alone found his way into the Primer. In the history of letters, Bodmer and Gottsched, with very little merit, have gained vast distinction; and circumstances secure to them always a conspicuous place, when the progress of culture is investigated.

Bodmer, born 1698, was a man of narrow intellect, no originality, and limited taste. His mind was fitted out with an imperfect knowledge of English literature. Of the value of Shakspeare, he had, indeed, no conception; but he fixed himself firmly in the love of Milton. He detested music; and rhyme was a greater offence to him than wine to a faithful Musselman. If a man had a fondness for rhyme in poetry, it was reason enough with Bodmer to question his moral character. Himself destitute of humour and of wit, he questioned their value. Completely engrossed by his own merits, he denied the merits of others, who were beginning to make their way to fame. He held the poetic diction of Homer inferior to his own; and would have thought himself slighted, had his tragedies been called only equal to those of Æschylus and Sophocles; though his imagination was as dry, as are, in spring, the leaves of the preceding year. At first he was a translator and critic, and tried to compete with his Leipzig rival: but at last, when almost fifty years old, he was smit with the desire of becoming an epic poet; and he chose Noah for his subject. Something he contrived to borrow from Milton and others; but his own verse is execrable. The man could not write prose agree ably; but he attains the maximum of ridiculousness, in his catalogue of the beasts that he marches into the Ark, with well-an ranged columns, in hobbling hexameters.

Bodmer has the merit of having revived some earlier German works, that were falling into oblivion. He also was the determined adversary of the Saxon School, which was a bad one. But his motives for opposition were hardly of the best kind; and all that he wrote is in itself of no intrinsic value,-poor in conception, purpose, and execution.

His adversary, Gottsched, born two years after him, had not one spark of genius, nor one impulse of fervent passion, and was utterly destitute of a creating and kindling imagination. His great merit consists in his patriotism. He was a German at heart, and his genuine love of country, as it glimmers in his writings, is the best thing about him. This led him to value his own language, and to plead for preserving its purity. As a critic, he wrote an art of poetry, meagre indeed, and of no original value; yet better than any similar work existing at the time in the German language.

Wholly without enthusiasm, his poetry is made up of commonplaces; he could pour out verses from his mind like water; and was as indefatigable in his labours as a mill stream, that does its work even on holidays. His success at first was prodigious. In

Leipzig, his authority was supreme; and elsewhere, his tragedies were acted with applause. His Cato, a tame imitation of Addison's, passed through ten editions. He contended for dignity; abominated all operas; did his utmost to banish, honest Harlequin from the stage; and always held Shakspeare a complete barbarian. His self-complacency was perfect; he enjoyed his dignity and his literary authority; and, when he was attacked, his pedantry was a shield, that the keenest weapons of his foes could not pierce.

His wife surpassed him in talent. The daughter of an eminent physician, she had, in her childhood, been employed to copy for her father. In her seventeenth year, Gottsched became acquainted with her, and made her an offer of all the love he was capable of feeling. Their courtship, a very rational one, lasted for five years; and then she became his literary assistant, rather than his wife. The marriage was a barren one; and the poor woman had none of the employments or honours of her sex. Their union was but a literary partnership. He made her read Greek and Latin authors of the most heterogeneous character, and in the original languages; concealed behind a partition of tapestry, she was compelled to listen, as he screamed out his lectures, and to take notes of them too; she daily translated for the press; she wrote tragedies, comedies, and reviews for him; she carried on his correspondence with public men and scholars; she wrote prefaces and poems; in the division of labour, he composed the elaborate treatises, and she, when they were ridiculed, defended her husband in epigrams. And for fear the poor woman should find time to come to her senses, she had to write the titles of books on the backs of some thousand volumes in the professor's library. All that she composed, under such auspices, is of little value. More feeling and nature are expressed in her private letter to a female friend, to whom, about three months before her death, she writes:-"I have sad news to tell you; I am losing my eyesight almost entirely. Oh, how I long to hear the hour of my dissolution strike. Do you ask for the cause of my sickness? Here it is. Twenty-eight years of unbroken labour, secret sorrow, and tears without number, which God only has seen flow."

