Put on this Robe of Earth, and show thyself Yet art thou not the Saviour from the Waters.- Both hands the Captive stretch'd to grasp that Saviour; But he fled. "So Phosphoros was grieved in heart: Then said the Word: Wait yet in peace seven moons, "Which when the mother Isis saw, it grieved her; him With his right hand, the Rainbow with the left; The long-forgotten NAME, and the REMEMBRANCE (The door closes, and again conceals the OLD MAN OF CARMEL.) The purport of this enigma Robert confesses that he does not "wholly" understand; an admission in which, we suspect, most of our readers, and the Old Man of Carmel himself, were he candid, might be inclined to agree with him. Sometimes, in the deeper consideration which translators are bound to bestow on such extravagances, we have fancied we could discern in this apologue some glimmerings of meaning, scattered here and there like weak lamps in the darkness; not enough to interpret the riddle, but to show that by possibility it might have an interpretation,-was a typical vision, with a certain degree of significance in the wild mind of the poet, not an inane fever-dream. Might not Phosphoros, for example, indicate generally the spiritual essence of a man, and this story be an emblem of his history? He longs to be "One and Somewhat; that is, he labours under the very common complaint of egotism; cannot, in the grandeur of Beauty and Virtue, forget his own so beautiful and virtuous Self; but, amid the glories of the majestic All, is still haunted and blinded by some shadow of his own little Me. For this reason he is punished; imprisoned in the "Element" (of a material body,) and has the "four Azure Chains (the four principles of matter) bound round him; so that he can neither think nor act, except in a confuse him. The "Cup of Fire" is given foreign medium, and under conditions that him; perhaps, the rude, barbarous passion and cruelty natural to all uncultivated tribes? But, at length, he beholds the "Moon;" begins to have some sight and love of material Nature; self, under gross emblems, a theogony and sort and, looking into her " Mirror," forms to himof mythologic poetry; in which, if he cannot behold the "Name," and has forgotten his own "Birthplace," both of which are blotted out and hidden by the Element," he finds some spiritual solace, and breathes more freely. Still, however, the "Cup of Fire" tortures him; till the "Salt" (intellectual culture?) is vouchsafed; which, indeed, calms the raging of that furious bloodthirstiness and warlike strife, but leaves him, as mere culture of the understanding may be supposed to do, frozen into irrelithe "Name" and his "Own Original" than gion and moral inactivity, and farther from ever. Then is the "Cup of Fluidness" a more merciful disposition? and intended, with "the Drops of Sadness and the Drops of Longing," to shadow forth that wo-struck, desolate, yet softer and devouter state in which mankind displayed itself at the coming of the "Word," at the first promulgation of the Christian religion? Is the "Rainbow" the modern poetry of Europe, the Chivalry, the new form of Stoicism, the whole romantic feeling of these later days? But who or what the "Heiland aus den Wassern" (Saviour from the Waters) may be, we need not hide our entire ignorance; this being apparently a secret of the Valley, which Robert d'Heredon, and Werner, and men of like gifts, are in due time to show the world, but unhappily have not yet succeeded in bringing to light. Perhaps, indeed, our whole interpretation may be thought little better than lost labour; a reading of what was only scrawled and flourished, not written; a shaping of gay castles and metallic palaces from the sunset clouds, which, though mountainlike, and purple and golden of hue, and towered together as if by Cyclopean arms, are but dyed vapour. Adam of Valincourt continues his exposi tion in the most liberal way; but, through many pages of metrical lecturing, he does little to satisfy us. What was more to his purpose, he partly succeeds in satisfying Robert d'Heredon; who, after due preparation, Molay being burnt like a martyr, under the most promising omens, and the Pope and the King of France struck dead, or nearly so,sets out to found the order of St. Andrews in his own country, that of Calatrava in Spain, and other knightly Missions of the Heiland aus den Wassern elsewhere; and thus, to the great satisfaction of all parties, the Sons of the Valley terminates, "positively for the last time." our readers may be disposed to hold his revelations on this subject rather cheap. Nevertheless, taking up the character of Vutes in its widest sense, Werner earnestly desires not only to be a poet, but a prophet; and, indeed, looks upon his