a downright lie, for he says, they whom | Schenectady common for the sunny Spanish the gods love, die young,' and the heathen meadow of imagination, and the long deities loved nothing that was not good."-straight turnpike in contrast to the winding This argument was not particularly clear to and welling river. the man's understanding. I arose, boxed the ears of the young ras“Landlord, in what part of the world cal that stood grinning at me, paid double was you born?" for a dinner which had passed like the mocking lake from the parched traitor, "I was born at the east'ard." "Humph-I thought so; how long is it" *untouched, untasted," jumped into my since you removed to these parts ?" "Fifteen years, last fall." "Did you bring any live stock with you?" "Yes-I brought a cow, a drove of hogs, and two Merino sheep, which were worth money then." cutter, and in the course of time, found myself seated before a glorious supper. How I ever reached good old Albany, I know not; but there I was, and "mine host of the hill" made me forget all my sufferings by a timely provision from his well-stocked lar"Pray were you acquainted with General der. How long I feasted, I am ashamed to Humphreys, when you lived at the east-say-but there I sat like Sardanapalus of ward ?" The man hesitated, whether from being nettled by my cross-examination, or from some secret suspicion, I knew not. “Landlord, look me in the face and give me a direct answer; is not this shoulder of mutton, part of the identical Merino sheep which General Humphreys imported from Spain, sixteen years ago? answer me on your conscience." What the publican's conscience would have replied, I know not, for he began to bluster and storm at my uncivil behaviour, to insist that he had kept tavern for fifteen years, and had never before been abused in his own house, with a great many et ceteras, and concluded, though not without some slight tremor of voice and a retrograde movement, by telling me that he was sure I was no gentleman. "Very true, landlord; you are the best judge of that matter, but the mutton”— old, and "Memory was lost in present bliss." Peter, I pause for the present. PAUL PARAGRAPH. * The Fire-worshippers.--Lalla Rookh. IDLE HOUrs. How very unpopular in the present day is the word aristocracy, and yet how popular ought it to be, if its etymology were strictly considered. Αριςοι κρατείτωσαν, let the best govern. But good must predominate over evil, in human affairs, before power will deign to be the minister of virtue. * The importance of those uassuming parts of speech called prepositions, ought to plead in their behalf with those, who in examining the construction of a sentence, dismiss them unceremoniously by a mere annunci"Cuss [curse] the mutton and you too," ation of their title. The whole meaning of said he, bolting out of the room and slam- a sentence sometimes rests on the humble ming the door so violently as to make King preposition. When we differ with a man, Philip, Napoleon, and the prodigal son it is a quarrel-when we differ from him, it shake with apprehension. is a dissimilarity of opinion or character. I sat quietly for a few minutes to ponder A man who is disappointed in matrimony, on what was to be done in such an emergen- finds that his wife is not the angel be deeincy. I cast my eye on the sheep, and imme-ed her to be-but if he be disappointed of a diately my imagination was transported to wife, he is still a merry bachelor. A man the pleasant meads of Andalusia, and the bright margin of the Guadalquivir. This train of ideas was not likely to assist my determination, as to the most reasonable course to be adopted under the circum-ly provided for another; but a friend of ours stances; for reality was staring me in the face, presenting the snowy waste of the dies of disease, and he dies, alas too frequently, by a doctor. A man who is the last to retire from a fashionable party, discovers that his hat is missing-he is certain who lately walked to his lodgings bare-headed, is ready to affirm as soon as he gets rid of his cold in the head, that it was 10 o'clock | sider us as having been dilatory on this subthe next morning before he was provided ject, we add, that his letter was not receivwith another. A toper has a taste for ed until Saturday the 7th ult. If he will whiskey-punch, he must have cash or cre- favour us with his name and address, we dit to get a taste of it. A patient is redu- will take an early opportunity to send him ced to a skeleton, by bleedings and blisters, all the information which we possess, on a for the benefit of the apothecary and phy-subject which ought to be interesting to all sician, with great rapidity, without any literary men. judgment, and against all rule. A man goes up stairs, when he sits down in the third story he is above stairs. A condemned malefactor hopes for pardon, when the rope is tightening around his neck, he loses all hope of a reprieve. Examples might be multiplied without end, but the reader has hemp-the execution of Negro Jack, In consequence of the great scarcity of probably already exclaimed, "hold, e-(found guilty of murder, at the last court,) nough." * * One of the most singular expressions of gratitude ever made, was that of an eastern legislature or provincial assembly, towards the veteran general Stark. After Stark's gallant affair at Bennington, they voted