This work deserves to be read carefully by all true lovers of literature, because it gives us new insight into the qualities and individuality of a great man. It will also be welcome to his devoted admirers, although they hardly need this in order to treasure him highly; to the attentive reader he has revealed himself sufficiently in his works. Examine the _Misanthrope_ carefully and ask yourself whether a poet has ever represented his inner spirit more completely or more admirably. We can well call the content and treatment of this play “tragic.” Such an impression at least it has always left with us, because that mood is brought before our mind’s eye which often in itself brings us to despair, and seems as if it would make the world unbearable. Here is represented the type of man who despite great cultivation has yet remained natural, and who with himself, as well as others, would like only too well to express himself with complete truth and sincerity. But we see him in conflict with the social world, where one cannot move without dissimulation and shallowness. In contrast to such a type Timon is merely a comic character. I wish that a talented poet would depict such a visionary who was always deceiving himself as to the world, and then was greatly put out with it, as if it had deceived him. OLD GERMAN FOLKSONGS (1806) _Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Old German Songs_, edited by Achim von Arnim and Klemens Brentano. Heidelberg, 1806. We are decidedly of the opinion that for the present criticism should not concern itself with this collection. The editors have collected and arranged this volume with such love and diligence, such good taste and delicacy of feeling, that their countrymen should first of all show their gratitude for this loving care by their good-will, their interest, and their sympathetic appreciation. This little book ought to be found in every home in which lively and healthy people dwell,--at the window, under the mirror, or wherever else songbooks and cookbooks are usually found, so that it may be opened in any happy or unhappy mood, and one may always find something which strikes a similar or a new chord, even though one must perhaps turn over a few pages. But the most fitting place for this volume would be upon the piano of a lover or a master of music, so that full justice might be done the songs by setting them to old familiar tunes, or suitable tunes might be adapted to them, or, God willing, new and striking melodies might be composed through their inspiration. If these songs were then borne from ear to ear, from mouth to mouth, clothed in their own melodious harmony, if they gradually returned regenerated and enhanced in beauty to the people from whom they, so to speak, have in part sprung, then we might truly say that the little book had fulfilled its mission, and could now be lost again in its written or printed form, because it had become part and parcel of the life and culture of the nation.