FOREIGN CORRESPONDENCE.

THE MEETING ON THE RHINE: GER-
MAN MOVEMENTS AND PROSPECTS.

Frankfort, September 15.

dustrious sort of people, made the best of all these demonstrations, acclamations, and decla mations. They took, and with full hands, I can assure you, the money from their guests; not considering whether they were kings or beggars, Ils sont passés ces jours de fête! The Rhine, countrymen or foreigners, aristocrats or republi lately overrun with crowned heads of steamers cans. Two Englishmen, innocent strangers, who and monarchs, and trembling with the continual had dropped into this bustle and noise without fire of most peaceful cannon, is returned to its the least inspiration, paid to the general enthuordinary and quiet course. The first stone of the siasm forty francs per night for one room and two new cathedral has been laid by the royal hand beds. Observe, too, that they, not being able of Frederick William, called the German; the to find an hotel to remain in, found this most military reviews and parades-en-gala are happily generous and disinterested hospitality in the past, and every-day life resumes its busy and house of an honest patrician, High-street, No. noisy track. Our German nation is very original 40. It must be confessed, at any rate, that Coand strange in things of this kind. Others are logne is not the town for a great and national celebrating holidays and festivals when a na- solemnity. Nowhere in Germany is the feeling tional task has been done; we do so when it is of exclusive and isolated selfism driven to so disbegun, without knowing when or whether it agreeable a point as in that place. Cologne does will be finished. The official joy of the German not know anything higher and more solemn than newspapers, praises with a sorry vein of humour its gurzenich, its town-hall; and no fête grander the national character and importance of this than its carnival. So here they had dressed up fête, which is the first, they say, where German the old and venerable ruin of their cathedral like princes and German nations (you see we are yet a schoolboy in holidays; like the bauf-gras of in the happy plural) have met in a true and Mardi-gras at Paris. Flowers, ribbons, standlarge fraternity, for a great and universal pur-ards! the mean-looking procession, the weari pose. They who like to cast a look behind the curtain, assure us that King Frederick William did not come to Cologne only to give three blows with a silver hammer to a great stone, or to shout here and there a happy toast. The King of Hanover, the Dukes of Nassau, the Archduke John of Austria, Prince Metternich, a numberless and nameless set of German princes, dukes, and counts,-did all these really come together with the pious design of hearing a mass in a cathedral? I dare say they did not. Every party, every opinion, substitutes and supplies its own sympathies and wishes to this occasion and its vast assemblage. The liberals dream of a general German amnesty, projected between Austria, Prussia, Hanover, and Bavaria. The aristocracy, particularly the gentry from the shores of "the free and German Rhine," look to these days of Cologne as a beginning of a new feudal and chivalrous time. The constitutional party stirs again with its old and always new desire: its "denique censeo:" Prussia must have a constitution. So they say, and the king smiles and shakes his head and shoulders, nodding his refrain: Not yet, my children, the time is not yet

come.

The inhabitants of Cologne, a clever and in

some illumination! that was all. And such a thing they call the first national fête and the commencement of a new German era!

Of all the sayings and doings which are really going on in Prussia, indeed, one does not know what is likely to come. There is nothing, certainly, of the old staid character in his Majesty Frederick William. In a stirring and continual excitement-now the godfather of an English prince, and then a wedding-guest of the Russian emperor; stung and driven by a restless desire of novelty, of action, and of glory; popular in his speeches, and monarchic in his inclinations; progressive when he thinks, more than conservative whenever he acts-this king throws himself into so many complicated questions, and tries so much, that in the end he will see himself obliged to do something he is now not thinking of. Austria looks, from the green and romantic hills of Johannisberg, at all his movements with a most attentive and careful eye. Not the least inclined to follow this leader of the modern age in his dangerous tendencies, utterly incapable to struggle with him in his popularity, she must nevertheless be herself content to move, and, out of breath by the unwonted exercise, keep to his side as close as possible, if she would not lose

