In this confusion of labors two great ideas stand out: the first producing historical poetry, the second philosophical; the one especially manifest in Southey and Walter Scott, the other in Wordsworth and Shelley; both European, and displayed with equal brilliancy in France by Hugo, Lamartine, and Musset; with greater brilliancy in Germany by Goethe, Schiller, Rückert, and Heine; both so profound, that none of their representatives, except Goethe, divined their scope; and hardly now, after more than half a century, can we define their nature, so as to forecast their results. The first consists in saying, or rather foreboding, that our ideal is not the ideal; it is only one ideal, but there are others. The barbarian, the feudal man, the cavalier of the Renaissance, the Mussulman, the Indian, each age and each race has conceived its beauty, which was a beauty. Let us enjoy it, and for this purpose put ourselves entirely in the place of the discoverers; for it will not suffice to depict, as the previous novelists and dramatists have done, modern and national manners under old and foreign names; let us paint the sentiments of other ages and other races with their own features, however different these features may be from our own, and however unpleasing to our taste. Let us show our hero as he was, grotesque or not, with his true costume and speech: let him be fierce and superstitious if he was so; let us dash the barbarian with blood, and load the Covenanter with his bundle of biblical texts. Then one by one on the literary stage men saw the vanished or distant civilizations return; first the Middle Age and the Renaissance; then Arabia, Hindostan, and Persia; then the classical age, and the eighteenth century itself; and the historic taste becomes so eager, that from literature the contagion spread to other arts. The theatre changed its conventional costumes and decorations into true ones. Architecture built Roman villas in our northern climates, and feudal towers amidst our modern security. Painters travelled to imitate local coloring, and studied to reproduce moral coloring. Every man became a tourist and an archæologist; the human mind quitting its individual sentiments to adopt all sentiments really felt, and finally all possible sentiments, found its pattern in the great Goethe, who by his "Tasso, Iphigenia, Divan," his second part of "Faust," became a citizen of all nations and a contemporary of all ages, seemed to live at pleasure at every point of time and place, and gave an idea of universal mind. Yet this literature, as it approached perfection, approached its limit, and was only developed in order to die. Men did comprehend at last that attempted resurrections are always incomplete, that every imitation is only an imitation, that the modern accent infallibly penetrates the words which we place in the mouths of ancient characters, that every picture of manners must be indigenous and contemporaneous, and that archaic