conception and execution. Thus a song of a few perfect verses is really a greater and more enduring monument of mind than a second-rate epic, or other pyramidical poem, or to any rough scene-painting of the passions, in which so much of even second-class tragedy consists. Some of Uhland's little ballads and discursive essays in verse are perfection, judged by the ideal the poet had in his head when he composed them. Some are derived from old national and mythologic traditions, but it is not ballads of this class which we most admire, but some of his briefer ballad poems, which have a sort of double sou!— a sort of delicate allegoric and moral inner meaning. L'Allegorie qui inhabite un palais diaphane is only effective in short compositions when it accompanies the objective form, or like its spiritual shadow. Among Uhland's most charming ballads, for detail, art and ideality, is "The Black Knight," where there is a description of the courteous figure joining in the dance in an ancient castle. He selects as his partner a beautiful maiden: as they enjoy the music and motion, the flowers begin to wither and drop from her wreath; the music at first so joyous grows mournful, and seems to come from a distance; and when the maiden rests from the dance, she has ceased to breathe-for the Dark Knight her partner was Death. Still better are the verses "Across the Ferry." An old man in a boat is crossing the river he had not visited since he was young; he recalls the dear friends who were then his companions: they are now no more; and when he reaches the opposite bank he gives the ferryman two additional coins, paying for the passage of the dear dead ones who had passed it with him-companions of his heart's memory. Uhland's brief sketches of scenery-for instance, his little verses on "Spring"-are composed of words which are like drops of sunny rain; some of his patriotic poems are fine in thought and measure; and his best verses are as peculiarly Teutonic as any of those of Schiller or Goethe. His Fairy poems also are peculiar in the sweet German homeliness of their details, and the spiritual simplicity of their fancy. His manner is rather to tell a story by suggestion than to work it out in the ordinary descriptive modethis is ideal treatment. Besides his narrative ballads, he has written a number of songs and little verses embodying impressions of nature, passing moods of mind, sweet, joyous, or sad. Some of these are like little floating shadows, distant lights, or fine chords of music, struck and dying on the air. Many such are melancholy. Of Uhland's melancholy and aspiring musings, the following is an instance, taken at random from his short poems :-

"As through the night-calm I tread
With soul full of solemn fancies,

Full of radiant necromancies,

Like moon-clouds o'er the sleeping Dead,
Something of the Infinite I borrow,

Here is another mood, entitled, "A Spring Holiday":

"Oh! sweet Spring noon, which balmily
Quickens my pulse with sunshine gay :
If ever a song succeed with me,
It must succeed to-day..

But why beneath the beauteous clime,
Would I not know some happy lay?
Ah! Spring is the poet's festal time,
A time to rest in light, and pray.'

Heine is in some respects a higher order of poet than Uhland. His "Buch der Lieder," besides its brief and charming melancholy verses, contains music and legendary ballads: "Le Chevalier Olaf," "Harold Herfanger," "Almanzor," and the "Undines;" but its grandest poetry is in the series of verses on the "North Sea," "Posadon," "The Storm," whose strophes have the majestic undulations of the waves. Those verses are sombre; steeped in the grey shadows of the polar clouds.

In his youth, Uhland's favourite study was the old ballad of German literature; on it he partly formed his style, bu he has a manner peculiarly his own, delicate and ideal, which renders the conceptions of the poet of a cultivated age superior to the old minstrelsy of Vaterland. The ballad generally narrates a story or incident, but many such are little epics; and this form of poetry can be made to comprise in petto all the elements of the epic, dramatic incident, character, dialogue, scene and situation. Not a few examples are to be found in the ballad collections of various countries which exhibit unsurpassable traits of descriptive force, and the most touching simplicity; unlike the imaginative scenes extemporized by a writer, they are like the narrations of an individual who had witnessed or acted in the scene described. In Percy's English collection, there are many such; many in our old Celtic poetry. The ballad poetry of Europe and the East is coloured with the race characteristics and climates in which it originated. How different in style and metre are the Homeric rhapsodies of war and voyage to the stern or sweet, wild or gloomy songs of Scandinavia-heroic songs, dreamlegends, which seem moulded by the winds out of the grey clouds of the north!-how different those from the chivalrous, romantic, amorous Spanish ballad, half Iberian, half Moorish: so full of the hot sunshine of southern passion; whose images are those of a warm climate-flowers and odours-not clouds, grasses, and heath, rocks and waves,

THE PALACE OF DREAMS.

PART II.

Dreaming in space beneath the magic night,
Pictures still rose before the poet's sight,
Rich fragment fancies, floating cloudlets fanned
By winds of sunset lovely, lone, or grand,
Austere and terrible with thunder-light,
Like vignettes framed by some enchanter's hand,
When in a mood of phantasy he'd form
Visions of beauty calm, or gloom and storm,
Of meditative heaven, or shuddering hell,
Which, so imagined, fine or fair or fell,
Mind to the scenic sense made visible.

