periodical Kunst und Alterthum appeared from 1816 to 1828. In 1821 was published the first edition of Wilhelm Meister's Wanderjahre. In 1816 Goethe lost his wife; in 1817 his son married Ottilie v. Pogwisch. Lotte-Werther's Lotte-then a widow of sixty, with twelve children, visited in 1816 her former lover, whom she found transformed into a stately minister. Not till 1827 did Frau von Stein die; nor did Goethe lose Karl August until 1828.

In the summer of 1822 he met, in Marienbad, Ulrike von Levezow. She was, Düntzer tells us, fifteen years of age, while the poet was seventy-three; but, notwithstanding this terrible disparity of years, the pair fell in love. Conscious, perhaps, of the risk of marrying so young a girl (the marriage was currently talked of), and dreading possibly ridicule, Goethe tore himself away; but his heart bled at parting with Ulrike. She seems to have been of singular charm and fascination, with a wonderful voice and great sensibility of sympathetic feeling. The affair with Madame Szymanowska was the last imaginative passion of the poet, who, when old in years, remained young in heart. He gave voice to the sorrow with which he parted from Ulrike in the Aeolsklagen. In 1823 the friend of his youth, Gräfin Auguste von Bernstorff, wrote to Goethe to "convert" him and to beg him to repair any injury that he might have done to the souls of others by his writings. He replied, proudly, that during his whole life he had meant honestly to others as to himself, and that in all his earthly strivings he had always kept his gaze fixed upon the Highest. He declared himself, in the highest sense of the word, a Protestant.

I have tried to give, necessarily in great brevity, some idea of these O'Donell letters, together with a hurried glance at the time, surroundings, and productivity of Goethe during the period of their production. The correspondence is not without interest. It shows one facet of a many-sided mind; it presents us with a little graceful episode in Goethe's long life of science and of song, of wisdom, genius, nobleness, fame, love.

H. SCHÜTZ WILSON.

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SOME POETS' HORSES.

T is a very curious fact indeed that poets see nothing of the natural animal in the horse. As a beast, a quadruped, they absolutely ignore it. It is only in its artificial varieties that they recognise it at all, and even then so seldom as to surprise the student of these pages. About the horse particular, individual steeds of fame, a volume might easily be gathered from our poets. But of the creature in nature they say nothing. The beast has become so thoroughly relative that it has lost all individuality. It is either the other half of a cavalier, a warrior, a war-chariot, a plough, a coach, or a cart, or something else, that it cannot be contemplated apart from its rider, its accoutrements, or the vehicle it draws. All other animals have characters of their own. The horse has none. It varies only according to the kind of man on its back or the kind of thing behind it. Attach a plough to it, and it becomes at once "heavy" and "dull"; set a soldier upon it, and it is "fiery" and "proud.” When ladies ride, their horses turn to "milk-white palfreys"; the hero of a poem, whether knight or highwayman, bestrides, as a rule, a "courser." There are also "swift-heeled Arabians," and "barbs," and "jennets"; but these are not meant for real horses.

There is, of course, nothing surprising in the fact that poets have but little in sympathy with stable-boys or book-makers. When they do speak of grooms they rate them as second-class horses, and the "horsey" gentleman as an inferior amateur groom. This is probably as it should be; but, on the other hand, when we remember that nearly all history has been made on horseback, and that it is to the character of that animal that man is indebted for the moiety of his achievements, it strikes strangely to find the poets so consistently disregarding the strongly marked individuality of the horse. Its sympathy with human beings as is the case with the poets' dogs also-has, doubtless, much to do with the doubling-up of the animal with its master. Whatever nature it may show, it is always in accordance with that of its rider. Its temper always matches its trappings, is strictly in keeping with its harness.

Once upon a time-so the Greeks had the story'-Athena and Poseidon contended for the honour of being the best friend of humanity, and to clinch his claim the ocean-god created for the use of man the horse. Olympus had to arbitrate between the rival divinities, and eventually decreed in favour of Athena's olive-tree, "for," said Zeus, "I foresee that man will pervert the gift of Poseidon to the purposes of war."

Appeal, however, lies from the judgment of the Thunderer to the ultimate voice of history, and if "in the fulness of time" we could ask the question again, Eternity would certainly reverse the decree of the Olympian bench, for-taking one thing with another-the horse has done far more for man than salad oil.

In myth it is always noble. No monster form in the classics has dignity except the centaur, the Asvinau of the Hindoos. The conjunction of man and horse in one being was not degrading.

To complete the majesty of deities, they rode or drove horses. In primitive legend they go in pairs-the black steed of Night with the grey of the Morning, the red horse of Carnage and the white of Death. In the sunrise and the sunset there glitter the peacockfeathered manes of the coursers of the sky. The spirit of the Whirlwind sweeps along charioted by a swarthy team. Thunder and Lightning, the terrific Dioscuri, ride in the heavens upon their neighing, fire-breathing stallions. The rain-god Indras comes up drawn by the Rohits, "the brown ones"; the Dawn has harnessed to her car three dappled greys. From the stables of Asgard issue Hrimfaxe and Skimfaxe, the steeds of Day and Night, just as from the stalls of Olympus the Hours lead forth Xanthos "the golden" and Belios "the mottled," and Memnon's mother, "Tithonia conjux," springs from bed to chariot and, shaking the dewy reins, Lampas and Phaethon whirl her upwards through the reddening skies to awaken the gods and men.

