and noble men, whom none of us had the opportunity of pressing to his heart; that many thousand years more may yet follow, leading over them men of heavenly, perhaps sorrowful, minds, who will never meet us, but at most our urns, and whom we should be so glad to love; and that only a few poor decades of years bring before us a few fleeting forms, which turn their eyes towards us, and bear within them the brother-heart for which we are longing. Embrace those hieing forms; your tears alone will make you feel that you have been loved.
"And even this, that a man's hand reaches through so few years, and gets so few kind hands to lay hold of, must excuse him for writing a book: his voice reaches further than his hand; his love, hemmed in a narrow circle, diffuses itself into wider spheres; and when he himself is no more, still his thoughts hover, gently whispering, in the paper-foliage, whose rustling and shade, transient like other dreams, beguile the weary hours of many a far distant heart. And this is my wish, though I scarcely dare hope it. But if there be some noble, gentle soul, so full of inward life, of recollection, and of fancy, that it overflows at the sight of my weak imaginings,—that in reading this history it hides itself and its gushing eye, which it cannot master, because it here finds again its own departed friends, and bygone days, and dried-up tears; oh, then,—thou art the loved soul of which I thought while I was writing, though I knew thee not; and I am thy friend, albeit never was of thine acquaintance,"—Wuz, Leben, s. W., t. vii. pp. 177-179.
Such was the frame of mind of Jean Paul at the opening of the second and brighter part of his literary career, during which he produced—besides the unfinished tale of "The Invisible Lodge," the hero of which is, at the close of the third volume, left in a prison, into which he had been cast by some unexplained blunder—-his three most highly-finished and most celebrated novels, "Hesperus," "Siebenkäs," and "Titan."
The first of these, "The Invisible Lodge," is an attempt to exhibit human nature under the effects of an early development of mind and heart, free from all the corrupting influences of the world, and directed towards the worship of God in nature. For this purpose, the author has had recourse to a whimsical device, which will at once remind our readers of the strange story of Caspar Hauser, and which, it is far from improbable, may have suggested the first idea of that romance in real life. Gustavus, the hero of the "Invisible Lodge," is educated for the first ten years of his life in a subterraneous pædagogium, with no other living associate but his tutor and a white poodle dog. On his eleventh birth-day the child emerges from this hypochthonian nursery and schoolroom, through a long passage which opens in the side of the mountain upon the upper world; with many precautions to prevent injury to his eyesight and his physical health, and