Now seemed a region in wide air to rise,
A land of sweet autumnalized repose,
Still as the spaces which the quiet skies
Reveal through western drifts of watery rose
Serene, round morn or even's steady star:
First in the silence he beheld afar,

Beyond an unknown coast, in clear sea day,

The glimmering levels of a quiet bay,

Whose tide toward ocean outward flowed away;
With fronting mountains, keen as purple spar,

And low, mellowing slopes of mingled grey;

Streams that in sleep through searing woodlands wound
Rocks-flowers of innocent beauty-all things round
Are toned with colours of the quiet glow;
And from the deep mid-channel's loneliness
He heard its solitary murmur swoon,
Ebbing to sca in the still afternoon,
Beyond the capes remote and cool and low,
That scarce above the watery distance show;
While o'er the skiey ridges calm, and o'er
The breathing yellow land and sandy shore,
The Eden beauty of the dreaming light
Enchants the wonder-wandering sight:
A sleeping picture, clear and sweet,
And fair as it is fleet-

For now 'tis melted into air, and soon,

As under some black vapour drives the moon,
Out in the stormy sunshine of a green
And heavy, rolling, rounding main, is seen,

'Mid careless, curling billows and flying spray,
Scudding under a steep-walled promontory
And wind-blown fortress brown, an argosy
Of ancient time, toil through the water's sway,
With square sail bellied and high surfy prow
Aslant, amid the outward billows bounding
Into the open, and the precipice rounding,
Plunge through the surges of the stormier sca,
A ship that wafted many a martial form
Upon a mission heroic and sublime;

And with them one fair northern maid, whose heart
From her steeled lover could not beat apart,

Living a lone life, like a broken rhyme,
But held by him for battle and for storm
Crusading; for it seemed the stirring time
When Europe witnessed her strong sons depart
To wrest the Holy Land from pagan sway.
Hell's mortal shadow resting dark upon
The Orient, wrapped in tumult and affray,
And toward the tomb of the Divinest One
Whose Spirit has celestialized our clay,

• Hurried like stormy clouds from the western grey;
Nor rest was there for thousands until they
Followed the trumpet toward the rising sun.
Still traced the dreamer the great vessel's flight,
Which, through the roaring darkness of the night
Scudded a solitary sea, afar

From friendly gleam of helm-directing star.

A darker change o'erspread the visioned vast,
As though subterrene night eclipsed the noon;
Nor more a music of Romance, but from
The pyramid heart of some sublimer pocm

Or lyre, from whose dark chords low thunders broke,
With lightnings which revealed the destiny

Of good and evil, in eternity,

Vibrating o'er the deserts of time awoke

A gloomier vision in his spirit's dome.

He thought he awoke with the sound of a mighty bell,
And heard its doleful cadences expire

O'er a windy waste where darkness fell
In flashes from a firmament of hell,
Silent, starless, strange and vast,

The while he wandered among
Sights and silences terrible;
Until he came at last

To where a desolate antre, all o'erhung
With roof of lower-lowering angry fire,

Skirting a fathomless main ;

Where wandered wide a desolate host
Apart, in torment, lonely and lost,
Of flaming fiend and anguished ghost;
Some of aspect cruel and cold,
Breathless with hatred and disdain
For mortal and immortal, and deep eyes
Stone-sullen, under brows of serpent fold:

There some, gnashing their rage with bloody tongue,
Mumbled inarticulate blasphemies;

And some couched moody, waiting with sad minds
The rising of the torture winds,

Shrank in prospective pain;

But soon swept upon the blast
That swooned from the eternal past,

The region faded into vaporous grey:

And from the shadowing frontier of that hell. Loomed vaguely a dominion where abode

The phantoms of old Wars,

Battalions, under the gaunt throne of Death ;-
And that, too, clouded away.

There rose upon his sight

A host, bright as a firmament of stars,

And flashed, and, like the northern light,

Sank into solitudes of night,

Where a great moon's blank and sombre face

Like some old lonely god's eternal tomb—

Shone, mouldering in forgotten space,

Among the austere wrecks of olden doom.

Through space the Dreamer's spirit wandered still :
When, as obeying fancy fixed by will,
Rose on his view the regions infinite,

Thronged with the systems and the worlds, between
Whose primal and reflected seas of light

Vast shadows coursed the hollow, where were seen
Primordial influences spreading wide,

'Twixt sphere and sphere, system with system buoyed Upon the impalpable bosom of the void,

Like billows of an omnipresent tide,

Now rolled in one and by the force destroyed;

And now new centres taking shape once more,
To roll again around some luminous shore,
Innumerable suns sequent as waves,

Alike the womb of planets and their graves;
But he beheld all where in sun and sphere
Conditions ripening to an end, as here
Results of Deitific, Prescient Cause

K