II.

In der Fluthen Schooss hinabgesunken Blieben unten ihre Trümmer stehn, Ihre Zinnen lassen goldne Funken Wiederscheinend auf dem Spiegel sehn.

III.

Und der Schiffer, der den Zauberschimmer
Einmal sah im hellen Abendroth,
Nach derselben Stelle schifft er immer,
Ob auch rings umher die Klippe droht.

IV.

Aus des Herzens tiefem, tiefem Grunde
Klingt es mir, wie Glocken, dumpf und matt:
Ach, sie geben wunderbare Kunde
Von der Liebe, die geliebt es hat.

V.

Eine schöne Welt ist da versunken, Ihre Trümmer blieben unten stehn, Lassen sich als goldne Himmelsfunken Oft im Spiegel meiner Träume sehn.

VI.

Und dann möcht' ich tauchen in die Tiefen,
Mich versenken in den Wiederschein,
Und mir ist als ob mich Engel riefen
In die alte Wunderstadt herein.

I wish I could add one of Klaus Groth's tales (Vertells, as he calls them), which give the most truthful description of all the minute details of life in Dithmarschen, and bring the peculiar character of the country and of its inhabitants vividly before the eyes of the reader. But, short as they are, even the shortest of them would fill more pages than could here be spared for Schleswig-Holstein. I shall, therefore, conclude this sketch. with a tale which has no author-a simple tale from one of the local Holstein newspapers. It came to me in a heap of other papers, flysheets, pamphlets, and books, but it shone like a diamond in a heap of rubbish; and, as the tale of "The Old Woman of Schleswig-Holstein," it may help to give to many who have been unjust to the inhabitants of the Duchies some truer idea of the stuff there is in that staunch and sterling race to which England owes its language, its best blood, and its honoured name.

II.

On the bosom of the flood reclining,

Ruined arch and wall and broken spire, Down beneath the watery mirror shining, Gleam and flash in flakes of golden fire.

III.

And the Boatman who at twilight hour
Once that magic vision shall have seen,
Heedless how the crags may round him lour,
Evermore will haunt the charmed scene.

IV.

From the heart's deep hollow faintly pealing,
Far I hear them, bell-notes sad and slow,
Ah, a wild and wondrous tale revealing
Of the drowned wreck of love below.

V.

There a world in loveliness decaying
Lingers yet in beauty ere it die;
Phantom forms across my senses playing,
Flash like golden fire-flakes from the sky.

VI.

Lights are gleaming, fairy bells are ringing, And I long to plunge and wander free, Where I hear the angel-voices singing

In those ancient towers below the sea.

tributions. At Hamburg, Messrs. L. and K. had set apart a large room for receiving lint, linen, and warm clothing, or small sums of money. One day, about Christmas, a poorly clad woman from the country stepped in and inquired, in the pure Holstein dialect, whether contributions were received here for Schleswig-Holstein. The clerk showed her to a table covered with linen rags and such like articles. But she turned away and pulled out an old leather purse, and, taking out pieces of money, began to count aloud on the counter: "One mark, two marks, three marks," till she had finished her ten marks. "That makes ten marks," she said, and shoved the little pile away. The clerk, who had watched the poor old woman while she was arranging her small copper and silver coins, asked her: "From whom does the money come?"

"From me," she said, and began counting again, "One mark, two marks, three marks." Thus she went on empty

ten small heaps of coin, of ten marks each. Then, counting each heap once over

marks for Schleswig Holstein; be so good as to send them to the soldiers."

While the old peasant woman was doing her sums, several persons had gathered round her; and, as she was leaving the shop, she was asked again in a tone of surprise from whom the money came.

"From me," she said; and, observing that she was closely scanned, she turned back, and, looking the man full in the face, she added, smiling: "It is all honest money; it won't hurt the good cause."

The clerk assured her that no one had doubted her honesty, but that she herself had, no doubt, often known want, and that it was hardly right to let her contribute so large a sum, probably the whole of her savings.