The spirits are all mounted-" Heaven's cherubim, hors'd upon the sightless coursers of the air"-night-roaming ghosts, by saucereyeballs known (Gay)-the Kelpy on its water-palfrey (Wordsworth) -the angels of death, whose "coal-black steeds wait for men" (Jean Ingelow) the fays of Collins on milk-white steeds, and of Shelley on "the coursers of the air," the elfin king of Leyden on his coalblack horse that goes with noiselesss hoofs. Ossian's steeds-"bounding sons of the hill," like every other animal in that tiresome imposture-are wreaths of mist. But more substantial, in their way, are the night-steeds of the moon in Campbell, the "pale horses" of

1 How miserably the poets use this beautiful episode! See, for instance, Congreve (To the Earl of Godolphin), or Parnell ("The Horse and the Olive").

famine, war, and plague (Mallet), the white horse, splashed with blood, which Anarchy rides, in Shelley, and the "pale horse," which is the steed of death in a score of poets. Coleridge alone makes fun of it :

A Pothecary on a white horse,

Rode by on his vocations,

And the Devil thought of his old friend

Death in the Revelations.

But it is reserved for Eliza Cook to speak of "the brave irongray, which is Eternity's Arab !"

The Oriental horse-myths have their exponent in Sir William Jones, whose "green-haired steeds," "with verdant manes," gallop through the skies. "The seven coursers green" of Love and Bounty, "with many an agate hoofed, and pasterns fringed with pearl," and those others, "the steeds of noon's effulgent king, that shake their green manes, and blaze with rubied eyes," are strictly in sympathy with Hindoo tradition. Campbell, on the same theme, wanders, as usual, into "sunless skies" of error.

Of horses more specifically, historically, individual, there is a multitude, of course. Starting from the commencement, there is the wild Scythian, supposed (by Phineas Fletcher) to drink the blood of the horse he is riding-" yet worse! this fiend makes his own flesh his meat"—and the horses of ancient tradition, such as that "wondrous horse of brass on which the Tartar king did ride;" and so we pass, through the classic steeds of Greece and Rome, the steeds of Cæsar and Alexander, to those of mediæval heroes, Arthur and the Cid; and so along the picketed lines of Rhenish steeds, knightly coursers, and milk-white palfreys of the old-ballad age, to the horse of Mazeppa, and the "Tartar steeds" of the revolt of Islam.

The horses of St. Mark and of Pharaoh-of which Miriam sang when she went up before the host, with all the women with timbrels and dances—of Darius which neighed him into the throne of Persia― of Diomed, anthropophagous brutes, "Thracian steeds with human. carnage wild,"

Which fell Geryon nursed, their food
The flesh of man, their drink his blood.

(Churchill)

-of Nereus, the sea-horses, a very favourite fancy of the poets-of

Dan Phoebus

When he doth tighten up the golden reigns

And paces leisurely down amber plains

His snorting four

-the air-bred and wind-begotten steeds of Thrace-and the winged steeds of Perseus and Endymion, all the "other foales of Pegasus, his kynde." So, step by step, pass to Black Besses of the Heath and Road, the chargers of our Joan-of-Arcs and other warriors of history, of Queen Elizabeth and other sovereigns, to the Rozinantes, Grizzles, and Dobbins, of Cervantes, Hudibras, and Syntax, to hacks of John Gilpin and the "Parish Doctor," and many a local hero and heroine beside whose jades are the subjects of a passing jest.

I remember having seen somewhere a picture of Adam, in the garb of Eden, riding a bare-backed mustang, a lion gambolling by his side. But in Holy Writ the horse appears in only one aspect-as the war-horse. "He saith among the trumpets, Ha! ha! and he smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains and the shouting." 1

In Genesis the name does not occur at all. Nor, as a matter of fact, could it do so, seeing that the first "horse" (the first that science knows of) was a little five-toed, sharp-nosed creature, much too small for a man of even our degenerate stature to ride upon, and otherwise also unsuitable for a steed; and it is, therefore, very probable that "the first man" never was on horseback.

Yet the use of the animal dates back to a prodigious antiquity. The Assyrian sculptures show us high-bred and carefully caparisoned chargers, three thousand years and more ago. Nor is it at all likely that they were the first to train them, for the horse is a native of Central Asia, and the early Aryan is hardly likely to have wasted such a useful beast. At any rate, that perfection to which the extremely ancient Assyrian monuments show us that the breeding had attained some eighteen hundred years before Christ, must certainly have taken a long time in development.

The poets, therefore, do not take more than their usual licence when they describe a primitive race catching the wild horse and breaking it in to their use. Thus in "Before the Flood":

With flying forelock and dishevelled mane,

They caught the wild steed prancing o'er the plain,

For war or pastime reined his fiery force:

Fleet as the wind he stretched along the course,

Or, loudly neighing at the trumpet's sound,

With hoofs of thunder smote the indented ground.

The colt "with heels unclipped and shaggy mane promiss," and

Job's splendid poem has incited several poets (Quarles, Young, Broome, for instance) to attempt the same theme, which, however, gains no accession of beauty or power from their paraphrases.

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