It is stated that Goethe in his old age felt once more the power of female charms in its full force; that a young lady of a noble family, whom he met at Marienbad, roused all the slumbering sensibilities of his heart, and that, after more than seventy winters had bleached the dark locks of his Jupiter-head, he had to undergo anew the whole process of love, without his behaviour, however, deviating in the least from the dignity of his age. The "Elegy of Marienbad," which forms the second part of his "Trilogy of the Passions," is said to have been the result of this strange passion. His But after all, what could have been worse? Even his moral deviations in Italy were in our opinion less degrading. Nature, to complete this great poet with his wonderful objectivity, perhaps thought it expedient to endow him not only with a powerful imagination, which car-violent attack of illness in 1823, when this ried him into higher regions, but also with an ardent sensuality that bound him to earth. But no excuse can be permitted for that profanation of matrimonial holiness which he indulged for nearly eighteen years,-nothing exculpate him from the charge of having sacrificed the most sacred ties to convenience and selfish comfort. great man had already passed his seventyfourth year, is ascribed to his violent struggles to overcome it. As, however, the circumstances of this wonderful case never have been sufficiently ascertained, and as, moreover, the venerable poet himself has thrown a veil over it, it seems proper not to make any farther attempt to lift it. WHEN it was announced, a few months since, | clime, as pure and sparkling as its mountain that Fredrika Bremer had landed upon our streams, as fresh and invigorating as its mounshores, the intelligence was received by the tain air. thousands who have read her works, with an interest that admiration of literary talent or genius alone could never have inspired. More than almost any other writer, Miss Bremer seems to have become a personal friend to every reader, and the cause of this is to be found in a far deeper source than mere admiration for the novelty and vividness of her narratives, her quiet pictures of domestic life, or her strong delineations of the workings of human passion. Her large and sympathetic heart is attuned to such harmony with humanity, or rather she so expresses this beautiful harmony of her own soul with God, with nature, and with humanity, that the human heart that has suffered or enjoyed, vibrates and responds like a harp-string to the master-hand. She has somewhere said, "Hereafter, when I no more belong to earth, I should love to return to it as a spirit, and impart to man the deepest of that which I have suffered and enjoyed, lived and loved. And no one need fear me;-should I come in the midnight hour to a striving and unquiet spirit, it would be only to make it more quiet, its night-lamp burn more brightly, and myself its friend and sister." Although she still belongs to earth, this aspiration has been satisfied. Even here, without having crossed the mysterious bourn, she has revealed to us great depths of suffering and joy, of life and love, and to many troubled hearts she has come in their midnight hours, a friend, a sister, a consoler. It is no wonder, then, that homes and hearts have opened to her, and that welcome and gratitude await her in every town and village of our country. When Miss Bremer's works were first introduced to us a few years ago, the brilliant narrations of Scott had been succeeded by the passionate and romantic creations of Bulwer, and our literature was flooded with inundations from the voluptuous and sensational school of France, which deposited its débris, and diffused its malaria wherever its impure waters subsided. At this period the writings of Fredrika Bremer came upon us, suddenly and beautiful as summer comes in her northern As works of art, or in a literary point of view, these novels have doubtless their faults. But those who have been elevated by their ennobling spirit, who have drunk at their clear, cool fountains, and felt their strengthening and life-giving influence, who have dwelt with her lovely characters in their happy homes, and participated in their joys and sorrows, would find it as impossible to turn upon them the cold eye of the critic, as to analyse the sunshine and the landscape that delight the eye, or to judge the features of a beloved friend by the strictest rules of beauty or of art. The office of the critic has come to be in literature what that of the surgeon is in the actual world. With perfect development, beauty, and harmony he has nothing to do. He has eyes only for deformities and faults, and wherever they are to be found, he applies his merciless scalpel, with a firm hand and an unrelenting heart. But the critic who judges by rules of art alone, does not give us the highest truth any more than the chemist, who, while he shows us how to analyse the diamond and to resolve it to its original elements, forgets to place it before us flashing in the sunlight; or the botanist who, in dissecting the flower, leaves its beauty to pass unnoticed, and its perfume to escape. Mere criticism is the judgment of the intellect alone; but the highest and truest judgment is that where the heart also has a voice, and an object seen through the one or the other medium, intellect or heart, is like those transparencies which in one light represent the dreary desolation of a winter landscape, and in the other, all the