the circumstance that no hint of them has reached us: nor are we anxious to obtain a full de

scription of them. For practical uses, we can sufficiently conjecture what they were; and the heart desires not to dwell upon them. This man is passed away from our dim and tarnished world: let him have the benefit of departed friends, be transfigured in our thoughts, and shine there without the little blemishes that clung to him in life.

Schiller gives a fine example of the German character: he has all its good qualities in a high degree, with very few of its defects. We trace in him all that downrightness and simplicity, that sincerity of heart and mind, for which the Germans are remarked; their enthusiasm, their patient, long-continuing, earnest devotedness; their imagination, delighting in the lofty and magnificent; their intellect, rising into refined abstractions, stretching itself into comprehensive generalizations. But the excesses to which such a character is liable are, in him, prevented by a firm and watchful sense of propriety. His simplicity never degenerates into ineptitude or insipidity; his enthusiasm must be based on reason; he rarely suffers his love of the vast to betray him into toleration of the vague. The boy Schiller was extravagant; but the man admits no bombast in his style, no inflation in his thoughts or actions. He is the poet of truth; our understandings and consciences are satisfied, while our hearts and imaginations are moved. His fictions are emphatically nature copied and embellished; his sentiments are refined and touchingly beautiful, but they are likewise manly and correct, they exalt and inspire, but they do not mislead. Above all, he has no cant; in any of its thousand branches, ridiculous or hateful, none. He does not distort his character or genius into shapes which he thinks more becoming than their natural one: he does not hang out principles which are not his, or harbour beloved persuasions which he half or wholly knows to be false. He did not often speak of wholesome prejudices; he did not "embrace the Roman Catholic religion because it was the grandest and most comfortable." Truth, with Schiller, or what seemed such, was an indispensible requisite: if he but suspected

an opinion to be false, however dear it may have been, he seems to have examined it with rigid scrutiny, and if he found it guilty, to have plucked it out, and resolutely cast it forth. The sacrifice might cost him pain, permanent pain; real damage, he imagined, it could hardly cause him. It is irksome and dangerous to travel in the dark; but better so, than with an ignis fatuus to guide us. Considering the warmth of his sensibilities, Schiller's merit on this point is greater than we might at first suppose. For a man with whom intellect is the ruling or exclusive faculty, whose sympathies, loves, hatreds, are comparatively coarse and dull, it may be easy to avoid this half-wilful entertainment of error, and, this cant which is the consequence and sign of it. But for a man of keen tastes, a large fund of innate probity is necessary to prevent his aping the excellence which he loves so much, yet is unable to attain. Among persons of the latter sort, it is extremely rare to meet with one completely unaffected.— Schiller's other noble qualities would not have justice did we neglect to notice this, the truest proof of their nobility. Honest unpretending manly simplicity pervades all parts of his character and genius and habits of life. We not only admire him, we trust him and love him.

Such, so far as we can represent it, is the form in which Schiller's life and works have gradually painted their character in the mind of a secluded individual, whose solitude he has often charmed, whom he has instructed, and cheered, and moved. The original impression, we know, was faint and inadequate, the present copy of it is still more so; yet we have sketched it as we could: the figure of Schiller, and of the figures he conceived and drew are there; himself, "and in his hand a glass which shows us many more." To those who look on him as we have wished to make them, Schiller will not need a farther panegyric. For the sake of Literature, it may still be remarked that his merit was peculiarly due to her. Literature was his creed, the dictate of his conscience; he was an apostle of the sublime and beautiful, and this his calling made

a hero of him. No great wonder, indeed, that it should have done so. Strong devotedness to any abstract principle whatever presupposes a certain magnanimity, and nourishes it, in the mind; strong and genuine devotedness to pure religion, implying the practice of sublime deeds and self-denials, must be marked out as the most inspiring and ennobling feeling which can dwell in the breast of man. But next, without a rival, to this task of performing glorious actions, which necessarily are of rare occurrence in life, is the task of conceiving and representing such in their loftiest perfection, of adorning them with all kindred embellishments, and dwelling for ever among the circumstances and emotions in which they have their rise. To this Schiller was devoted; this he followed with unstaying speed all the days of his life. The common, and some uncommon, difficulties of a fluctuating and dependent existence could not quench or abate his zeal: sickness itself seemed hardly to affect him. During his last fifteen years, he wrote his noblest works; yet, as it has been proved too well, no day of that period could have passed without its load of pain.* Pain could not turn him from his purpose or shake his equanimity: in death itself he was calmer and calmer.