that he should be presented with the thanks of the country and with *two pieces of linen. Some wag remarked that either General Stark was stark naked, or the assembly was stark mad. * We are not certain as to the number. Suicides. Murders and suicides form the principal items of weekly news. People seem not only desirous to put their fellows out of the world, but also particularly anxious to be off themselves. Is the earth becoming too bad for men, or are men becoming too good for the earth? CROSS READINGS. tan-was built in New-York, of the best of The great hunting Elephant, Tippoo Sulmaterials, and is coppered and copper-fast ened. was postponed. The house of Representatives-are perfectly docile and easily managed by the keepers. The petition of J. R. and others, for a bank charter-blew up with a horrible ex• plosion. The stockholders of the New-York Water Works Co.-had been drinking very freely and became very much exasperated. The narrative of Mr. John D. Hunteris as complete an illusion as we ever witnessed. The South-American Camel-was yes. terday appointed a Master in Chancery. THE ESSAYIST. ON LYRIC POETRY. THAT the Odes of a nation are a picture of their character, cannot be better exemLiterary. "Le Notti Romane al sepol-plified than in the case of the Arabians. cro de' Scipioni." This celebrated work of The Arabs have from time immemorial been Count Alessandro Verri, has been translated a free and independent people, a people into our language, and will shortly be published in this city. a who spurn at subjection, as their wild-horse spurns the yoke. Never, in the annals of history, have they been known to crouch to the conqueror. They have roamed To Correspondents. Will the writer of through the desert, wild, brave, and preletter, dated 12th December last, on the ferring to the confinement of cities the cansubject of an “Association in this city," Opy of heaven and the tented field. The "which has been permitted to expire," has spread itself in a remarkable degree spirit which animates this martial people oblige us with his address? We can sug- through their Odes. These, glowing with gest a plan which, we think, will materially the fiery soul of a nation conscious of its further the objects of that association, and independence, proud of a long line of anrender it permanently useful. It will re- cestry free as themselves, are withal temquire nothing but spirit and perseverance cloudless clime. Love and war, the two pered by the happy influence of an everon the part of the members to ensure suc-grand objects to which their existence is cess. That our correspondent may not con- devoted, are their unceasing theme. The impetuous passion which urges them in the out one spark of true lyric inspiration burnone, and the headlong valour which they ing at his heart; a sort of sneer, in short, display in the other, is there as ardently ex- at every sentiment that is generous, or ropressed, and as fiercely told. There simi-mantic, or lovely, which lets us at once into les, their allegories, their allusions, are all the spirit of that nation, which informs us, taken from the objects of Nature, and the that cultivated, and refined, and polished scenery around them. They compare the though they be, they possess not, or have blue eyes of a fine woman bathed in tears lost, that glow of passion, that soul-thrilling to violets dropping dew, and a victorious chivalry, which is the true essence of the warrior to an eagle sailing through the air, Ode. and piercing the clouds with his wings. And truly, in a country such as theirs, where their tribes frequently traverse boundless tracts of parched and desart sand, and where the eye seeks in vain for some verdant spot on which to rest its wearied orb, these their favourite allusions to green meadows and clear rivulets, must come in with peculiar effect. The Arabian poets were of opinion, that the three most beautiful objects in Nature were a green meadow, a clear rivulet, and a beautiful woman. The lyric poetry of Persia, though beautiful in the extreme, cannot altogether be put into the balance with that of Arabia. There is in their Odes a want of independence of spirit, a want of something, which at once marks a free and noble people, which at once tells us, that the Persians, though perhaps a brave, are yet an indolent and voluptuous race, preferring the undisturbed enjoyment of their pleasures, to that liberty dearer to the Arab than life. Yet there is something too in the Odes of Hafiz of an entrancing nature, something which lulls the senses and enchants the soul. Love is their subject, and love, in its most ardent, most bewitching form. The cloudless sky, the never-changing clime, the richscented gale wafted from the flowers of Araby, seem to have shed their softest, their most balmy influence, over the gentle bards of Persia. Were we to take such notice of those Jyric compositions which have been mentioned as they deserve, much more were we to mention all the nations who have made themselves famous in this department of poetry, we should far exceed the limits of a paper of this kind. Yet are there two nations who stand so eminently forth for learning and science, that it may appear strange that no mention has been made of them. The people to whom I refer are the French and the Greeks. As to the Greeks, though the cause is very different, yet is