his father, but wearily and unwillingly. His way would have led him back over the mountains; but there he is not permitted to go. The object of his journey comes to meet him; they go back together; he becomes more and more prosperous, and sinks deeper and deeper into his fatal delusion. Yet the fatal tablet is in his heart, the bond by which he is bound to evil; even on his wedding-night he cannot forget the giver. At length the long-smothered poison burst out with all its fury, and flowers touch his heart no more. He curses them and nature; the warning mandrake, instead of the voice of conscience, is but a revelation of the power of evil. It has but taught him to despair, and seek his friends elsewhere; and he is lost for ever. Of the more awful person in this fearful story I will not speak; but for the outline of the fate of Christian, who can look round him into the most ordinary life, and not see innumerable instances of it? The burden of the other two stories is very similar: the way to understand them is to try and analyse the feelings left on our mind by the whole, and not distract ourselves by assuming a fancied meaning, and speculating with the particulars to make each fragment fit our theory. Do not let us perplex ourselves to find out what the little dog is, what is the meaning of the bird, and the old woman. They may have many meanings; but we shall never find them by beginning at that end. It is only by the light of the whole that the parts become intelligible. "The Love-charm" is a work of a different nature; it is one of the most remarkable of all Tieck's writings, and, as far as we know, stands alone among the productions of modern art. With the help of a popular German superstition, he has woven a tragedy out of the ordinary events of every-day life, the spirit of which approaches as near as modern thought can be made to approach to the fatalism of the Greek drama. A destiny of some kind, either moral or external, is essential to tragedy. What we mean by "the terrible" as applied to human action, is, that the free will of man is laid under the influence of some external power, which he has little or no ability to resist, which hurries him on through a series of action and incident, from which, if in full possession of his self-control, he would shrink in horror. Thus, in common life the crimes men commit under the influence of any of the loftier passions, such as love or revenge, or when goaded on by famine or despair, or which men do in ignorance, when the ignorance may partially, but not entirely, be their own fault, are terrible, and therefore tragic. The individual seems to be sacrificed, not to deserve all that has fallen on him; his fate becomes one of the startling mysteries of life. The meaner or more selfish the passion under which the crime is committed, or the cooler and more deliberate the action, the more what he does loses the character of tragic, and becomes merely disgusting. Pity goes with