CHAPTER XI. GERMAN LITERATURE. - USING a New Testament, of which (in the narrative parts at least) any one word being given will suggest most of what is most immediately consecutive, you evade the most irksome of the penalties annexed to the first breaking ground in a new language: you evade the necessity of hunting up and down a dictionary. Your own memory and the inevitable suggestions of the context furnish a dictionary pro hac vice. And afterwards, upon advancing to other books, where you are obliged to forego such aids, and to swim without corks, you find yourself already in possession of the particles for expressing addition, succession, exception, inference in short, of all the forms by which transition or connection is effected, (if, but, and, therefore, however, notwithstanding,) together with all those adverbs for modifying or restraining the extent of a subject or a predicate, which in all languages alike compose the essential framework or extralinear machinery of human thought. The filling-upthe matter (in a scholastic sense) may differ infinitely; but the form, the periphery, the determining moulds into which this matter is fused - all this is the same for ever: and so wonderfully limited in its extent is this framework, so narrow and rapidly revolving is the clock-work of connections among human thoughts, that a dozen pages of almost any book suffice to exhaust all the ina лTEQOεVTα✶ which express them. To have mastered these ineɑ ntegoeνta is in effect to have mastered seven-tenths, at the least, of any language; and the benefit of using a New Testament, or the familiar parts of an Old Testament, in this preliminary drill, is, that your own memory is thus made to operate as a perpetual dictionary or nomenclator. I have heard Mr. Southey say that, by carrying in his pocket a Dutch, Swedish, or other Testament, on occasion of a long journey performed in 'muggy' weather, and in the inside of some venerable 'old heavy ' 6 such as used to bestow their tediousness upon our respectable fathers some thirty or forty years ago - he had more than once turned to so valuable an account the doziness or the dulness of his fellow-travellers, that whereas he had booked' himself at the coach-office utterly αναλφαβητος, unacquainted with the first rudiments of the given language, he had made his parting bows to his coach brethren, (secretly returning thanks to them for their stupidity,) in a condition for grappling with any common book in that dialect. One of the polyglot Old or Eлɛα лtegoενta, literally winged words. To explain the use and origin of this phrase to non-classical readers, it must be understood that, originally, it was used by Homer to express the few, rapid, and significant words which conveyed some hasty order, counsel, or notice, suited to any sudden occasion or emergency: e. g. To him flying from the field the hero addressed these winged words - Stop, coward, or I will transfix thee with my spear." But by Horne Tooke, the phrase was adopted on the title-page of his Diversions of Purley, as a pleasant symbolic expression for all the non-significant particles, the articuli or joints of language, which in his well-known theory are resolved into abbreviations or compendious forms, (and therefore rapid, flying, winged forms,) substituted for significant forins of greater length. Thus, if is a non-significant particle, but it is an abbreviated form of an imperative in the second person-substituted for gif, or give, or grant the case — put the case that. All other particles are shown by Horne Tooke to be equally short-hand (or winged) substitutions. New Testaments published by Bagster, would be a perfect Encyclopædia, or Panorganon, for such a scheme of coach discipline, upon dull roads and in dull company. As respects the German language in particular, I shall give one caution, from my own experience, to the selfinstructor: it is a caution which applies to the German language exclusively, or to that more than to any other, because the embarrassment which it is meant to meet, grows out of a defect of taste characteristic of the German mind. It is this: elsewhere you would naturally, as a beginner, resort to prose authors, since the license and audacity of poetic thinking, and the large freedom of a poetic treatment, cannot fail to superadd difficulties of individual creation to the general difficulties of a strange dialect. But this rule, good for every other case, is not good for the literature of Germany. Difficulties there certainly are, and perhaps in more than the usual proportion, from the German peculiarities of poetic treatment; but even these are overbalanced in the result, by the single advantage of being limited in the extent by the metre, or (as it may happen) by the particular stanza. To German poetry there is a known, fixed, calculable limit. Infinity, absolute infinity, is impracticable in any German metre. Not so with German prose. Style, in any sense, is an inconceivable idea to a German intellect. Take the word in the limited sense of what the Greeks called Συνθεσις ὀνοματων i. e., the construction of sentences -I affirm that a German (unless it were here and there a Lessing) cannot admit such an idea. Books there are in German, and, in other respects, very good books too, which consist of one or two enormous sentences. A German sentence describes an arch between the rising and the setting sun. Take Kant for illustration: he has actually been complimented by the cloud-spinner, Frederick Schlegel, who is now in Hades, as a most original artist in the matter of style. Original,' Heaven knows he was! His idea of a sentence was as follows: We have all seen or read of an old family coach, and the process of packing it for a journey to London some seventy or eighty years ago. Night and day, for a week at least, sate the housekeeper, the lady's maid, the butler, the gentlemen's gentleman, &c. packing the huge ark in all its recesses, its 'imperials,' its' wills,' its 'Salisbury boots,' its 'swordcases,' its front pockets, side pockets, rear pockets, its 'hammer-cloth cellars,' (which a lady explains to me as a corruption from hamper-cloth, as originally a cloth for hiding a hamper stored with viaticum,) until all the uses and needs of man and of human life, savage or civilized, were met with separate provision by the infinite chaos. Pretty nearly upon the model of such an old family coach packing, did Kant institute and pursue the packing and stuffing of one of his regular sentences. Everything that could ever be needed in the way of explanation, illustration, restraint, inference, by-clauses, or indirect comment, was to be crammed, according to this German philosopher's taste, into the front pockets, side pockets, or rear pockets of the one original sentence. Hence it is that a sentence will last in reading whilst a man 'Might reap an acre of his neighbor's corn.' Nor is this any peculiarity of Kant's. It is common to the whole family of prose writers of Germany, unless when they happen to have studied French models, who cultivate the opposite extreme. As a caution, therefore, practically applied to this particular anomaly in German prose writing, I advise all beginners to choose between two classes of composition — ballad poetry, or comedy — as their earliest school of exercise; ballad poetry, because the form of the stanza (usually a quatrain) prescribes a 'It was a banner broad unfurl'd, These, or words like these, in which Wordsworth conveys the sudden apocalypse, as by an apparition, to an ardent and sympathizing spirit, of the stupendous world of America, rising, at once, like an exhalation, with all its shadowy forests, its endless savannas, and its pomp of solitary waters well and truly might I have applied to my first launching upon that vast billowy ocean of the German literature. As a past literature, as a literature of |