Essays and Remains, Ed. with a Mem. by R. Vaughan (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SAVONAROLA AND HIS TIMES. THIS poem scarcely sustains the reputation which its late author had acquired in Germany by his Faust. A German professor of Hebrew said in our hearing one day that he had attempted in vain to read it through. This might have been the case, and the book excellent notwithstanding, for the learned Orientalist was no poet. But his unfavourable verdict was not altogether unjust. Though possessing abilities of no mean order, Lenau has failed to give the life and spirit to his production which a theme so noble should have inspired. The poet has not sufficiently acclimated himself, as it were, to the age of which he writes. Too much the moralist and too little the painter, he has not portrayed the period and suffered it to speak for itself. He assumes his office of interpreter too frequently and with too little of concealment. Modern sentiments are placed in the mouths of speakers in the fifteenth century. The reader becomes aware that his author, in his vehement censure of the learned scepticism that prevailed in the Florentine Academy, is, iu effect, anxious to hold up to abhorrence the pantheistic philosophy of modern Germany. The truth of the analogy is undeniable, the parallel is fair, the indignation righteous, but this expression of it is ill-placed. These bitter iambics are out of keeping; they mar the artistic beauty of an historic poem. The monument of a hero should not be placarded with rewards offered for theapprehension of a criminal. But, though defective in this respect, and occasionally abstract and tedious, the poem contains many admirable passages. Savonarola. Ein Gedicht von Nicolaus Lenau. Zweite durchgesehene Auflage. 1844. (Savonarola. A Poem. By Nicholas Lenau. Second Edition, revised, 1844.) TOL. I. I We propose, in bri...