is expended in describing their course amid clouds and tempests, and wheeling stars, above scenery ever varying, till they descend at the city of the giants.

The strange and beautiful beings found in the retreat of Adonai are offered as an acceptable present to the sovereign. Daidha is sent to the women's apartment to await the monarch's pleasure, and Cedar is cast into prison, to tame the spirit that could awe even his cruel captors. The author has lavished all the wealth of language to depict the splendor and luxury of this abode of evil, the hateful magnificence of these powerful beings elevated by popular superstition, and the intrigues of their impious court. The tyrant reigns by fear, but leans upon, and dreads at the same time, the mightiest of his inferiors, Asrafiel, who has in secret vowed his destruction. His favorite, Lackmi, a young female educated under his direction in the midst of vice, is beautifully painted by the poet. In the midst of her depravity acknowledging and doing homage to virtue, self-abhorrence and remorse are first created in her bosom by the contemplation of excellence. She visits Cedar in his dungeon, enamoured of his personal and mental graces, so superior to all she has hitherto seen; obtains his friendship and confidence, though her love is repelled with horror; and promises to procure his liberty, and restore him his lost Daidha. At a regal banquet she is deputed by her master to poison Asrafiel; she murders the monarch instead; and, in the confusion that ensues, Lackmi, assuming the sovereignty, liberates Cedar and flies with him disguised as his lost bride. At dawn the lover discovers his mistake; he spurns from him the perfidious Lackmi, and rushing back to the city of the gods, succeeds, by naming the beloved name of Adonaï, in exciting the people to insurrection. He enters the palace at the head of an army, just in time to rescue his children, and save Daidha from the arms of the impious oppressor.

Once more free, they take their course towards another land, guided by Stagyr, one of the race whom Cedar has deposed, but whose life he saved from the infuriated people. They escape only to die. The treacherous guide conducts them into the desert, where he leaves them at night with their only camel; and, after having triumphed over so many dangers, Cedar sees his wife and infants perish of thirst, just when relief is at hand. He perceives at a distance a group

of palms that overshadow a spring. The fainting mother is too much exhausted to reach the spot; but Cedar speeds thither alone. He returns with water, but too late. Daidha lies cold on her last bed. Cursing life, Cedar raises a funeral pile over the beloved corpses, and immolates himself upon them. The voice of his doom sounds in his dying ear.

"Va! descends, cria-t-il, toi qui voulus descendre!
Mesure, esprit tombé, ta chute à ton remord!

Dis le goût de la vie et celui de la mort !
Tu ne remonteras au ciel qui te vit naître
Que par les cent degrés de l'échelle de l'être,
Et chacun en montant te brûlera le pié ;
Et ton crime d'amour ne peut être expié

Qu'après que cette cendre aux quatre vents semée, Par le temps réunie et par Dieu ranimée, Pour faire à ton esprit de nouveaux vêtements Aura repris ton corps à tous les elements, Et prêtant à ton âme une enveloppe neuve, Renouvelé neuf fois ta vie et ton épreuve ; A moins que le pardon, justice de l'amour, Ne descende vivant dans ce mortel séjour! " We fail to discern the moral of this sentence. The punishment of Cedar cannot be just, for he has no haunting consciousness of guilt. As man, he is sinless; and no recollection of his fault in forfeiting heaven seems to attend him in his life on earth. He is, like his bride, an innocent and injured being. He receives instruction meekly, like her, from the prophet's lips, and abhors the impieties he is compelled to witness. Besides, his crime at first is not represented as a deliberate yielding to temptation, but as obedience to a sudden and generous impulse; the being he loves is in danger; he can rescue her in no other way. This is a fault. There are claims that must be satisfied, even in the most fantastic fiction, or its moral pretensions must be relinquished; and it falls to the rank of a mere tale devised for amusement.

Such is the story, which has the advantage of all the embellishments of gorgeous imagery, and the rich flow of verse. for which M. de Lamartine is distinguished. The interest is charmingly sustained. We know of no modern romance that can more pleasingly beguile a few hours; and this, notwithstanding grievous errors in taste, that sometimes interrupt the enchantment of the fiction. The episode of Isnel and Ichme, for

example, is merely horrible, as are many of the pictures of the impious orgies of the giant gods. The conception of Cedar and Daidha reminds us of the "Oberon " of Wieland. Like the hero and heroine of the German poet, the claims of the pair upon our sympathy arise from the inextinguishable love they bear each other, the love sublime in its strength, victorious over persecution and temptation, — triumphant over death.

