which her character deserves. It tells us that Ophelia's helplessness springs from innocence, not from weakness, and thus serves at once to heighten our impression in favor of her, and to soften our impression against the queen. Besides, the good which Ophelia thus does affords some compensation to our minds for the evil which she suffers, and tends to deepen and prolong our pity by calling in other feelings to its relief and support. are, for the most part, but the victims of what is done and the authors of what is said. The play forms a complete class by itself; it is emphatically a tragedy of thought; and of all Shakspeare's, this undoubtedly combines the greatest strength and widest diversity of faculties. Sweeping round the whole circle of human thought and passion, its alternations of amazement and terror; of lust, and ambition, and remorse; of hope, and love, and friendship, and anguish, and madness, and despair; of wit, and humor, and pathos, and poetry, and philosophy; now, congealing the blood with horror; now, melting the heart with pity; now, launching the mind into eternity; now, shaking the soul to its centre with thoughts too deep for mortal reach; now, startling conscience from her lonely seat with supernatural visitings;-it unfolds a world of truth, and beauty, and sublimity, which our thoughts may indeed aspire to traverse, but which our tongues must despair to utter. Almost any other author would have depicted Gertrude without a single alleviating trait in her character. Beaumont and Fletcher would probably have made her simply frightful or loathsome, capable of exciting no feeling but disgust or abhorrence; if, indeed, in her monstrous depravity, she had not rather failed to excite any feeling whatsoever. From their anxiety to produce effect in such delineations, most authors would strike so hard and so often as to stun the feelings they wished to arouse. Shakspeare, with far more effect as well as far more truth, exhibits her with that mixture of good and bad which neither disarms censure nor precludes pity. Herself dragged along in the terrible train of consequences which her own guilt had a hand in starting, she is hurried away into the same dreadful abyss along with those whom she loves and against whom she has sinned. In her tenderness towards Hamlet and Ophelia, we recognize the virtues of the mother without palliating in the least the guilt of the wife; while the crime in which she is an accomplice almost disappears in the crimes of which she is the victim. Corrupted by the seductions which swarm about her station, her criminal pas-alize its own superstitious imaginings. The sions blind her to the designs of her wicked but wily associate; and she stops not to consider the nature of her conduct, until its fearful results come in to stab her affections and murder her peace. To speak of this play as a whole, is a task which we dare not attempt. Nearly all the events of the play seem the work of an inscrutable Providence, or rather they are the work of an inscrutable Providence, and seem the work of an inexorable destiny. The plan of the drama seems to be, to represent persons acting without any plan: in the words of Goethe, "the hero is without any plan, but the play itself is full of plan." The characters, accordingly, Of its manifold excellencies a few of the less obvious only need be mentioned. For picturesque effect the platform scenes have nowhere been surpassed. The chills of a northern winter midnight seem creeping over us as the heart-sick sentinels pass before us, and, steeped in moonlight and in drowsiness, exchange their meeting and parting salutations. The train of thoughts and sentiments, which arises in their minds, is just such as the anticipation of preternatural visions would be likely to inspire. As the bitter cold stupefies their senses, an indescribable feeling of dread and awe steals over them, preparing the mind to re feeling one has in reading these scenes is not unlike that of a child passing a graveyard by moonlight. Out of the dim and drowsy moonbeams apprehension creates its own confirmations; our fancies imbody themselves in the facts around us; our fears give shape to outward objects, while those objects give outwardness to our fears. The heterogeneous elements which are brought together in the graveyard scene, with its strange mixture of songs, and witticisms, and dead men's bones, and its still stranger transitions of the grave, the sprightly, the meditative, the solemn, the playful, and the grotesque, make it one of the most wonderful yet most natural scenes the poet has given us. Of various other scenes the excellencies are too obvi ous to need remark. The overpowering intensity of interest in the miniature scene, with its Niagara of thoughts, and images, and emotions, can have escaped no mind that has not escaped it. The catastrophe of this play is a frightful abyss of moral confusion over which the mind shudders with horror and awe. As we gaze into its