wondering delight over the approaching beauty, forgets to announce her, and has brought upon himself a heavy punishment; but Helen, the cause of his misdemeanor, is to be judge in his case, and she pardons him. Faust and all his vassals do homage to the powerful beauty, in whom the antique pathos soon disappears. In the new surroundings, in the mutual exchange of quick and confiding love, the sweet rhyme soon flows from their kissing lips. An attack of Menelaus interrupts the loving courtship; but Valor, which in the battle for Beauty and favor of the ladies, seeks its highest honor and purport, is unconquerable, and the swift might of the army victoriously opposes Menelaus. Christian chivalry protects the jewel of beauty which has fled to it for safety, against all barbarism pressing on from the East.—Thus the days of the lovers pass rapidly away in secret grottoes amid pastoral dalliance; as once Mars refreshed himself in the arms of Venus, so in the Middle Ages knights passed gladly from the storm of war to the sweet service of women in quiet trustfulness. Yet the son whom they beget, longs to free himself from this idle, Arcadian life. The nature of both the mother and the father drives him forward, and soon consummates the matter. Beautiful and graceful as Helen, the insatiate longing for freedom glows in him as in Faust. He strikes the lyre with wonderful, enchanting power; he revels wildly amid applauding maidens; he rushes from the bottom of the valley to the tops of the mountains, to see far out into the world, and to breathe freely in the free air. His elastic desire raises him, a second Icarus, high in the clouds; but he soon falls dead at the feet of the parents, while an aureola, like a comet, streaks the Heavens. Thus perished Lord Byron. He is a poet more romantic than Goethe, to whom, however, Art gave no final satisfaction, because he had a sympathy for the sufferings of nations and of mankind, which called him pressingly to action. His poems are full of this striving. In them he weeps away his grief for freedom. Walter Scott, who never passed out of the Middle Ages, is read more than Byron. But Byron is more powerful than he, because the Idea took deeper root, and that demoniacal character concentrated in itself all the struggles of our agitated time. Divine poesy softened not the wild sorrow of his heart, and the sacrifice of himself for the freedom of a beloved people and land could not reproduce classic Beauty. The fair mother, who evidently did not understand the stormy, self-conscious character of her son, sinks after him into the lower world. As everything in this phantasmagory is allegorical, I ask whether this can mean anything else than that freedom is necessary for beauty, and beauty also for freedom? Euphorion is boundless in his striving; the warnings of the parents avail not. He topples over into destruction. But Helen, i.e. Beauty, cannot survive him, for all beauty is the expression of freedom, of independence,