her own position in German affairs. Prince Met- the country; but for Prussia, it is rather in the ternich, who a few weeks ago did not think of provinces of the East, in Silesia, and East Prusleaving Konigswarth, his castle in the recesses sia; and for the rest of Germany, in the quiet of the Bohemian forest, came only to Cologne and silent hearts of our forests and mountains. at last, to counterbalance in some degree, by his At Heilbronn near the Neckar resides the man, potent presence, the influence of so meddlesome who, with two volumes, thrown out by a juveand dangerous a king, particularly amongst the nile hand, has struck with a daring power, adcatholic part of the Prussian gentry, who, to the mitted by his best opponents, against the whole time of the difference with the archbishop, had building of the ecclesiastical system, Frederic been always such welcome guests at Johannis- David Strauss. His most zealous and bold folberg. There was, I am very sure, not one lowers, Feurbach and Bauer, go on the same stranger, not one guest of the fête, so much way; banished by the government from their ennuyé as Prince Metternich. In the soft and cathedrals, but surrounded with the whole namild eye of the great statesman, I saw a glance tion as an undisturbable auditory. These men which reminded me of a sunsetting. This great in one half of their notions may be more false than genius must know that his time is over. That true, more dangerous than safe; but in the other is why he already gives way, and yields to some half they mark the breaking away of the old tendencies, to some institutions, which are not landmarks, and for that I refer to them. Ruge all in accordance to his old system. Austria at Dresden carries the ensign of this forlorn-hope gives railways, reforms the post-office, tries detachment; he struggles with an incredible some renovations in the customs-system, and no courage and boldness against the governments longer shuts up her frontiers to the thoughts or of Prussia and Saxe, and his task is, to make to the merchandise of other countries. Why, popular and practical the great innovations of then, here we have no more the Austria of 1815. philosophy and literature, as far as a German The fresh and cool breath of a new dawn already journal (Deutsche Jahrbücher) can do so. What blows over the mountains of the finest and rich- Strauss, Feurbach, Bauer and Ruge are thus doing est land in Germany. It must grow into full from one side-the scientific-is pursued by the day, and it will. poets and authors of the modern school at the If there is a political and national FUTURE for other one-the æsthetical. Gutzkow, Mosen, Germany, and who would deny or doubt it? Laube, and others, whose names are not known its conditions lie not in a Prussian constitution beyond the frontiers of Germany, although they merely, or a customs-union; nor in the liberty of well deserve to be known, are busy mastering the the press, the first fruits of which are now per- stage for the new ideas. Herwegh, Hoffman, mitted to this paper and now to that; nor in the Dingelstedt, Prutz, with their free and loud settlement of the dynastic dilemma in Hanover; songs, send forth tidings of the new spring of nor in the union of all the "disjecta membra" in political life and liberty. These tendencies, in a one body, covered with the uniform of a Prussian word, are no longer the property of some learned general or minister. No, there is another co-men, or the idealistic dreams of a few exalted operation needed to so large and grand a result. poets; they are founded in the consciousness of Germany is nothing, and will never be anything the entire nation. What a philosopher or a poet in Europe; neither a nation by itself, indepen- thinks and sings in the little asylum of his gardent from Russia, or from England, and safe ret or his cell, a Prussian statesman, the minisagainst France; nor indeed a political and material unity of any kind; as long as Austria does not give up the isolation, the hermetic separation, in which she has kept aloof from German progress. Austria and Prussia, not Austria, or Prussia; that is the question. They separated from, and lost each other at Ratisbon; let them meet again at Frankfort.

ter Schön at 'Königsberg-glory and honour to his name!-says in plain and hard words to the ear of his royal master. It resounds throughout all the chambers of deputies in Germany; Carlsruhe, Stuttgart, Darmstadt, Cassel, give echo to these complaints and reclamations; and the nation astonished at first and perplexed, itself takes up the work at last, makes it its own, and purIt is not the spirit or the disposition of the na-sues it with more or less happiness, far as the tion that resists this: it is the tenacious and ob- juncture of present affairs and the bounds of an stinate habit of the governments, the rotten and opposition, yet loyal as it is decided, will allow. foul systems of diplomacy, which set themselves I attempt to give you here, in slight outline against a longed-for union. For the German only, an idea of what is going on in our country. nation begins to awake, and to look around with France and England-we know it but too well! her own eyes. A political sense, an interest for do not take as great a notice of such endeavourpublic life, a feeling of the want of nationality, ings and beginnings as they ought to do. Too are making themselves understood at last as much occupied by their own interests-England hard as ever they can. That old feverish fright is only aware of the industrial and commercial of policy, that sacred reverence for names and movements in Germany, as far as they are or shadows, they begin to disappear like misty may one day grow dangerous to her own power clouds of night at the break of morning. For it and dominion; and France looks still upon us as is not only in philosophy and literature, but in upon a fantastic and idealizing people of poets political realities, in the interest of a common and thinkers, very little fitted for a political miswealth, trade, and commerce, that a new and sion or position. Yet it would be well for both never-before-known-of quickness spreads itself to know, and to have some interest in knowing, all over Germany. The centre of these move. that the excitement I have described, and which ments is not, where foreigners commonly believe occupies the whole country without regard to it to be, on the Rhine, at the west frontiers of custom-houses and passport-offices, is indeed a

SWEDEN.