merits in the former province as altogether subservient to his higher purposes in the latter. We have a series of the most confused and long-winded letters to Hitzig, who had now removed to Berlin; setting forth, with a singular simplicity, the mighty projects Werner was cherishing on this head. He thinks that there ought to be a new Creed promulgated, a new Body of Religionists established; and that, for this purpose, not writing, but actual preaching, can avail. He detests common Protestantism, under which he seems to mean a sort of Socinianism, or diluted French Infidelity; he talks of Jacob Bohme, and Luther, and Schleiermacher, and a new Trinity of "Art, Religion, and Love." All this should be sounded in the ears of men, and in a loud voice, that so their torpid slumber, the harbinger of spiritual death, may be Our reader may have already convinced himself that in this strange phantasmagoria there are not wanting indications of very high poetic talent. We see a mind of great depth, if not of sufficient strength; struggling with objects which, though it cannot master them, are essentially of richest significance. Had the writer only kept his piece till the ninth year; meditating it with true diligence and unwearied will! But the weak Werner was not a man for such things: he must reap the har-driven away. With the utmost gravity he vest on the morrow after seed-day, and so stands before us at last, as a man capable of much, only not of bringing aught to perfection. Of his natural dramatic genius, this work, ill-concocted as it is, affords no unfavourable specimen; and may, indeed, have justified expectations which were never realized. It is true, he cannot yet give form and animation to a character, in the genuine poetic sense; we do not see any of his dramatis persone, but only hear of them yet, in some cases his endeavour, though imperfect, is by no means abortive; and here, for instance, Jacques Molay, Philip Adalbert, Hugo, and the like, though not living men, have still as much life as many a buff-and-scarlet Sebastian or Barbarossa, whom we find swaggering, for years, with acceptance, on the boards. Of his spiritual beings, whom in most of his plays he introduces too profusely, we cannot speak in commendation: they are of a mongrel nature, neither rightly dead nor alive; in fact, they sometimes glide about like real, though rather singular mortals, through the whole piece; and only vanish as ghosts in the fifth act. But, on the other hand, in contriving theatrical incidents and sentiments; in scenic shows, and all manner of gorgeous, frightful, or astonishing machinery, Werner exhibits a copious invention, and strong though untutored feeling. Doubtless, it is all crude enough; all illuminated by an impure, barbaric splendour; not the soft, peaceful brightness of sunlight, but the red, resinous glare of playhouse torches. Werner, however, was still young; and had he been of a right spirit, all that was impure and crude might in time have become ripe and clear; and a poet of no ordinary excellence would have been moulded out of him. But as matters stood, this was by no means the thing Werner had most at heart. It is not the degree of poetic talent manifested in the Sons of the Valley that he prizes, but the religious truth shadowed forth in it. To judge from the parables of Baffometus and Phosphoros, commissions his correspondent to wait upon Schlegel, Tieck, and others of a like spirit, and see whether they will not join him. For his own share in the matter, he is totally indifferent; will serve in the meanest capacity, and rejoice with his whole heart, if, in zeal and ability as poets and preachers, not some only, but every one, should infinitely outstrip him. We suppose, he had dropped the thought of being "One and Somewhat;" and now wished, rapt away by this divine purpose, to be "Nought and All." On the Heiland aus den Wassern this correspondence throws no further light: what the new Creed specially was, which Werner felt so eager to plant and propagate, we nowhere learn with any distinctness. Probably, he might himself have been rather at a loss to explain it in brief compass. His theogony, we suspect, was still very much in posse; and perhaps only the moral part of this system could stand before him with some degree of clearness. On this latter point, indeed, he is determined enough; well assured of his dogmas, and apparently waiting but for some proper vehicle in which to convey them to the minds of men. His fundamental principle of morals we have seen in part already: it does not exclusively or primarily belong to himself; being little more than that high tenet of entire Self-forgetfulness, that "merging of the Me in the Idea;" a principle