luxuriance and beauty of summer. But seen in any light, the writings of Miss Bremer have great and peculiar merit, and they occupy a distinctive place in the literature of the time. The age in which we live is one of scepticism, of analysis, and of transition. Religion, government, society, are all in turn investigated by its indomitable spirit of inquiry. All great questions relating to humanity, its reform, its progress, and its final destiny, are agitated to a degree not known before at any period of the world's history. The conservative and destructive principles are at war, and there are moments when those of the firmest faith seem to doubt what the final issue of the contest may be. The literature, as could not fail to be the case, takes its tone from the spirit of the age, and no department of literature has more direct bearing upon the popular mind than that of fiction. He who writes the songs and romances of a people may well leave to others to make their laws. Not, indeed, those lighter romances, intended only to interest or amuse the fancy, but those which embody some deep sentiment, or some vital principle of society or of religion. Truths and principles thus inculcated or diffused, have their most direct influence upon the youthful mind, and, like the impressions made upon the rock in its transition state, they harden and remain. As an instance of the extent of this influence of fiction, we may refer to the writings of that woman who, possessing the most extraordinary combination of masculine and feminine qualities under the name of George Sand, for the last few years has taken the first rank among the writers of her native language, and from that eminence has exercised such incalculable influence, not only over her own but all other countries. George Sand and Fredrika Bremer stand at the head of two widely different classes of fictitious writing, each having other and higher objects than to amuse. Through the writings of both there is a deep and powerful under-current, to which the story is but the sparkle on the surface. Both discuss great questions of social reform, the laws of marriage, and the nature of love. Both enter the temple of humanity-but the one to overthrow its altars, and to shatter its cherished images-the other to render them more firm and steadfast-to burn incense on the shrines, and adorn them with garlands of immortal flowers. The genius of the one is the flaming torch of the incendiary, that carries destruction and desolation in its coursethat of the other is the fragrant lamp, that illumines the darkness, and dispels, by its steady and benignant beams, the gathering and mysterious gloom. The course of the one has been like that of the furious tempest of the tropical regions, that uproots the old landmarks, floods the gentle streams till they overflow their channels, and sweep away banks, bridges, and barriers that oppose their course; that of the other, like the evening dews and the summer showers, that sink softly into the bosom of the earth, refreshing, gladdening, and fertilizing. The institution of marriage, the root from which society springs, the groundwork upon which it stands, George Sand, with all the force of her genius and eloquence, seeks to degrade and to destroy; while Fredrika Bremer would ennoble, not the institution of marriage only, but she would exalt it into that deeper and holier spiritual union, of which the actual marriage is but the symbol. Love, that most divine of all our sentiments, the bloom and perfume of the tree of Life, the sun that lights and gladdens the night of existence, the one presents to us as burning with all the voluptuous ardour of the senses, the other, as glowing with the sacred fire of the impassioned soul. It seems to be a law of Providence, that good and evil should ever co-exist, both in the outer and inner world; that wherever poisons abound the antidotes are also to be found; and the cotemporaneous appearance of the two leading minds we have been contrasting. is an instance of the verification of this law in the intellectual or moral world. Some one has truly said, that "where nothing great is to be done, the existence of great men is impossible." Goodness is only one form of greatness, and in opposing the influence of the materializing and disorganizing school of French romances, there was a great good to be attained; and by Miss Bremer, and the class of writers of which she stands at the head, it has been in a measure accomplished; for there is another law of Providence which secures the final triumph of good over evil, and renders the contest not doubtful in the end, although it may be of long duration. Besides the French school of romance writers, there is another, to which the works of Miss Bremer offer an equally salutary antidote. We refer to those who, with contempt in their hearts, and bitterness and sarcasm on their lips, go through the world like Mephistopheles, only to sneer at the weaknesses of humanity, to magnify its errors, and to question or despise its virtues, and who, like certain birds of prey, seem to be attracted only by that which is in its nature offensive. The mischief of such works is, that they lower the standard of human excellence, they unsettle our faith in human nature, and they engender a sceptical and contemptuous spirit, that as fatally extinguishes the higher virtues and aspirations, as fire-damp extinguishes the miner's lamp. Goethe has somewhere said that if we would make men better, we must treat them