to the isolated household. This is a foolish error; do we not see that families can live in tents or palaces, in boarding-houses, and even on shipboard, without the tie being dissolved? It is not dependant consequently upon the isolated household, as is supposed, and will not, therefore, cease to exist, if the isolated household is replaced by Association.

Some reformers have committed the error of attacking marriage, and of attributing to it the evils engendered by the system of isolated households. They have been guilty of a gross mistake, and have received a merited condemnation for their oversight. So far from marriage being the cause of these evils, it is itself degraded and contaminated by the system of isolated households; and to such an extent that it may almost be said, that the isolated household is the tomb of love. It will be reserved for Association, with its riches, its complete moral and intellectual development of beings, the enjoyment of the arts and sciences, and its freedom from petty cares and anxieties, to refine and elevate marriage. The isolated household produces disagreements, engenders antipathies, and deadens enthusiasm. It is the grave of harmony, of genius, and of love.

There is another cause which degrades marriage at present: beings come together with undeveloped, misdeveloped, and perverted natures; all angular, if I may use the expression, and with false and artificial tastes and habits. The sentiment of love throws before marriage a veil over these defects, but when afterwards there is close contact, they come out, and then all the discordant developments of passions, characters, and appetites clash with each other, and engender the ten thousand antipathies and disgusts which exist in present marriages.

Association, with its system of universal, integral, and uniform education, which will develop, perfect, and refine all the faculties of the mind, all the feelings of the heart, and make of men and women fully and nobly developed beings, instead of the abortions of humanity, which they now for the most part are, will do away by this means with this second fruitful cause of unfortunate marriages.

We intended to have entered more fully into the practical details of Association in the present article, but as it has grown rather lengthy, we will defer them to a future number. We will terminate the present article with a Table, which contains some of the leading features and results of Association, and shows the contrast between it and the present system of society.

Contrast between a true Social Order, based upon Association and Attractive Industry, and the present false Societies, based upon Isolated Families and Repugnant Industry.

THE STARS THAT HAVE SET IN THE NINETEENTH

CENTURY.

No. III.

GOETHE.

THERE have been false prophets in literature as well as in religion; and both have appeared for a season in all the honors of undeserved celebrity. We cannot always judge of the rank of a chief by the number of his followers; for if the final approbation of the many be just, their immediate favor or dispraise is far from being always so. It requires time to winnow the chaff from the grain of public applause; the idol of one generation is often the contempt of the next; and the history of letters exhibits no lack of Lyllys and Aretines.

By contemporaries, perhaps, the supremacy of a great mind may be best estimated by the command it is seen to exercise over such as are themselves highly endowed; even as the power of the wave is shown by the size of the rocks it has moved. An accident may captivate the humor of the many; but he who is admitted to be the first among the rarer few, must have no doubtful claim to this distinction.

As an evidence of this nature, we have only to look at the despotic sway which Goethe held during his lifetime over minds of a superior order, and the cordiality of their respect for him who was at once the Alpha and the Omega of German poetry, and whose name was a Shibboleth of German critics. He must, indeed, be considered as the mightiest of all the sons of song of whom Germany has ever boasted; nor would any one, in these later times, have attacked his well-deserved fame, if some of his blind admirers had not had the temerity to proclaim him also the best of men, and even to compare him, with presumptuous adulation scarcely credible, to our Saviour himself. The rising generation was not inclined to bow before their idol with that blind veneration which his worshippers enjoined as a duty; and its ehief men began to examine whether Goethe had thoroughly fulfilled his duty to his father-land. The result of this inquiry was not altogether satisfactory; and they found, or at least imagined they had found, that in some things he had failed; they considered and spoke of Goethe in three different characters-as poet, as minister of state, and as a man. With this distinetion we shall not concern ourselves, having only to treat of him as a poet. We therefore proceed to a rapid historical survey of those events only which are illustrative of, or illustrated by his works.

When we look towards Germany, an indescribable load of sadness possesses our heart; for behold this great country, from a land of faith and love, has become, in its turn, the empire of doubt and passion. It were a long and miserable history, to trace the progress of doubt among a people whom religion has so entirely satiated, that they will away with no more, and with whom mysticism has ended at the same point as skepticism among the French. It were only to show the efforts of that people to arrest its own fall, and to float yet a while longer upon wandering creeds ere it sank never to rise again. The same conflicts which her Luther underwent during his watchings-the cryings out-the weepings the sighings-the groanings-these same has Germany endured upon her lonely pillow-behind her curtains-in that long waking-time of glory, which began with Frederick and finished with Goethe. For it is not in an hour that she has reached the spot where France stands. She has offered her adoration to all things; and in this downfall of heaven upon earth, everything has given way under her hand, and sunk with her. When the realm of letters reeled, she took refuge in intellect; and when intellect, utterly ruined by mysticism, in its turn gave way at the point where her faith failed, she betook herself to the worship of philosophy. That was the time of Fichte and Schelling; and then, this empire being undermined, fell into the Nihilism of Hegel, and it was necessary to make another god.

There was once a time when patriotism served religion; when men prayed in battle, and faith was tempered in blood; when the Te Deum of Leipsic arose fearlessly in its cathedral, from the midst of smoke and confusion: and this faith, the most easy to maintain, has, in its turn, passed away with the smoke of the bivouacs. There remained, at least, the worship of Art. Her shrine had always been preserved. But Goethe, whom she adored, himself destroyed it. Thus Germany has descended into doubt with the same honest earnestness which she had shown in ascending into faith. It has not been as with others, by the irremediable and sudden fall of a day, but by an infinity of steps and circuits, regulated beforehand. We see her descend progressively into nonentity, and scientifically into doubt. Her cathedrals are worn out-not by the praying and the kneeling of men; she has encircled them with the symbols of mysticism, as the flowers of winter are bound round the forehead of the dead. Thus, by another way, she has reached the point where the world was awaiting her; and at this moment, under different languages and different names, the whole of Europe can boast that it lives under the same shelter, that is to say, in the same void; and henceforward behold