which reigns both in Stoical and Christian ethics, and is at this day common, in theory, among all German philosophers, especially of the Transcendental class. Werner has adopted this principle with his whole heart and his whole soul, as the indispensable condition of all Virtue. He believes it, we should say, intensely, and without compromise, exaggerating rather than softening or concealing its peculiarities. He will not have Happiness, under any form, to be the real or chief end of man; this is but love of enjoyment, disguise it as we like; a more complex and sometimes more respectable species of hunger, he would say Nevertheless, let his missionary zeal have justice from us! It does seem to have been grounded on no wicked or even illaudable motive: to all appearance, he not only believed what he professed, but thought it of the highest moment that others should believe it. And if the proselytizing spirit, which dwells in all men, be allowed exercise even when it only assaults what it reckons Errors, still more should this be so, when it proclaims what it reckons Truth, and fancies itself not taking from us what in our eyes may be good, but adding thereto what is better. to be admitted as an indestructible element in | long, to play fantastic tricks in abundance; human nature, but nowise to be recognised as and, at least, in his religious history, to set the the highest; on the contrary, to be resisted and world a-wondering. Conversion, not to Popeincessantly warred with, till it become obedi- ry, but, if it so chanced, to Braminism, was a ent to love of God, which is only, in the truest thing nowise to be thought impossible. sense, love of Goodness, and the germ of which lies deep in the inmost nature of man; of authority superior to all sensitive impulses; forming, in fact, the grand law of his being, as subjection to it forms the first and last condition of spiritual health. He thinks that to propose a reward for virtue is to render virtue impossible. He warmly seconds Schleiermacher in declaring that even the hope of Immortality is a consideration unfit to be introduced into religion, and tending only to pervert it, and impair its sacredness. Strange as this may seem, Werner is firmly convinced of its importance; and has even enforced it specifically in a passage of his Söhne des Thals, which he is at the pains to cite and expound in his correspondence with Hitzig. Here is another fraction of that wondrous dialogue between Robert d'Heredon and Adam of Valincourt, in the cavern of the Valley: ROBERT. And Death, so dawns it on me,--Death perhaps, That too must die ?--This shallow Self of ours, We can, we must be free of it, and then Meanwhile, Werner was not so absorbed in spiritual schemes, that he altogether overlooked his own merely temporal comfort. In contempt of former failures, he was now courting for himself a third wife, "a young Poless of the highest personal attractions ;" and this under difficulties which would have appalled an ordinary wooer: for the two had no language in common; he not understanding three words of Polish, she not one of GerNevertheless, nothing daunted by this circumstance, nay, perhaps discerning in it an assurance against many a sorrowful curtain lecture, he prosecuted his suit, we suppose by signs and dumb-show, with such ardour, that he quite gained the fair mute; wedded her in 1801; and soon after, in her company quitted Warsaw for Königsberg, where the helpless state of his mother re man. ADAM (calling joyfully into the interior of the Cavern.)quired immediate attention. It is from Königs Brethren, he has renounced! Himself has found it! ADAM (embracing Robert.) Come to my heart!-&c. &c. berg that most of his missionary epistles to Hitzig are written; the latter, as we have hinted above, being now stationed, by his official appointment, in Berlin. The sad duty of watching over his crazed, forsaken, and dying mother, Werner appears to have discharged with true filial assiduity: for three years she lingered in the most painful state, under his nursing; and her death, in 1804, seems notwithstanding to have filled him with the deepest sorrow. This is an extract of his letter to Hitzig on that mournful occasion: Such was the spirit of that new Faith, which, symbolized under mythuses of Baffometus and Phosphoros, and "Saviours from the Waters," and Trinities of Art, Religion, and Love," "I know not whether thou hast heard that on and to be preached abroad by the aid of Schlei- the 24th of February, (the same day when our ermacher, and what was then called the New excellent Mnioch died in Warsaw,) my mother Poetical School, Werner seriously purposed, like departed here, in my arms. My Friend! God another Luther, to cast