dark chaotic bosom, where the guilty and the guiltless have been relentlessly swept away and overwhelmed in indistinguishable ruin, as if by some furious tornado of destiny, our thoughts, affrighted at the awful confusion before us, fly for refuge to the heaven above us. Most truly hath a wise man UHLAND. FOREMOST among the living bards of Germany, stands the name of Ludwig Uhland; and if popularity be the test of poetic excellence, and the pledge of lasting distinction" that life to come in every poet's creed," the evergreen chaplet of laurel has seldom encircled a worthier brow. Throughout the length and breadth of Germany, and especially among the youth of that country, the songs of Uhland are familiar as household words; scattered through the land, "like flow'r seeds by the far winds strown," they call forth, whenever they fall on a kindly and genial soil, sentiments of a noble and generous nature; a love of the home circle, and that wider circle of the Fatherland, a lively appreciation of the beauties and harmonies of nature, and a warm sympathy with all that is great or venerable in the ruined monuments of the past. It has been objected by that utilitarian school of critics, who estimate the merits of a work of art as they would the efficiency of a steam engine, by its value as a means of increasing our pecuniary wealth, or ministering to our physical wants, that the poems of Uhland are the puny offspring of a sickly sentimentalism, or the idle fancies of a "mind diseased;" that he fails or neg. lects to express the advancing spirit of the age; that he lingers too long among the mouldering relics of feudal grandeur, and too carefully avoids all contact with "tower'd cities and the busy haunts of men," preferring to loiter among the forest: paths and hold converse with the elfin bands who people the greenwood shades, till he seems spell-bound by their mysteri ous influences; that his poetry is utterly deficient in strength and vigor, and is, after all, but "such stuff as dreams are made of." These bagmen of literature, with the mercenary quere ever on their lips, ther in heaven nor in earth, such an ele- | patible with the character of a truly great ment as the spiritual. They rear no altars man, the creature of circumstances to any unknown divinity. Cui bono, in the most secular sense of the phrase, is their test of the beautiful. They would, without compunction, convert the Parthenon into a Fourierite quadrangle, and put up the field of Marathon at auction, in lots to suit purchasers. It is not in a literary point of view alone, that the name of Uhland deserves honorable mention: his services in the cause of freedom have been neither few nor unimportant, and the universal admiration in which he is held throughout Germany, is a tribute of praise to the virtues of the citizen, as well as to the genius of the poet. A patriot in the war of 1813, he has proved himself, since the overthrow of the common enemy of the German Confederation, a vigilant guardian of the popular liberties from the encroachments of domestic tyranny. In the year 1815, a period of great political excitement in Wurtemburg, his songs were echoed from every tongue; and from the time of his election as a member of the Diet of that principality, in 1809, until his resignation, which occurred a few years ago, in consequence of the liberal complexion of his political views, and the boldness with which he expressed them, he was the constant and unwavering advocate of those great and important constitutional rights which despotism is always most eager to suppress. In this respect he manifests a vast moral superiority over the great oracle of German literature, the "many-sided" Goethe, whose facility of disposition led him to regard with comparative indifference the dangers that threatened his country both from hostile armies without, and arbitrary rulers within its borders, provided only that his individual quiet remained undisturbed and his literary pursuits uninterrupted. He viewed everything from an artistical point of view; even the most momentous interests, present and future, of humanity, seem to have been regarded by him merely as subjects of philosophical speculation. Indeed, his character and principles were none of the strictest, nor was his temperament capable of enduring those restraints to which men of sterner mould easily submit. He was, far more than is com "He lives in a house on the hill-side over looking the Necker bridge, as you go out toward Ulm; above lie his pleasure garden and vineyard, and here he has a full view of the distant Swabian Alps, shutting in with their varied outlines one of the most rich, beautiful and animated landscapes in that pleasant Swabian land." Professor Wolff, of the University of Jena, in a paper on German Literature contributed to the London Athenæum for 1835, says, in reference to Uhland: "I could write through whole pages and yet tion, for his patriotism, his love of mankind, his not praise him