The old woman remained silent for a time, but, after she had quietly examined the faces of all present, she said: "Surely it concerns no one how I got the money. Many a thought passed through my heart while I was counting that money. You would not ask me to tell you all? But you are kind gentlemen, and you take much trouble for us poor people. So I'll tell you whence the money came. Yes, I have known want; food has been scarce with me many a day, and it will be so again, as I grow older. But our gracious Lord watches over us. He has helped me to bear the troubles which He sent. He will never forsake me. My husband has been dead this many and many a year. I had one only son; and my John was a fine stout fellow, and he worked hard, and he would not leave his old mother. He made my home snug and comfortable. Then came the war with the Danes. All his friends joined the army; but the only son of a widow, you know, is free. So he remained at home, and no one said to him, Come along with us,' for they knew that he was a brave boy, and that it broke his very heart to stay behind. I knew it all. I watched him when the people talked of the war, or when the schoolmaster brought the newspaper. Ah, how he turned pale and red, and how he looked away, and thought his

6

said nothing to me, and I said nothing to him. Gracious God, who could have thought that it was so hard to drive our oppressors out of the land? Then came the news from Fredericia! That was a dreadful night. We sat in silence opposite each other. We knew what was in our hearts, and we hardly dared to look at each other. Suddenly he rose and took my hand, and said, Mother!' -God be praised, I had strength in that moment-John,' I said, 'our time has come; go in God's name. I know how thou lovest me, and what thou hast suffered. God knows what shall become of me if I am left quite alone, but our Lord Jesus Christ will forsake neither thee nor me.' John enlisted as a volunteer. The day of parting came. Ah, I am making a long story of it all! John stood before me in his new uniform. Mother,' he said, one request before we part-if it is to be-' 'John,' I said to him, 'I know what thou meanest-Oh, I shall weep, I shall weep very much when I am alone; but my time will come, and we shall meet again in the day of our Lord, John and the land shall be free, John! the land shall be free !'"

Heavy tears stood in the poor old woman's eyes as she repeated her sad tale; but she soon collected herself, and continued: "I did not think then it would be so hard. The heart always hopes even against hope. But for all that"-and here the old woman drew herself up, and looked at us like a queen- I have never regretted that I bade him go. Then came dreadful days; but the most dreadful of all was when we read that the Germans had betrayed the land, and that they had given up our land with all our dead to the Danes ! Then I called on the Lord and said, 'Oh Lord, my God, how is that possible? Why lettest thou the wicked triumph and allowest the just to perish?' And I was told, that the Germans were sorry for what they had done, but that they could not help it. But that, gentlemen, I could never understand. We should never do wrong, nor allow wrong to be

cannot always remain so; our good Lord knows His own good time, and in His own good time He will come and deliver us. And I prayed every evening that our gracious Lord would permit me to see that day when the land should be free, and our dear dead should sleep no more in Danish soil. And, as I had no other son against that day, I saved every year what I could save, and on every Christmas Eve I placed it before me on a table, where, in former years, I had always placed a small present for my John, and I said in my heart, 'The war will come again, and the land will be free, and thou shalt sleep in a free grave, my only son, my John!' And now, gentlemen, the poor old woman has been told that the day has come, and that her prayer has been heard, and that the war will begin again; and that is why she has brought her money, the money she saved for her son.

Good

morning, gentlemen," she said, and was going quickly away.

But, before she had left the room, an old gentleman said, loud enough for her to hear, "Poor body! I hope she may not be deceived."

"Ah," said the old woman, turning back, "I know what you mean; I have been told all is not right yet. But have faith, men! the wicked cannot prevail against the just; man cannot prevail against the Lord. Hold to that, gentlemen; hold fast together, gentlemen! This very day I-begin to save up again."

Bless her, good old soul! And, if Odin were still looking out of his window in the sky as of yore, when he granted victory to the women of the Lombards, might he not say even now:

"When women are heroes,

What must the men be like?
Theirs is the victory;
No need of me."

FROM the year 1801-2-at which I left Chalmers, in the flush of his glorious youth, with some extraordinary future evidently before him, but its nature then undetermined-I overleap at once a period of twenty years. Alighting on his career again, about the year 1821-2, I find him then, in the full manhood of fortytwo, in a position definite enoughthe greatest pulpit-orator, beyond all comparison, in Scotland, and with a fame, on this and other grounds, which had gone over the whole of Britain. The place of his residence, astir from week to week with the immediate excitement of his oratory and proud of so farfamed and far-flashing a possession, was the city of Glasgow. In 1815, Chalmers, at the age of thirty-five, had, by the