Our author's passion for illustrating things in the moral, by things in the natural world, is indulged throughout these volumes. Sometimes his similes are extremely happy; but that he often repeats himself, he would be in this particular the most ingenious of poets. Thus after describing the iniquity of the worshippers of the Titan king, the developement of human nature in its deepest depravity, he proceeds;

"So when the plain of Ocean is disturbed,
In the deep bed of the retreating wave
The affrighted eye discerns mysterious horrors
Laid open to the light; foul pits of mire,

Whose stagnant breath corrupts the moving floods,
Where huge sea-monsters, stranded in the marsh,
Expire; where reptile over reptile crawls;
Where, wallowing in the slime himself shook off,
The hippopotamus exults alone!"

Another of his striking comparisons is found where Cedar appeals to the injured people, calling them to revenge by his fiery eloquence;

"So, when the wind upon the ocean main

Lifteth the waters, first, insensible

They glide before the breeze, with scarce a murmur

Laving the silent shore. But to the voice

Of the roused blast, sweeping their breast again,
A thousand thousand angry waves reply;

Beneath the wheeling firmament appears
Billow o'er billow mounting, till the flood

Swells to colossal height, and mocks the sky:
With thunderous moan it smites the shattered steep,
And in its arms of foam drags down the rocks
Into the deep, that, erewhile, laved their feet."

Graphic and glowing as are his descriptions, we have often, as has been already hinted, an impression of feebleness, occasioned by his assiduous accumulation of minute objects,

and his habits of idealizing every thing, and of magnifying the smallest into the same proportions with the grandest. His torch-light is ever in danger of extinguishing his starlight. He seems wholly ignorant of the art of producing effect in a picture by a few vigorous touches. His landscapes are overladen with coloring and laborious ornament. Nature is not good enough for him. His earth is not the same earth we inhabit. His suns shine with a purer and more golden light. So his men are moral monsters, colossal in good or evil. He has not the despairing, philosophical misanthropy of Lord Byron; his views do not shut out the better things' of humanity; his heart apprehends them; but his fancy colors them with strange hues. He will not paint nature as she is, in the mind of man, any more than in the external world. In short, he lacks simplicity, which he sacrifices in his morbid desire to elevate the ideal. This is the reason why his creations fail to command universal interest, to touch the soul. They are not beings of our own brotherhood; they are creatures elaborated and refined in the furnace of M. de Lamartine's imagination, and then dressed for exhibition in his stiff vesture of embellishment.

The next épisode, M. de Lamartine informs us, will be entitled Les Pêcheurs. It will have more of local interest than the present one. It is more like that of "Jocelyn," for which the public has shown such flattering partiality. May we hope, that in it our author will endeavour to preserve that simplicity in form and coloring, which is ever the life of poetry, nor mar the real excellence to which we do homage, by an excess of adventitious ornament.

H.P. Goodrich.

ART. VII. GEORGII WILHELMI FREYTAGII Lexicon Arabico-Latinum, præsertim ex Djeuharii Firuzabadiique et aliorum Arabum operibus, adhibitis Golii quoque et aliorum libris, confectum. Halis Saxonum, 1830-37. 4 vol. 4to.

THE first announcement of Professor Freytag's plan, some few years since, led the learned to expect no more

than a reimpression of Golius. For this they waited long; and when it was told, that the work was to be entirely original, they cheerfully waited longer still. This interest in the work, caused by a growing desire to cultivate the language and literature of that Arab race, whose history, and whose position among the nations of the earth, are almost as peculiar and mysterious as those of the outcasts of Israel, whose dwelling is everywhere, and whose home is nowhere, was highly favorable to its reception. It gave to the author the power of realizing the most brilliant dream of a German mind, in making an epoch of his age. How he has used his opportunity, how he has met the wants and expectations of his compeers and his followers in Oriental learning, can now be decided; for the work has been long enough before the public to admit of its being not only examined, but used. But, since the obligation of the author to give to the world a work of substantial merit, depends much on the actual importance of Arabic literature, and its present state of culture, a short digression on these matters may be pardoned.

The advancement of Arabic learning among European scholars has been slow, but solid. Its relation to Hebrew literature gives it a permanent importance for students of the Old Testament Scriptures. Who can estimate the biblical labors of Schultens, and his successors, down to Gesenius in our day, and not render homage to the Arabic language, in whose rich mines they have so successfully wrought? Its commercial value, too, is beginning to be great. It would become of the first consideration, if the commerce of the East should again flow through the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, as it did in the days of the Ptolemies and the Fatimite caliphs; an event now by no means improbable, since the British government, after Colonel Chesney's careful survey of the Euphrates, has fixed on the Red Sea route for the great Oriental mail line. There is, further, in our age, an interest in it among learned men, belonging to that search which they are prosecuting after the literary treasures of every language, time, and country; an interest in which Christian men participate, from their determination to send both the documents and the teachers of their religion to all nations.

The literature of these cavaliers of the desert is not more useful than it is delightful. Its very existence is a romance, as wild, as bewitching, and to the first view seeming almost