below, and round about me: but I am chained to a little ball of dust and ashes." He was unhappy before the great ideas of Virtue--of Truth--and of God; because he knew how feeble are the approximations to them which a son of earth can make. But this was a dream: God be thanked, that in reality there is no such craving and asking eye directed upwards to heaven--to which death will not one day bring an answer! IMAGINATION UNTAMED BY THE COARSER REALITIES OF LIFE. Happy is every actor in the guilty drama of life, to whom the higher illusion within supplies or conceals the external illusion; to whom, in the tumult of his part and its intellectual interest, the bungling landscapes of the stage have the bloom and reality of nature, and whom the loud parting and shocking of the scenes disturb not in his dream! SATIRICAL NOTICE OF REVIEWERS. In Swabia, in Saxony, in Pomerania, are towns in which are stationed a strange sort of officers,--valuers of author's flesh, something like our old market-lookers in this town. They are commonly called tasters (or _Prægustatores_) because they eat a mouthful of every book beforehand, and tell the people whether its flavor be good. We authors, in spite, call them _reviewers_: but I believe an action of defamation would lie against us for such bad words. The tasters write no books themselves; consequently they have the more time to look over and tax those of other people. Or, if they do sometimes write books, they are bad ones: which again is very advantageous to them: for who can understand the theory of badness in other people's books so well as those who have learned it by practice in their own? They are reputed the guardians of literature and the literati for the same reason that St. Nepomuk is the patron saint of bridges and of all who pass over them,--namely, because he himself once lost his life from a bridge. FEMALE TONGUES. Hippel, the author of the book "Upon Marriage," says, "A woman, that does not talk, must be a stupid woman." But Hippel is an author whose opinions it is more safe to admire than to adopt. The most intelligent women are often silent amongst women; and again the most stupid and the most silent are often neither one nor the other except amongst men. In general the current remark upon men is valid also with respect to women,--that those for the most part are the greatest thinkers who are the least talkers; as frogs cease to croak when _light_ is brought to the water edge. However, in fact, the disproportionate talking of women arises out of the sedentariness of their labors: sedentary artisans,--as tailors, shoemakers, weavers,--have this habit as well as hypochondriacal tendencies in common with women. Apes do not talk, as savages say, that they may not be set to work: but women often talk double their share--even _because_ they work. FORGIVENESS.