Stockholm: September 1, 1842.

the north should obey the common impulse, and that a Scandinavian society for the furthering of physical science should have been founded, holding an annual meeting in the cities of Stockholm, Copenhagen, Christiania, and Götheborg, by turns.

national excitement. It will not bring forth a THE TRAVELLING PHILOSOPHERS OF heavy and decisive Catastrophe; never will it end in what is called a Revolution: for this neither the political complications are so threatening as in France, nor the social as in England. ONE of the signs of these times is the spread of Providence leads the German nation a softer all kinds of societies for the advancement of all way, though it may be a much longer and slow-kinds of knowledge. It is not surprising that er one. But you should not leave us in this track we are pursuing without your brotherly attention and assistance. English and French know little of our German literature but to the times of Old Göthe or Father Lessing. A few names, Tieck, Novalis, Hoffman, Körner, all very unconnected, have found their way across the Rhine, and in the English Review as well as in the French Feuilleton we see ourselves generally judged by things which, having borne their fruits amongst us, are themselves passing away. Tieck and the Romantic School had their great merits and they enjoy a well-merited reputation; pensions of German Princes, while they are living, and necrologies of German biographers, when they are dying. Uhland, the German love-bird; Ruckert, the oriental nightingale; Freiligrath, the eagle of the desert: they have had their times: but they are mute now, and their sweet songs, uttered in melancholy nights, their complaining shrieks and sighs, only flutter away like the voice of the evening's wind on a silent lake. Other sympathies, other wants, raise themselves in the midst of the changed and renewed nation. They seize upon even the most peaceful manifestations of life and genius. Painters desert from the Madonnas and the Holy Families. At Dusseldorf, Lessing gives us Huss at the Council, a great and powerful composition, full of modern strength and free ideas; at Munich, Kaulbach draws in a true romantic style his destruction of Jerusalem, the downfall of the old, and the rising life of the new.

Perhaps you may think I boast too much of too small and too uncertain a beginning. Let me be candid and not forget the dark side of my picture, full of bright hope as I yet claim it to be. But that gloomy side, such as it is, is not to be found, where you in France and England seek it. The "reactionaire" tendency, believe me, has not any powerful or active stronghold in the place where Anastasius Grun (Count Auersperg) raised the very first song of liberty and bold opposition; not in that great metropolis where Cornelius for the fifteenth time paints his doomsdays, satans, and demons; where Schelling pours forth his oracles of mystic philosophy, and Stahl his principles of firm and absolute statesmanship. No, neither Vienna nor Berlin are the centres of retardative tendencies. But look at those small, dusky, dirty, poor, and miserable little places, called residences of German dukes and princes! look at those men who never saw anything in their lives but the walls of their college, and then the walls of their bureaux, shops or casinos! look at those courts and constitutions, and governments, and administrations, and armies, all in duodecimo! look at those lackeys in general's dress! Hic hæret aqua, hic Rhodus, hic salta. That is the heel of Achilles. Poor Germany, who does not yet know what the wise man teaches, that it is not well to take the bread from the children of the house and to give it to the dogs!

If it is fair to measure the prosperity of these gregarious bodies by the number of heads, the meeting held in July last at Stockholm must have surpassed the most ardent wishes of its support. ers. Not to mention the tribes of indigenous Swedes who attended it, the government steamvessel, Heckla, placed at the disposal of the Danish savans by the King of Denmark, brought a large cargo of wisdom from Copenhagen, headed by Conferenz-räd Orsted, the first mathematician of Denmark; while troops of Norsemen, led by Professor Hansteen, also a great mathematician, thronged the steamboats on the lakes, and poured down over the Fells. The meeting, though open to all wise men from all parts of the world, was not well attended either by English or Germans; of the former, a solitary but sufficient specimen presented himself, Professor Johnson of Durham; of the latter great things were expected, and it was confidently hoped that the veteran Humboldt would gladden the eyes of the assembly. But alas for science! the "silberne Hochzeit" of the Emperor Nicholas happened in the same week as the Scandinavian gathering, and the Philosopher, who is also a Geheime Rath, being bidden to the marriage feast at Petersburg, either could not or would not come. The example of the great man was followed by many little ones in Germany; for be it remembered your German is not like alligators and Englishmen, amphibious; on the contrary he is for the most part decidedly hydrophobic, and the waters of the East Sea are salt and rough enough to fill him with a fearful anticipation of sea-sickness and shipwreck. If, however, the quality of the meeting was not so high as had been hoped, its quantity as we have said, was undeniable. So that when the bands from Copenhagen and Norway had joined their brethren at Stockholm, there were found to be nearly 500 members ready to brandish (to borrow the expression of the president of another society nearer home) "the torch of science in its nomadic course."

The arrangements of the provisional committee. at Stockholm, superintended by Baron Berzelius, were excellent, and the greatest attention was paid to the comfort of the visitors. The king and the prince royal behaved in the most gracious way. The House of Nobles was appropriated to the sections and general meetings, and the palace of Prince Carl given up as a place of evening resort. Inthese favourable circumstances the incongruous mass of physicians, geologists, chemists, naturalists, botanists, &c. &c., resolved itself with very little loss of time into various sections, in the labours of which, together with three general meetings for the sake of the public, rather