forth, as good seed, knocks with an iron hammer at our hearts; among the ruins of decayed and down-trodden and we are duller than stone, if we do not feel Protestantism! Whether Hitzig was still young it; and madder than mad, if we think it shame enough to attempt executing his commission, to cast ourselves into the dust before the Alland applying to Schlegel and Tieck for help; powerful, and let our whole so highly miseraand if so, in what gestures of speechless asto-ble Self be annihilated in the sentiment of His nishment, or what peals of inextinguishable infinite greatness and long-suffering. I wish I laughter they answered him, we are not in-had words to paint how inexpressibly pitiful formed. One thing, however, is clear: that a man with so unbridled an imagination, joined to so weak an understanding, and so broken a volition; who had plunged so deep into Theosophy, and still hovered so near the surface in all practical knowledge of men and their affairs; who, shattered and degraded in his own private character, could meditate such apostolic enterprises, was a man likely, if he lived my Söhne des Thals appeared to me in that hour, when, after eighteen years of neglect, I again went to partake in the Communion! This death of my mother, the pure, royal poet-andmartyr spirit, who for eight years had lain continually on a sick-bed, and suffered unspeakable things,-affected me, (much as, for her sake and my own, I could not but wish it with altogether agonizing feelings.) Ah, Friend, how heavy do my youthful faults lie on me! How | charm of his conversation: for Werner many much would I give to have my mother-(though times could be frank and simple; and the true both I and my wife have of late times lived humour and abandonment with which he often wholly for her, and had much to endure on her launched forth into bland satire on his friends, account)-how much would I give to have her and still oftener on himself, atoned for many of back to me but one week, that I might dis-his whims and weaknesses. Probably the two burden my heavy-laden heart with tears of re- could not have lived together by themselves: pentance! My beloved Friend, give thou no but in a circle of common men, where these grief to thy parents! ah, no earthly voice can touchy elements were attempered by a fair adawaken the dead! God and Parents, that is dition of wholesome insensibilities and forthe first concern; all else is secondary." malities, they even relished one another; and, indeed, the whole social union seems to have stood on no undesirable footing. For the rest, Warsaw itself was, at this time, a gay, picturesque, and stirring city; full of resources for spending life in pleasant occupation, either wisely or unwisely.* This affection for his mother forms, as it were, a little island of light and verdure in Werner's history, where, amid so much that is dark and desolate, one feels it pleasant to linger. Here was at least one duty, perhaps, indeed, the only one, which, in a wayward, wasted life, he discharged with fidelity: from It was here, that, in 1805, Werner's Kreuz his conduct towards this one hapless being, we an der Ostsee (Cross on the Baltic) was writmay, perhaps, still learn that his heart, how-ten: a sort of half-operatic performance, for ever perverted by circumstances, was not in- which Hoffmann, who to his gifts as a writer capable of true, disinterested love. A rich heart added perhaps still higher attainments, both as by Nature; but unwisely squandering its riches, a musician and a painter, composed the acand attaining to a pure union only with this one companiment. He complains that, in this matheart; for it seems doubtful whether he ever ter, Werner was very ill to please. A ridiculoved another! His poor mother, while alive, lous scene, at the first reading of the piece, the was the haven of all his earthly voyagings; and, same shrewd wag has recorded in his Serain after years, from amid far scenes, and crush-pions-Bruder; Hitzig assures us that it is liteing perplexities, he often looks back to her grave with a feeling to which all bosoms must respond. The date of her decease became a memorable era in his mind; as may appear from the title which he gave, long afterwards, to one of his most popular and tragical productions, Die Vier-und-zwanzigste Februar (The Twenty-fourth of February.) rally true, and that Hoffmann himself was the main actor in the business. "Our Poet had invited a few friends, to read to them, in manuscript, his Kreuz an der Ostsee, of which they already knew some fragments that had raised their expectations to the highest stretch. Planted, as usual, in the middle of the circle, at a little miniature table, on which After this event, which left him in posses- two clear lights, stuck in high candlesticks, sion of a small but competent fortune, Werner were burning, sat the poet: he had drawn the returned with his wife to his post at Warsaw. manuscript from his breast; the huge snuff-box, By this time, Hitzig, too, had been sent back, the blue-checked handkerchief, aptly reminding and to a higher post: he was now married you of Baltic muslin, as in use for petticoats and likewise; and the two wives, he says, soon be- other indispensable things, lay arranged in came as intimate as their husbands. In a lit-order before him.