as if they were better than they are; if we take them at their actual level we make them worse; much more then do we render them worse when we put them below their actual level, preserving, though caricaturing the likeness. The characters Miss Bremer has drawn, while they are free from this charge, do not on the other hand fall into the opposite error of being too favourably depicted. They represent human nature as it often is, as it is always capable of being, refined, elevated, and noble. The home affections that she so vividly portrays, though originating in the domestic circle, radiate from that centre until they encompass all that live and suffer, genial as the sun, and embracing as the atmosphere; and, like the sun and air in the outward world, they call forth the verdure and bloom of the inner life in all those whom they thus enfold. light of the moon, receive each some beam of her silver light. Of the personal history of Miss Bremer, she has herself, at different times, given some slight sketches. She was born in Finland, and in her fourth year removed with her family to Sweden, where her father became a landed proprietor, residing on his estates in the summer, and removing to Stockholm in the winter. She describes the covered carriage that travelled every winter from the country-house to the residence in the capital, and every spring returned to the country; and the young daughters who played sonatas, sung ballads, drew in black chalk, and looked with longing to the future, in the hope of seeing and performing wonders. Of herself she says, that her first and greatest love was for her native country, and that this expressed itself in her early years in many extraordinary ways. She adds, in addressing some American friends, "Happy are they who have a noble fatherland, to whose life and history they can look up with admiration and joy. They do not live insulated upon the earth. A mighty genius leads and animates them. Their little life has a greater one with which to unite itself, and for which to live. It may be objected that we assign too great an influence, too prominent a. position, to these creations of the imagination, presented to us on the pages of fiction. But fiction, in its action on the mind, has all the effect of history; it has even an advantage over history, Since the one gives but the outward and apparent life, while the other enters the secret recesses of the heart, unveils the hidden springs of motive and of action, and lays open to our view, what no history and no confessions ever do, the secret workings of the human soul, that most mysterious and complicated of all the works of God. Into these "beings of the mind," the writer of fiction, like the sculptor of old, breathes life, thought, and immortality, and they become to us positive existences. Lear and Cordelia, Othello and Desdemona, Ivanhoe and Rebecca, are as much realities as "I have more than once heard you esteem if they had dwelt upon the earth, and their yourself fortunate in being born a citizen of lives had come down to us beside those of the the North American republic. I have listened heroes and heroines of history. So it is with to your enthusiastic words respecting that the characters Miss Bremer has drawn. We empire, founded-so unlike all others,--not by are as familiar with Bear and his little wife, the powers of war, but by those of peace; its as if we had dwelt with them at their cottage- wealth and greatness, acquired by bloodless home of Rosenvik. We shrink before the iron victories; its efforts to become a great and will and the imperious commands of ma chère powerful community in a Christian meaning, mère, and shudder to encounter the dark form by raising every one to an equal degree of enand the lowering glance of the fierce Bruno. If, lightenment and equal rights, efforts which now then, fiction in its effects is to be regarded as so powerfully attract the eyes of Europe and possessing equal power with history, it becomes America, and I have understood your love. a more important feature, not only in litera- Will you also be able to understand mine? It ture, but in morals, and should occupy a higher belongs exclusively to a poor country, an inplace than has been assigned to it, and those considerable people, nurtured in necessity and who people the world with these airy yet actual warlike deeds, but under whose blood-stained beings, and present to us in them, ideals to laurels there dwells a spirit, powerful and contemplate and to imitate, should be regarded profound as their ancient mythology. This is as the benefactors of men. And so, indeed, it now no more, or lives but as a remembrance has been with her who is the subject of this in the breasts of our people, or as an echo in brief sketch. Her works have gone abroad on our valleys; corn grows in our fields, and the their message of peace and love over the civi- Linnæ a blooms in our woods, protected by lized world, and her fame has resounded far many years of peace. Travellers who come and wide, till its echo returned to her native to Sweden from more populous countries exland. Fame, as it is generally understood, claim, How still; how silent and lifeless!' however, is but a poor expression of the rela- Has that life, then, formerly so powerful, tion that exists between Miss Bremer and her become extinct? No; but it has retired into world of readers; it is but the outward fact of silence. And in the silence of nature, in Swethe deep, spiritual relation she bears to them