Yet of one man, who, at this early period strove for the honours of successful verse, we must speak with unmingled veneration. Albert Haller, a native of Bern, a pupil of Boerhaave, had been led by the restless impulse of his own mind, to engage in studies in almost every department of learning; and was inspired to become a poet, by the mountains of his native land. In his youth, he wrote pastorals, and an epic poem of some thousands of lines. These he threw into the flames, in his twentieth year. His poem of the Alps, was written by him while yet a minor. Attempting to exercise his profession, as a physician, in Bern, he vas not very successful; but Münchhausen, the father of the Geor

gia Augusta, perceived his merit, and invited him to Göttingen. There the results of his efforts were extraordinary, in promoting a public interest in the youthful university, in gaining confidence in himself, and then in employing the influence thus acquired, for the establishing and perfecting the fixtures that are requisite for a high school of learning. After he had been professor at Göttingen, seventeen years, he longed for his own country again, for his native city in the Canton, which is filled with the brightest and boldest scenes, that Europe can show, of natural sublimity; where the brooks, that come from the dissolving snows, leap down precipices of so many hundred feet, that they are dissipated into spray, as they fall; where flowers grow by the side of masses of ice, and the mountains produce the plants of coldest regions, just above the ripening grape: he longed for his native city, where one man in four attains the age of seventy; where the eye embraces from the hills, in one view, the brightest glories of the crowded Alps; and, looking beyond the fertile fields of the immediate vicinity, beholds in the distance, the glaciers, as they sparkle in the sunbeams, and flash with light. In Göttingen, he had every wish for the advancement of his science gratified; but then he was in the midst of active and ambitious and contentious minds, whose clashing interests did not fail to breed dislikes; and so his mountain land won him again to independence. Being still in the best years of manhood, as he returned to Bern, he gave himself up in part to science, and in part to his countrymen. To the learned periodical, issued at Göttingen, he continued to contribute, till finally the number of his articles in that work amounted to 12,000. Twelve thousand we write in words, lest incredulity should strike off a cypher, as a mistake of the pen. It is related of Heyne, by his son-in-law, that he wrote, at a moderate estimate, three reviews a week; in all, seven or eight thousand at the least. Perhaps Heyne's activity is too moderately rated; and Haller's, perhaps too highly. But if we take away a couple of thousand, there will still remain enough to astonish. In practical life, Haller showed a benevolent and humane activity. He was always honoured with the magistracy; he devised a plan for an orphan-house; he reformed the medical police; he took care that the poor should have good salt to their bread; he settled dissensions about boundaries between the cantons; and all the while continued to advance science, by his careful labours; and conducted a wide correspondence in the polished dialects of Europe. Meantime, the sovereigns of Europe strove to win him to their states; the leading Universities of Halle and of Göttingen, solicited him to be their chancellor ; the learned societies of Europe, vied in electing him their assoeiate; the Russian government desired to win him for St. Petersburgh; the King of Sweden decorated him with the order of the

Polar Star; and Joseph II., who, for his travelling at least, we will call the modern Hadrian, sought him out in his retirement. But Haller was, in the common sense, neither ambitious nor happy. His own nature was gloomy; his spirit was, emphatically, a wounded one. In his seventieth year, he escaped from the sorrows of a melancholy temperament, and a sickly frame; having, the year before his death, published the eleventh edition of his poems.