-Deep silence on all sides!-tle while Hoffmann joined them; a colleague in Hitzig's office, and by him ere long introduced to Werner, and the other circle of Prussian men of law, who, in this foreign capital, formed each other's chief society; and, of course, cleave to one another more closely than they might have done elsewhere. Hoffmann does not seem to have loved Werner; as, indeed, he was at all times rather shy in his attachments; and, to his quick eye, and more rigid, fastidious feeling, the lofty theory and low selfish practice, the general diffuseness, nay, incoherence of character, the pedantry and solemn affectation, too visible in the man, could nowise be hidden. Neverthe-ly-shrouded nuns of strictest discipline, walking, selfless, he feels and acknowledges the frequent Not a breath heard!-The poet cuts one of those unparalleled, ever-memorable, altogether indescribable faces you have seen in him, and begins.-Now you recollect, at the rising of the curtain, the Prussians are assembled on the coast of the Baltic, fishing amber, and com * Hitzig has thus described the first aspect it presented to Hoffmann: "Streets of stately breadth, formed of palaces in the finest Italian style, and wooden huts which threatened every moment to rush down over the heads of their inmates; in these edifices, Asiatic pomp combined in strange union with Greenland squalor. An as in a perpetual masquerade: long-bearded Jews; ever-moving population, forming the sharpest contrasts, monks in the garb of every order; here veiled and deep silk mantles of the brightest colours, talking and promesecluded and apart there flights of young Polesses, in nading over broad squares. The venerable ancient Polish noble, with moustaches, caftan, girdle, sabre, and red or yellow boots: the new generation equipt to the Greeks, Russians, Italians, Frenchmen, in ever-changutmost pitch as Parisian Incroyables; with Turks, ing throng. Add to this a police of inconceivable tolerance, disturbing no popular sport; so that little puppettheatres, apes, camels, dancing bears, practised incessantly in open spaces and streets; while the most elegant equipages, and the poorest pedestrian bearers of burden, stood gazing at them. Further, a theatre in the national language; a good French company; an Italian opera; German players of at least a very passable sort; mask "I, for whom the caresses of love and all roses of joy ed-balls on a quite original but highly entertaining plan; withered away, as the first shovel with its mould sound-places for pleasure-excursions all round the city," &c. ed on the coffin of my mother." &c.-Hoffmann's Leben und Nachlass, b. i. p. 287. mence by calling on the god who presides over gerations are softened into something which this vocation.-So-begins: Bangputtis! Bangputtis! Bangputtis! -Brief pause!-Incipient stare in the audience!-and from a fellow in the corner comes a small clear voice: My dearest, most valued friend! my best of poets! If thy whole dear opera is written in that cursed language, no soul of us knows a syllable of it; and I beg, in the Devil's name, thou wouldst rather have the goodness to translate it first!'"* Of this Kreuz an der Ostsee our limits will permit us to say but little. It is still a fragment; the Second Part, which was often promised, and, we believe, partly written, having never yet been published. In some respects, it appears to us the best of Werner's dramas: there is a decisive coherence in the plot, such as we seldom find with him; and a firmness, a rugged nervous brevity in the dialogue, which is equally rare. Here, too, the mystic dreamy agencies, which, as in most of his pieces, he has interwoven with the action, harmonize more than usually with the spirit of the whole. It is a wild subject, and this helps to give it a corresponding wildness of locality. The first planting of Christianity among the Prussians, by the Teutonic Knights, leads us back of itself into dim ages of antiquity, of superstitious barbarism, and stern apostolic zeal: it is a scene hanging, as it were, in half-ghastly chiaroscuro, on a ground of primeval Night: where the Cross and St. Adalbert