the effect nearly the same. They have produced lyric writers, who, though they may have been equalled, have yet, I believe, never been surpassed. But we view their compositions to infinite disadvantage, through the dim medium of accumulated ages. How is the face of nature changed since Pindar wrote and Anacreon sung! Since then, how many generations have been swept away-how many nations have risen into glory, and shrunk into insignificancehow many waves have rolled down the stream of time, each succeeding one rendering still more dim the faint traces of things that were! Their monuments of immortality still remain, but manners and customs have undergone an utter revolution. We may flatter ourselves with the idea, that we perceive all the force, and the beauty, and the propriety of the allusions of Pindar to the games of Greece, and that, by the discovery of the circumstance that these were a favourite theme, we transport ourselves to Hellas, and read with the eyes, and hear with the ears of a Greek. But the tone and spirit of that age are gone, never to return; the allusions which were then faultless, cannot be understood; and, in spite of ourselves, our reverence for the Greeks, and for the genius of the poet, we cannot read the digressions of Pindar without a feeling of constraint. We may admire, we may venerate the Odes of ancient times, but we cannot truly appreciate their merits. Over them their hangs a cloud of obscurity which no ray of learning can dispel, and which is daily gathering around them, and shrouding them in thicker darkness. PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY. JAMES G. BROOKS, Editor and Proprietor, No. 4 Wall-street, New-York. As to the first, with the exception, per- Subscriptions received by G. & C. Carvill, 108 Broadhaps, of Quinault and Rousseau, their pro-way-where communications may be left, or transmitductions are a very mockery of lyric poet-ted through the post-office to the editor. ry. There is a prosaic coldness in every • No subscriptions received for a shorter term than one thing of this description which they have written, a something which assures us, that the author has well considered all that he has said, and that he writes, as it were, in the full possession of his sober senses, with year. No letters or communications will be taken out of the Post Office, unless the postage is paid. Terms-Four dollars per annum, payable in advance. J. SEYMOUR, printer, 49 John-street. LITERARY. GERMAN LITERATURE. LUDWIG TIECK. asleep again. Upon Tieck, therefore the character of German poetry in the age following those of Goethe and Schiller will mainly depend, and never did Norwegian or Icelandic spring burst forth more suddenly or with more richness and splendour, than THIS is one among the great German the youth of Ludwig Tieck. There is not in writers who made their appearance during the whole history of literature any poet who the last ten years of the eighteenth centu- can count up so many and so great exploits ry; a period, whether from any extraordi- achieved on his first descent into the arena; nary productiveness in the power that regu- in number and variety even Goethe must lates the seed-time and the harvests of the yield the precedence, though his youthful human race, or from the mighty excite- triumphs were Goetz of Berlichingen and ments and stimulants wherewith the world Werther. There was in Tieck's early was then teeming, among the richest in the works the promise, and far more than the blossoming of genius. For not to mention promise, of the greatest dramatic poet whom the great military talents first developed in Europe had seen since the days of Calderthose days, among the holders of which on; there was a rich elastic buoyant comic were he who conquered all the continent of spirit, but not like the analytical, reflective, Europe, and he before whom that conqueror keen biting wit of Moliere and Congreve fell; turning away from the many rank but and other comic writers of the satirical luxuriant weeds that sprang up in France, school, but like the living merriment, the after all its plants had been manured with uncontrollable, exuberant joyousness, the blood; and fixing the eye solely upon lite- humour arising from good humour, not, as it rary excellence, we find in England that often does, from ill humour, the incarnathe chief part of those men by whom tion, so to say, of the principle of mirth, in we may hope that the memory of our Shakspeare, and Cervantes, and Aristodays will be transmitted to posterity as a phanes and as a wreath of flowers to thing precious and to be held in honour, that crown the whole, there was the heavenly Wordsworth, and Coleridge, and Southey, purity and starlike loveliness of his Geneveand Lamb, and Landor, and Scott, put forth va. Had the rest of Tieck's life kept pace during those ten years the first-fruits of their with the fertility of the six years from 1798 minds; while in Germany the same period to 1804, he must have been beyond all riwas rendered illustrious by Fichte and John|valry the second of German poets; and as Paul Richter at its commencement, and sub- Eschylus in the Frogs shares his supremacy sequently by Schelling, and Hegel, and with Sophocles, so would Goethe have inviSteffens, and Schleiermacher, and the Schle- ted Tieck to sit beside him on his throne. gels, and Novalis, and