On the whole, we may pronounce him happy. His days passed in the contemplation of ideal grandeurs ; he lived among the glories and solemnities of universal Nature; his thoughts were of sages and heroes, and scenes of elysian beauty. It is true, he had no rest, no peace; but he enjoyed the glowing consciousness of his own activity, which stands in place of it for men like him. It is true, he was long sickly: but did he not even then conceive and body forth Max Piccolomini, and Thekla, and the Maid of Orleans, and the scenes of Wilhelm Tell? It is true, he died early: but the student will exclaim with Charles XII in another case: "was it not enough of life, when he had conquered kingdoms?" These kingdoms which Schiller conquered were not for one nation at the expense of suffering to another; they were soiled by no patriot's blood, no widow's, no orphan's tear: they are kingdoms conquered from the barren realms of Darkness, to increase the happiness, and dignity, and power of all men; new forms of truth, and images and scenes of beauty won from "the void and formless infinite;" a crñμa iç aiɛì; "a possession for ever," to all the generations of the earth.

CHESELDEN the celebrated surgeon and oculist gives some very curious particulars respecting a boy who was couched by him in his thirteenth year: * his narrative is the more interesting as it seems to determine the question so long and so hotly contested by philosophers,-Whether a person blind from his birth upon being made to see could, by sight alone, distinguish a cube from

a globe? Most persons would probably answer in the affirmative, notwithstanding the many theoretical arguments which might be brought against it, at least until they have such facts as the operation of couching discloses, which are of too stubborn a nature to be easily evaded.

It is previously remarked by Cheselden that though we speak of persons afflicted with cataracts as blind,

yet they are never so blind from that cause but that they can distinguish day from night; and for the most part in a strong light distinguish black, white, scarlet, and other glaring colours: but they cannot distinguish the shape of any thing. And he gives the following reason for his remark. The light coming from external objects being let in through the matter of the cataract which disperses and refracts the rays, these do not, as they ought, converge to a focus on the retina or back part of the eye, so as to form a picture of the objects there; the person afflicted is consequently in the same state as a man of sound sight looking through a thin jelly. Hence the shape of an object cannot be at all discerned, though the colour may. And this was the case with the boy couched by the operator. Before couching he could distinguish colours in a strong light, but afterwards, the faint ideas he had previously acquired of them were not sufficient for him to recollect them by, and he did not know them to be the same that he had seen dimly, when he was enabled to see them perfectly. Scarlet he now thought to be the most beautiful, and of others the gayest were the most pleasing: black, the first time he saw it perfectly, gave him great uneasiness, but after a little time he became more reconciled to it; he however always associated some unpleasant idea with it, being struck with great horror at the sight of a Negro woman whom he met some months afterwards.

When he first saw, he was so far from making any right judgment about distances, that he thought all objects whatever touched his eyes (so he expressed it), as what he felt did his skin. He thought no objects so agreeable as those which were smooth and regular, though he could form no judgment of their shape, nor guess what it was in any object that pleased him. He did not know any one thing from another however different in shape or size; but upon being told what things those were whose form he knew before from feeling, he would carefully observe that he might know them again. Having often forgot which was the cat, which the dog, he was ashamed to

ask, but catching the cat (which he knew by feeling), he looked steadfastly at her, and then putting her down, "So, Puss," said he, "I shall know you another time." He was very much surprised that those things which he had liked best when blind did not appear most agreeable to his eyes, expecting those persons whom he loved most would appear most beautiful, and such things most agreeable to his sight which were so to his taste. His friends at first thought that he even knew what pictures represented, but found afterwards they were mistaken; for about two months after he was couched he discovered that they represented solid bodies, at first taking them for party-coloured planes or surfaces diversified with a variety of paint: but even then he was surprised that the pictures did not feel like the things they represented, and was amazed when he found that those parts of pictures which by their light and shade appeared prominent, and uneven to his sight, felt equally flat with the rest. On this latter occasion he pertinently inquired-Which was the lying sense, feeling or seeing?

Being shown his father's picture in a locket at his mother's watch, he acknowledged the likeness, but was very much astonished, asking how it could be that a large face could be expressed in so little room, and saying that it should have seemed as impossible to him as to put a bushel of any thing into a pint.

At first he could bear but very little light, and the things he saw he thought extremely large; but upon seeing things larger, those first seen he conceived to be less than they had appeared before, never being able to imagine any figures or lines beyond the bounds he saw: the room he was in he said he knew to be but part of the house, yet he could not conceive that the whole house could look bigger. Before he was couched he expected little advantage from seeing, worth undergoing an operation for, except reading and writing; for he said he thought he could have no more pleasure in walking abroad than he had in the garden at present, which he could do safely and readily. And even blindness he said had this advantage, that he could go any