come in con tact with the Sacred Oak and the Idols of at least resembles poetic harmony. We give this drama a high praise, when we say that more than once it has reminded us of Cal deron. The "Cross on the Baltic" had been bespoke by Iffland for the Berlin theatre; but the complex machinery of the piece, the "little flames" springing, at intervals, from the heads of certain characters, and the other supernatural ware with which it is replenished, were found to transcend the capabilities of any merely terrestrial stage. Iffland, the best actor in Germany, was himself a dramatist, and a man of talent, but in all points differing from Werner, as a stage-machinist may differ from a man with the second-sight. Hoffmann chuckles in secret over the perplexities in which the have found himself, when he came to the shrewd prosaic manager and playwright must back a refusal, full of admiration and expostu"little flames." Nothing remained but to write lation: and Iffland wrote one which, says Hoffmann, “passes for a master-piece of theatrical diplomacy." In this one respect, at least, Werner's next play was happier, for it actually crossed the and reached, though in a maimed state, the "Stygian marsh" of green-room hesitations, Elysium of the boards; and this to the great joy, as it proved, both of Iffland and all other parties interested. We allude to the Martin Luther, oder die Weihe der Kraft, (Martin Luther, or the Consecration of Strength,) Werner's Berlin in 1807, and soon spread over all Germost popular performance, which came out at Romova, we are not surprised that spectral shapes peer forth on us from the gloom. In the constructing and depicting of charac-many, Catholic as well as protestant, being ters, Werner, indeed, is still little better than a acted, it would seem, even in Vienna, to overmannerist: his persons, differing in external flowing and delighted audiences. figure, differ too slightly in inward nature; and no one of them comes forward on us with a The savage rightly visible or living air. Yet, in scenes and incidents, in what may be called the general costume of his subject, he has here attained a really superior excellence. Prussians, with their amber-fishing, their bearhunting, their bloody idolatry, and stormful untutored energy, are brought vividly into view; no less so the Polish Court of Plozk, and the German Crusaders, in their bridal-feasts and battles, as they live and move, here placed on the verge of Heathendom, as it were, the vanguard of Light in conflict with the kingdoms of Darkness. The nocturnal assault on Plozk by the Prussians, where the handful of Teutonic Knights is overpowered, but the city saved from ruin by the miraculous interposition of the "Harper," who now proves to be the spirit of St. Adalbert; this, with the scene which follows it, on the Island of the Vistula, where the dawn slowly breaks over doings of wo and horrid cruelty, but of wo and cruelty atoned for by immortal hope,-belongs undoubtedly to Werner's most successful efforts. With much that is questionable, much that is merely common, there are intermingled touches from the true Land of Wonders; indeed, the whole is overspread with a certain dim religious light, in which its many pettinesses and exag * Hoffmann's Serapions-Brüder, b. iv. s. 240. If instant acceptance, therefore, were a measure of dramatic merit, this play should theless, to judge from our own impressions, rank high among that class of works. Neverthe sober reader of Martin Luther will be far from finding in it such excellence. It cannot be named among the best dramas: it is not much scenic exhibition, many a "fervid sentieven the best of Werner's. There is, indeed, all its mixture of coarseness, here and there ment," as the newspapers have it; nay, with a glimpse of genuine dramatic inspiration; but, as a whole, the work sorely disappoints falls asunder in our thoughts, like the iron and us; it is of so loose and mixed a structure and clay in the Chaldean's Dream. There is an interest, perhaps of no trivial sort, awakened in the First Act; but, unhappily, it goes on declining, till, in the Fifth, an ill-natured critic might almost say, it expires. The story is too wide for Werner's dramatic lens to gather into a focus; besides, the reader brings with him an image of it, too fixed for being so boldly metamorphosed, and too high and august for being ornamented with tinsel and gilt paste board. plentifully furnished as it is with sceptres and Accordingly, the Diet of Worms, armorial shields, continues a much grander scene in History, than it is here in Fiction. excepting those of Luther and Catharine, the Neither, with regard to the persons of the play, Nun whom he weds, can we find much scope |