den, where primeval mountains, covered with all; for each one receives from her some direct pine forests, surround deep, tranquil lakes, the rays, as the wavelets of the lake, lying in the contemplative spirit lives more profoundly than elsewhere; the listening ear can, better than amid the tumults of the world, become acquainted with the secrets of nature and the human heart, and comprehend the revelations of a life peculiar to that people, beside whose cradle the prophetess Vala sang her wonderful song of the origin, destruction, and regeneration of all things. "It was a presentiment of this life, and sympathy with it, which already in the days of my childhood worked upon my heart, and made me shed tears of ardent longing to be able to do something for that beloved country; in some way to serve it and contribute to its honour, which induced me to form the most extraordinary and impracticable projects for this purpose, and made me sometimes behave myself in a manner which caused reasonable people to wonder whether I was quite in my senses. "Now, when I better understand what I then blindly loved; now, when approaching the autumn of my life, I look back to its early spring, I also know the meaning of its longings and its sufferings, for, if I can now rejoice at serving my country as a little light, making some portion of its whole life visible to far distant countries, this is a fruit of my first love, it is just, then, that it should be also my last." Of her deeper spiritual life, she says in another instance, speaking of herself, "If you will look deeper into her soul, you will see how the sad realities of the world gradually spread their dark veil over the brilliant dreams of her youth; how an early twilight overtakes the wanderer on her path, and with what effort, though in vain, she endeavours to escape from it. The air is thick as during a heavy fall of snow, the darkness increases as the night sets in. And during this deep, endless winter night she hears sounds of lamentation from the east and from the west, from creatures and from plants, from an expiring nature and a despairing humanity: and she sees life, with all its beauty, with all its love, with its beating heart, buried alive under a humid layer of ice. The sky is dark and desolate, nowhere a look-nowhere a heart. All is dead or dying save suffering. Have you observed the profound significance of the mythologies? In the beginning, we see a divine principle of light and warmth draw near the cold and mist, and from this union of light and darkness, fire and tears, is born a god; I believe that something similar takes place with every human being who is born to a deeper life, and something similar, also, happened to her who writes you these lines. "If you had seen her some years later, you would have found in her a great change. Her eyes, which tears dimmed for many years, now beam with inexpressible bliss. She has, as it were, risen again to new life. But whence this change? Perchance the dreams of her youth have been realized, and she has become a brave heroine, and enjoyed the triumphs of beauty, love, and honour. No; the dreams of childhood have vanished; youth is past, but she has nevertheless become young again, because in the depths of her soul, over its dark chaos, the words have been spoken, Let there be light,' and the light has penetrated the darkness, and illumined it, and with her eyes fixed upon that light, she has exclaimed, 'O Death! where is thy sting? O Grave! where is thy victory?' Many a grave has since then opened and robbed her of some of those she most loved on earth. The sting of many a grief has been and is still felt, but her heart still beats tranquilly. Despair is for ever passed, but not so its fruits. For, like those flowers that open only at night, it is only during the midnight hours of severe suffering that the soul of man opens to the light of the eternal stars.” The Countess Hahn-Hahn, who visited Miss Bremer at her country residence of Arsta a few years since, speaks of it as being remarkable in an historical point of view. The house is of stone, built during the Thirty Years' War, with large and lofty apartments, overlooking the meadow where Gustavus Adolphus reviewed the army with which he marched into Livonia. It is surrounded with magnificent trees, the dark waters of the Baltic lying in the distance. Here Miss Bremer, with a beloved mother and sister, resides for a part of the year, and here many of our countrymen have had the pleasure of visiting her and enjoying her hospitality. One of these remarks of her, that in every thought and act she seems to have but one object-that of making her fellow-beings contented and happy. She is possessed of an ample fortune, and devotes her income mostly to charitable objects. In a recent severe winter, when the poor were dying with hunger and cold, hundreds through her means were warmed and fed, who would otherwise have perished. In addition to her other accomplishments, Miss Bremer possesses a most delicate musical ear, and plays on the piano with great expression and an exquisite touch, the wild songs of her native land, as well as the more elaborate works of the great masters. She also paints in water-colours, and her album contains finely executed miniatures of most of the remarkable persons she has known. As to Miss Bremer's future, we do not consider her course by any means as ended. We know that in her works, as in her life, she aspires to that ascending metamorphosis, with |