there could be no sea, but that of time"—one whom experience disciplines into the resolve to live in the present wisely, alike forgetful of the past and uncareful for the shrouded future; to be a man among men, and no longer a dreamer among shadows, and to record upon the leaves that still remain of the book of life a more noble history than the child's story with which the book began. Interesting, too, is the Baron of Hohenfels, that "miscellaneous youth,"—everything by turns, but nothing long, or great—his master-defect the amiable one of thinking too well of human nature. And so is the Englishman, Berkley,—the basis of his character "good, sound common sense, trodden down and smoothed by education," forming a level groundwork which his "strange and whimsical fancy uses as a dancing-floor, whereon to exhibit his eccentric tricks"—who eats his breakfast sitting in a tub of cold water, and reading a newspaper—who has a kiss for every child he meets, and a benedicite (in plain English) for every old man—who pronounces the Righi sunrise a confounded humbug—-and writes in the traveller's book at Schaffhausen,
Beware of the Raven of Zurich! 'tis a bird of omen ill;
With a noise and an unclean nest, and a very, very long bill.
Glimpses of German life and manners we find scattered here and there, not without their attraction,—whether a touching sketch of home charities, or a rough draft of a "fox commerce" and "beer scandal," with its slang, its boisterous practical jokes, its choruses, beer-bibbings extraordinary, and duels infinite.
"Kavanagh" is a tale more delicately and artistically wrought—containing passages of beautiful tenderness and earnest thought, together with interesting studies of character and minutely-finished pictures of life. But a certain shadowy medium intervenes between reader and book—the latter is bookish, and has the impress of the man of letters rather than the man conversant with life. This gives, perhaps, an additional charm to certain phases of his subject, but it impairs the effect of the story as a whole, and the reality of the actors. Emphatically individualised as these are—Kavanagh, ever planning, never completing; another Coleridge in sanguine speculation, and eke in infirmity of will,—Alice Archer, too exquisitely sensitive, too fragile alike in person and character,—Cecilia Vaughan, dreamily poetic, indefinably fascinating,—still do we miss in each portraiture the vivifying touch of creative art. But nothing can be more delightful of its kind than the pervading style of this fiction; nothing more happily expressed than the apophthegms and aphorisms with which it abounds; nor were it easy to excel in affecting beauty the scenes between Cecilia and Alice, or in strange effectiveness that of the camp-meeting by night.
From one in the prime of life, and who has made such a marked and rapid advance in literary development, we may justly, and do heartily, look for future performances, both in verse and prose, decidedly superior to the best of his present achievements. He will yet, we trust, produce "metal more attractive" than even the gold of the "Golden Legend"—and sun himself in a sunnier "Hyperion"—and act "Excelsior" as well as sing it, in his minstrel vocation, which is—
So to act that each to-morrow
Find him farther than to-day.
