The French are the chosen people of the new religion, its first gospels and dogmas have been drawn up in their language; Paris is the New Jerusalem, and the Rhine is the Jordan which divides the consecrated land of freedom from the land of the Philistines.
When Candide came to Eldorado, he saw in the streets a number of boys who were playing with gold nuggets instead of marbles. This degree of luxury made him imagine that they must be the king’s children, and he was not a little astonished when he found that in Eldorado gold nuggets are of no more value than marbles are with us, and that the school-boys play with them. A similar thing happened to a friend of mine, a foreigner, when he came to Germany and first read German books. He was perfectly astounded at the wealth of ideas which he found in them; but he soon remarked that ideas in Germany are as plentiful as gold nuggets in Eldorado, and that those writers whom he had taken for intellectual princes, were in reality only common school-boys.
I know not what it may mean to-day That I am to grief inclined; There’s a tale of a Siren—an old-world lay— That I can not get out of my mind.
The air is cool in the twilight gray, And quietly flows the Rhine; On the ridge of the cliff, at the close of the day The rays of the sunset shine.
There sits a maiden, richly dight, And wonderfully fair; Her golden bracelet glistens bright As she combs her golden hair.
And while she combs her locks so bright, She sings a charming lay; ’Tis sweet, yet hath a marvelous might, And ’tis echoing far away.
The sailor floats down, in the dusk, on the Rhine That carol awakens his grief; He sees on the cliff the last sunbeam shine, But he sees not the perilous reef.
Ah! soon will the sailor, in bitter despair, To his foundering skiff be clinging! And that’s what the beautiful Siren there Has done with her charming singing.
He was an admirable dialectician, and did more than any other writer to promote in Germany a sympathetic study of Plato. Yet there is a touch of Romanticism in the vague, shadowy and mystic language in which he presents the elements of Christian thought and life.—_Sime._
Wilhelm Von Humboldt says that Schleiermacher’s speaking far exceeded his power in writing, and that his strength consisted in the “deeply penetrative character of his words, which was free from art, and the persuasive effusion of feeling moving in perfect unison with one of the rarest intellects.”—_American Cyclopædia._