Tieck. Of this no- Unfortunately for those who would have ble brotherhood, who all, I believe, studied feasted upon his fruits, the poet during the at the same university, that of Jena, and last twenty years has been so weighed down who were all bound together by friendship, by almost unintermitting ill health, that he by affinity of genius, and by unity of aim, has published but little. There was a short the two latter, Novalis and Tieck, were the interval indeed that seemed to bid fairer, poets for though there are several things about the year 1812, when he began to colof great poetical beauty in the works of the lect his tales and lesser dramas, on a plan Schlegels, their fame upon the whole rests something like that of the Decameron, in the on a different basis. The lovely dreamy Phantasus; but it has not yet been carried mind of Novalis was cut off in the full pro- beyond the second reign, out of seven mise of its spring; it only just awoke from through which it was designed to extend. the blissful visions of its childhood, to breathe Of that collection the chief part had been out a few lyrical murmurs, about the mys-known to the world ten or twelve years beteries it had been brooding over, and fell fore: some things however appeared then for the first time, and among them, was the tale of The Love-Charm. Latterly, Tieck's genius has taken a new spring, in a somewhat different direction from that of his youth. He has written half a dozen novels in the manner of the one recently translated nor are the others of less excellence than this; a beautiful tale of magic has also been just published; and the speedy appearance of several other things that have employed him during the long period of seeming inactivity, is promised; among the rest, of his great work upon Shakspeare, wherein he has been engaged more or less for above a quarter of a century, and to gather materials for which he some years since visited England. Of this work the highest expectations may justly be formed: not many people, even in this country, possess more extensive and accurate acquaintance with our ancient drama than Tieck; no one has entered more fully into the spirit of its great poets, than Tieck has shewn himself to have done in the prefaces to his Old English Theatre and his Shakspeare's Vorschule; few have ever bestowed such attention on the history of the stage in all countries, or have so studied the principles of dramatic composition and the nature of dramatic effect; hardly any one ever learnt so much from Shakspeare: no one therefore can have more to teach us about him; and to judge from the remarks on some of the plays which have already been printed in the Abendzeitung, no one was ever so able to trace out the most secret workings of the great master's mind, or to retain his full, calm self-possession when following him on his highest flights; no one ever united in such perfection the great critic with the great poet. One may look forward therefore with confidence to the greatest work in esthetical criticism that even Germany will ever have produced. THE RICCIARDETTO OF FORTEGUERRI. RICCIARDETTO is a younger brother of Rinaldo and Malagigi, names more familiar to the readers of Boiardo and Ariosto. He has killed in battle the son of Scricca, king of the Caffres; and the princess Despina, who is passionately attached to her brother, publicly declares her resolution to bestow her hand on no one but on the champion who shall present her with the head of his murderer. This determination produces a great invasion of France by Scricca and an army of Caffres. There is burlesque in the very ground-work of Forteguerri's story. We have no longer the mighty kings of India and Tartary and Sericane, who, with their pagan chivalry, menace the strong holds of Christendom in the narratives of e genuine romantic poets, The Caffres are joined by the Negroes; and these gi- They are, however, strong, and stout, and bristly, The herald of the Caffre king arrives in Paris with his defiance most inopportunely, when the court of Charlemagne was thinking of nothing but the pleasures of peace. But, while the storm of war was gathering round, Listened to songs of love. in verdant shade, The greater number of the Paladins have set out in various directions in search of the frantic Orlando, and left Paris almost defenceless. Rinaldo goes alone upon his quest towards Persia; Olivieri, Dudone, and others, turn to the North; and Alardo, Astolfo, and Ricciardetto, go to seek him in Spain. We hear somewhat of the adventures which befell them all in these expeditions, but the last party find their mad companion, and assuage the fever of his brain in a way much more scientific than romantic. After opening a vein, The Paladins with pitying care applied A cudgel fifty times in every hour; They arrive at Paris in time for Orlando to take the chief command against the invaders, and put them to utter rout. Rictheir meeting and its consequences are deciardetto, however, and Despina meet; and far above the rank of a mere burlesque poet. scribed in stanzas, which place Forteguerri They become mutually enamoured; and the conflict in Despina's mind between rebed, but introduced with an image of the venge and love is not only forcibly descrimost touching pathos. She seems a mother, on each hand a son, She clasps one, on the other turns her eye; |