thoroughly to my own satisfacnoble nature, and all the beautiful qualities of his character. Never was a man so universally loved and revered in Germany, and I never read or heard his name mentioned, without demonstrations of respect, and declarations of sincerest affection." Uhland is considered by the critics of Germany, as belonging to the Romantic School of poetry, which numbers among its followers the Schlegels, Tieck, Novalis, Gleim, Chamisse, and a host of others of less distinction. The characteristics of this class, which dates its origin from the German War of Liberation in 1813, are described by Dr. Wolff as a true perception of the nature of romantic poetry, and its relation to that of the classical school, a more thorough recognition of the intellect and the poetry of the German middle age, a more profound understanding of Shakspeare's greatness, and of the rich treasures of Spanish and Italian poetry, for a true and noble estimation of the treasures of which Germany was indebted to Lessing and Goethe, and for an unrelenting warfare against characterlessness in literature, wherever it appeared. The works of Uhland consist of a collection of poems published in 1815, which are the most popular and well known productions of his pen, and two dramas which appeared in 1818 and 1819, in which his powers are displayed to less advantage. He has also written a commentary on the works of Walter Von Dervogelweide, one of the ancient Minnesingers; an "Essay on the Scandinavian Myth of Thor," and "Researches concerning Poetical Traditions." For the last twenty-five years, his poetical energies seem to have been allowed to slumber, either according to Goethe's prediction, because the politician has swallowed up the poet, or because his civic and professional duties have occupied his time to the exclusion of more congenial pursuits. Without entering into a critical analysis of the character of his writings, we shall give translations of a few of his poems, selected chiefly from his ballads and romances, in order that our readers may form some estimate of his poetical powers. Should a feeling of disappointment be experienced in reading them, we beg that some allowance may be made for the difference between American or English and German taste, as well as for the obvious disadvantage presented by the appearance of an author under a foreign garb. Other specimens may be found in Longfellow's Poets and Poetry of Europe," in "Gostick's Survey of German Poetry," and in the "Foreign Quarterly Review" for 1837. The Democratic Review" for 1846, also contains "some translations from the Songs and Ballads of Uhland," by W. A. Butler, prefaced by some introductory verses of considerable merit. 66 The following ballad, which is among the best of the collection, has lately furnished the subject of a beautiful painting from the pencil of Munchen. THE MINSTREL'S CURSE. In olden times, erect and proud, a lofty castle stood, Therein a haughty monarch dwelt, in lands and conquests great, His every thought was horror still--each glance with vengeance shone ; Once at the castle bounds appear'd a noble minstrel pair, The old man to the younger spake: "My son, thou must prepare! Within the lofty pillar'd hall, the minstrels twain are seen, His queen with glance as mild and sweet, as beam of full moon bright. The hoary minstrel struck the strings-he played so wondrous well, In tones of heavenly clearness streamed the youth's sweet voice along, They sing of spring-tide and of love-the age ere wo began— All lovely things they celebrate, that heave the human breast, The troop of courtiers gather round, their scorn forgotten now- "My people he has led away, will he corrupt my wife?” As if a storm had scattered them, the hearers fled away. But now before the lofty gates the hoary minstrel stands, Wo, wo to you, ye lofty halls, no sweet and soothing tone Of lyre or song, within your walls, shall ever more be known. No! sighs and groans alone be yours, and slavery's cringing pace, "Wo to you all, ye gardens sweet, in the May month's pleasant light- "Wo to thee, ruthless murderer! of minstrelsy the pest; The old man's voice has died away, but Heav'n has heard his cry; Around, where once the garden smiled, is now a desert land, "The Ferry" is a little poem which ives a very fair impression of some of the ost marked peculiarities of Uhland's tanner. He delights in summoning from the dim mysterious past" the scenes, e thoughts and feelings of that happier me, when the vivid imagination of youth ad power to clothe and comparing the pictures which hope and fancy then portrayed, with the harsh realities into which experience has since transmuted them. As the contrast of the present with the past generally suggests reflections of a somewhat mournful character, inasmuch as the advancing footsteps of time are constantly crushing some flower that bloomed in our pathway, whose frail life we fondly deemed of perennial duration, the heart of the poet whose sympa |