The praise of Haller, in the sciences, extends as far as the sciences which he advanced. In the department of poetry, it is his praise, that of all men, whose memory lives in literary history, as in a similar degree eminent for erudition and science, he stands the first as a poet. From Aristotle to Blumenbach, among students of natural history, he has here no rival. His poems have more feeling than fancy; the correctness of his understanding surpasses the brilliancy of his imagination. Yet in his poems, he never obtrudes his character, as a scientific man; he writes from his own warm feelings; the earnestness of religion communicates to his verse an air of solemnity. His poetic style is harsh; and his thoughts, sometimes, are hardly less so. His diction is not uniformly correct; and his manner seldom has freedom and ease. His "Alps" had no model, in the literature of his language; the tone of sentiment pervading the poem, is eminently moral; the descriptions are just, but sometimes too minute and trivial; noble reflections are interspersed amidst description. Of his elegiac poems, that on the death of his first wife is most admired. It is simple and touching; and a mildness of affection is expressed in language of real, and, as it would seem, of lasting sorrow. But his marrying again, not long after, and then a third time, spoils the poetry of his regrets.

A greater and a better impulse was given to German letters, by a young student of theology, who, having passed several years of quiet industry at the celebrated school of Schulpforte, and then pursued his studies as a theologian, first at Jena, and afterwards at Leipzig, published while yet but twenty-three years old, the first cantos of a poem, which will never be forgotten. The outlines of Klopstock's life are simple and highly honourable to his moral worth. Born with little inheritance but his genius, he spent the best years of his youth in a cloister school, where his mind was replenished, and his taste formed, by an intimate study of the Greek and Roman authors. In Leipzig, among his young contemporaries, he found those that became dear to him, from a similarity of pursuits and ambition. His mind, which, at an early period, had conceived the idea of winning immortality by writing an epic, teemed with the design; and though it had been his original purpose to wait, till his power was matured, yet the fervour of his own mind did not admit of delay, in

commencing his work; and his friends induced him to appear at once before the public, with three books, which were finished. The effect produced by it, was immense. A new prospect opened for German letters, and admiration was excited, alike for what had already been accomplished, and for the greater hopes awakened for the future. In 1748, the poet, though still at an early age, covered with the glory of unbounded success, went to Langensalza, as a teacher in a private family; there he became deeply enamoured of a girl, who did not return his affection. The nation heard with astonishment, that there lived the German maid, that could be indifferent to the suit of the poet of the Messiah, to whom the laurel had been decreed, as it were, by acclamation. Letters were sent from remote parts, to the obdurate fair, conjuring her to yield her heart, and become the inspiring muse of her lover. All in vain; and Klopstock, deeply chagrined, is said never to have given way again to the impetuosity of passion. He never forgot his ill success;-in the days of his dignity, he remembered his unrequited passion, as a sinful weakness. His fancy lost something of its delicacy, and his manner assumed something more of dignity. From that time, he appears in state, as officially a poet, having a diplomatic character to sustain, as the ambassador of the muses, and representative of morality, the model for the nation. Holding himself ever after, superior to the troubles of earthly existence, he seems always to have worn on his brow, the laurel which was charmed against the lightnings and the storms of life.

Bodmer invited him into Switzerland; and there he remained on the lake of Zurich, in the midst of those natural beauties, which are lavished on that favoured land, venerated even in his youth. His mind received the best impulses, from his short residence in Switzerland; and, among his odes, there are several very fine ones, which relate to that period. In 1751, the King of Denmark invited Klopstock to reside at Copenhagen, to finish his Messiah; and gave him, for that purpose, a salary of less than three hundred dollars. On his way to Copenhagen, which was his place of residence, from 1751 to 1771, he saw in Hamburgh, a lady to whom he had a letter of introduction, as a profound admirer of his poetry. This lady, after a courtship of three years, became his wife; but, in about four years after their marriage, died in childbed, leaving him a childless widower. He left Copenhagen in 1771, and established himself at Hamburgh. He remained unmarried thirty-three years, leading a life above all reproach; and then, in his old age, was married to a lady whom he had long known. With youthful zeal, he participated in the enthusiasm consequent on the French Revolution, till the scenes of blood ensued. He died in 1803; and his funeral, though in point of fortune and station in civil life, his condition was not