It always seemed to us that the finest part of "Hesperus," and one of the finest passages of German literature, is contained in the Ninth Dog-Post-Day and some pages of the Tenth. The Ninth, in particular, which is a perfect idyl, describes Victor's walk to Kussewitz: all the landscape is made to share and symbolize his rapture: the people in the fields, the framework of an unfinished house, the two-wheeled hut of the shepherd, are not only well painted, but turned most naturally to the help of interpreting his feeling. The chapter has also a direct and unembarrassed movement, which is rare in this romance. And it is beautifully translated. The reader must understand that Victor is called by various names; so that, if he merely dips into the book, as we suspect he will until his sympathy is enlisted by some fine thought, his ignorance will increase the frantic and dishevelled state of the story. Victor is Horion, Sebastian, and Bastian; a susceptible youth, profoundly affected by the presence of noble or handsome women, and brought into situations that test his delicacy. He smuggles a declaration of love into a watch which he sells, in the disguise of an Italian merchant, to the Princess Agnola, on occasion of her first reception at the court of her husband. He is ashamed of this after he begins to know Clotilde, who is one of Jean Paul's pure and noble women; and he is at one time full of dread lest the Princess had read his watch-paper, and at another full of pique at the suspicion that she had not. Being court-physician and oculist, he has frequent opportunities to visit Agnola, and there is one rather florid occasion which the midnight cry of the street-watch man interrupts. But all this time, the inflammable Victor was indulging a kind of tenderness for Joachime, maid-of-honor and attractive female. As the love for Clotilde deepens, he must destroy these partialities for Agnola and Joachime. This is no easy matter; what with the watch-paper and various emphatic passages of something more than friendship, the true love does not at once stand forth, that he may find "the partition-wall between love and friendship with women to be very visible and very thick." But one day the accursed watch-paper flutters into Joachime's hand, who at once takes it for a declaration of love to herself, and beams with appropriate tenderness. Victor, seized with sudden coldness and resolution, confesses all to Joachime; and the story, released from its feminine embarrassments, would soon reach a honeymoon, if it were not for the difficulty of deciding the parentage and relationship of the various characters. A wise child knows its own father; but no endowment of wisdom in the reader will harmonize the genealogy of this romance. A birth-mark of a Stettin apple, which is visible only in autumn when that fruit is ripening, plays the part of Box's strawberry in the farce, and with as much perspicuity.