become minister of the Tron parish in that city, containing a population of about 11,000 souls; and he remained in Glasgow till 1823, or eight years in allfor the first four (1815-1819) as minister of this Tron parish, and for the last four (1819-1823) as minister of a new parish, called St. John's, formed almost expressly on his account in the poorest part of the city, and containing a population of over 10,000 persons, mostly of the operative class. Within a few months after his arrival in Glasgow, the degree of D.D. had been conferred on him by the University of the city, so that from 1816 to his death he was known as Dr. Chalmers-the additional honours conferred upon him from time to time, such as the corresponding mem

and the degree of D.C.L. from the University of Oxford in 1835, making no difference in his designation. I have chosen the year 1821-2, when he was in the middle of his incumbency in St. John's parish, and when Edward Irving was his assistant there, as the particular year in which to observe him; but I shall range, in this paper, over the whole eight years of his Glasgow popularity.

Popularity! yes, let me keep the word, and take the risk of whatever disagreeable associations it is apt to call up. For those eight years of his life he was thought of and spoken of as Dr. Chalmers, the famous popular preacher. That the reader may have an idea, however, of the exact nature of his reputation in this character, and of the altogether unusual respect accorded to him, not only by the city in which he dwelt, but by the most cultivated and critical opinion of the time, comparing him with the most eminent of his Scottish or even British contemporaries of all kinds whatsoever, I will quote from a witness not likely to be suspected of partiality or exaggeration in the case. In the year 1819, there was published, anonymously, by the late Mr. John Gibson Lockhart, then a young man of five-and-twenty, fresh from Oxford and his travels in Germany, and beginning his peculiar literary career in Edinburgh, a book in three volumes, called Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk. It is a whimsical kind of description, with much satire intermingled, of Scotland and its notabilities of that day, in the guise of letters from a certain Peter Morris, of Pensharpe Hall, Aberystwith, to his friend and fellow-Welshman, the Rev. David Williams. Among the persons described in it are Scott, Dugald Stewart, Jeffrey, Leslie, Playfair, and most of the other Edinburgh lions of five-and-thirty years ago. Rough portraits of some of them (after pen-and-ink sketches by Lockhart himself, as I suppose) are introduced to assist the text. But Peter makes a run to Glasgow; and none of his descriptions of the Edinburgh men is half so enthusiastic as that which he thence sends to his correspondent of the

"Yesterday, being Sunday, I threw myself into the midst of one of those overwhelming streams [of Glasgow people going to church], and allowed myself to float on its swelling waves to the church of the most celebrated preacher in this place, or rather, I should say, the most celebrated preacher of the day in the whole of Scotland-Dr. Chalmers. I had heard so much of this remarkable man in Edinburgh that my curiosity in regard to him had been wound up to a high pitch, even before I found myself in the midst of this population, to which his extraordinary character and genius furnish by far the greatest object of interest and attention. . . . I was a good deal surprised and perplexed with the first glimpse I obtained of his countenance ;. for the light that streamed faintly upon it for the moment did not reveal anything like that general outline of feature and visage for which my fancy had, by some strange working of presentiment, prepared me. By-and-by, however, the light became stronger, and I was enabled to study the minutiae of his face pretty leisurely while he leant forward and read the words of the psalm-for that is always done in Scotland, not by the clerk, but by the clergyman himself. At first sight, no doubt, his face is a coarse one; but a mysterious kind of meaning breathes from every part of it that such as have eyes to see cannot be long without discovering. It is very pale, and the large, half-closed eyelids have a certain drooping melancholy weight about them which interested me very much, I understood not why. The lips, too, are singularly pensive in their mode of falling down at the sides, although there is no want of richness and vigour in their central fulness of curve. The upper lip, from the nose downwards, is separated by a very deep line, which gives a sort of leonine firmness of expression to all the lower part of the face. The cheeks are square and strong, in texture like pieces of marble, with the cheekbones very broad and prominent. The eyes themselves are light in colour, and have a strange dreamy heaviness that conveys any idea rather than that of dullness, but which contrasts, in a wonderful manner, with the dazzling watery glare they exhibit when expanded in their sockets and illuminated into all their flame and fervour in some moment of high entranced enthusiasm. But the shape of the forehead is perhaps the most singular part of the whole visage; and, indeed, it presents a mixture so very singular of forms commonly exhibited, only in the widest separation that it is no wonder I should have required some little time to comprehend the meaning of it. In the first place it is without exception the most marked mathematical forehead I have ever met with-being far wider across the eyebrows than either Mr. Playfair's or Mr. Leslie's; and having the eyebrows themselves lifted up at their extreme ends quite out of

