"As to Asia, the same processes secure a similar result. In the East Indies the elements of a mighty kingdom are collecting, and European cultivation widely diffusing itself. The Indians are so ready to receive it, and so thankful for the instructions of the English, that I do not dream of their ever being expelled the country. "New sects will arise in Arabia, which will approximate the old faith to Christianity. China and Japan will offer more resistance, inasmuch as in material cultivation they are already so near the Europeans; and it would be impossible to modify such immense masses of people by intermixture, like the blacks, or root them out, like the North American Indians. "Whatever, therefore, may be the result, whether at any future time the whites, by intermixtures, may swallow up all the other shades, it is, at all events, certain that population will go on increasing in a greater ratio than ever. Nothing has yet set bounds to its progress. Great nations have disappeared, the whole American race is on the point of expiring, and yet the numbers are replaced tenfold. Mortality in China is prodigious. Millions are swept off by a war or a pestilence, and yet that is the territory in the whole earth where population is most donse. It is, therefore, no idle question what will happen in some thousand years, when every corner of the earth is inhabited. In this question lies matter for the most awful page in the world's history. The means of supplying such prodigious numbers are above our present faculties to imagine_or is that the time for the angel of destruction foretold to us in the Revelations?" We find we have left ourselves little room to give any account of the fifth or Historical Problem, and our readers may perhaps be of opinion we have devoted quite as much space to the others as they deserve. But we explained, when we began, our reason for doing so; and we feel persuaded they will not now dissent from our proposition, that the present school of German philosophers has a much greater tendency to the absurd and grotesque, than to the useful and the true. Following in the steps of Herder and Schelling, Menzel discourses very learnedly on a certain "parallelism of nature," taking for his text this somewhat astounding proposition, which is the received doctrine of the modern philosophers, "That history forms one great self-connected life in time, as nature does inspace." He agrees also with Schelling, that all the appearances we are acquainted with in nature compose oppositions or antitheses; and that the antithesis is, therefore, the only form in which nature reveals herself to mankind." We shall not follow him in his exemplifications of this theory, although we confess that his Historical Problem shows as much information as ingenuity. We have now done all we intended, and, after wading through a hundred and ninety-five pages of such wonderful speculations, (which, we confess, have astonished us the more, as proceeding from the author of the Deutsche Literatur,) we cannot part without promising, on some future occasion, to restore him to our own good opinion, and that of our readers, by giving a view of him in some of his better works-his stirring history of his own land, or his noble assaults on literary quackery and imposture. 5. To him, thy child, thyself revealing, 6. The will, the love, the sunlike reason, 7. In all the track of earth-born ages, 8. But 'mid thy countless forms of being 9. Then teach my heart, celestial Brightness! HYMN X. 1. Time more than earthly o'er this hour prevails, 2. That face, so well-beloved, is senseless now, 3. In vain affection yearns to own as man 4. An hour ago its lightest looks or throbs, 5. Now not a worm is crawling o'er the earth, 6. Cold hand, I touch thee! Perish'd friend! I know 7. How strange is death to life! and yet how sure 8. Because the eye is only made to spell 9. The stars will sink as fade the lamps of earth, 10. Himalah's piles, like heaps of autumn leaves, 11. Yet something still will somewhere needs abide 12. The trees decay'd, their parent soil will feed, And still the earliest may have been the worst. 13. Thus, never desperate, muse believing men ; 14. Not thus, O God! desert us! Rather I |