had remarked in the countenances of almost all the great mathematical and calculating geniuses. Immediately above the extraordinary breadth of this region, which, in the heads of most mathematical persons, is surmounted by no fine points of organization whatever-immediately above this, in the forehead of Dr. Chalmers, there is an arch of imagination, carrying out the summit boldly and roundly in a style to which the heads of very few poets present anything comparable; while over this again there is a grand apex of high and solemn veneration and love, such as might have graced the bust of Plato himself, and such as in living men I have never beheld equalled in any but the majestic head of Canova. The whole is edged with a few crisp dark locks, which stand forth boldly and afford a fine relief to the death-like paleness of those massive temples. . . . Never perhaps did the world possess any orator whose minutest peculiarities of gesture and voice have more power in increasing the effect of what he says-whose delivery, in other words, is the first and the second and the third excellence of his oratory more truly than is that of Dr. Chalmers. And yet, were the spirit of the man less gifted than it is, there is no question these, his lesser peculiarities, would never have been numbered among his points of excellence. His gestures are neither easy nor graceful; but, on the contrary, extremely rude and awkward; his pronunciation is not only broadly national, but broadly provincial-distorting almost every word he utters into some barbarous novelty, which, had his hearers leisure to think of such things, might be productive of an effect at once ludicrous and offensive in a singular degree. But, of a truth, these are things which no listener can attend to while this great preacher stands before him, armed with all the weapons of the most commanding eloquence and swaying all round him with its imperial rule. At first, indeed, there is nothing to make one suspect what riches are in store. He commences in a low drawling key, which has not even the merit of being solemn, and advances from sentence to sentence and from paragraph to paragraph while you seek in vain to catch a single echo that gives promise of that which is to come. But then with what tenfold richness does this dim preliminary curtain make the glories of his eloquence to shine forth when the heated spirit at length shakes from it its chill confining fetters and bursts out elate and rejoicing in the full splendour of its disimprisoned wings. I have heard many men deliver sermons far better arranged in regard to argument, and have heard many deliver sermons far more uniform in elegance both of conception and of style. But, most unquestionably, I have never heard, either in England or Scotland, or in any other country, any preacher whose eloquence is capable of producing an effect so strong and irresistible

recourse for a moment to the vulgar arts of common pulpit enthusiasm. He does it entirely and proudly by the sheer pith of his most original mind, clothing itself in a bold magnificence of language as original in structure, as nervous in the midst of its overflowing richness, as itself. He has a wonderful talent for ratiocination, and possesses, besides, an imagination both fertile and distinct, which gives all richness of colour to his style and supplies his argument with every diversity of illustration. In presence of such a spirit subjection is a triumph; and I was proud to feel my hardened nerves creep and vibrate, and my blood freeze and boil, when he spoke, as they were wont to do in the early innocent years when unquestioning enthusiasm had as yet caught no lessons of chillness from the jealousies of discernment, the delights of comparison, and the example of the unimaginative world."

The late Mr. Lockhart was not one who was given to overpraise people. On the contrary, in his later life, if all tales are true, he was as remarkable a representative as it would have been easy to find of that Mephistophelic frame of mind and temper, one of the chief characteristics of which it is to act on the rule which is said to have been once given by Sir Philip Francis, the reputed author of "Junius," to a too generous young member of Parliament,-"My young friend, let me, as an old man of the world, give you one bit of advice: never praise anybody, unless it be in odium tertii, to the discredit of some third party." At twenty-five Lockhart had not, perhaps, attained to this blessed temper-on which account what he wrote then may, if the reader pleases, have the less weight.. But he was considerably of a scorpion even then, as the early numbers of Blackwood can attest; and, when it is remembered that at that time he had seen and conversed with a large number of the most eminent men both of this country and of the continent, Goethe himself included, his making so much of Chalmers can hardly be set down to the raw provincialism which overestimates objects near it from a deficiency of others with which to compare them. In short, it is impossible that Lockhart could have taken so much pains in his description of