Roderick took his dying friend in his arms. He had found him in his wife's room playing with the dagger. She was almost dressed when he entered. At the sight of the hated red bodice his memory had rekindled; the horrible vision of the night had risen upon his mind; and gnashing his teeth he had sprung after his trembling flying bride, to avenge that murder and all those devilish doings. The old woman, ere she expired, confessed the crime that had been wrought; and the gladness and mirth of the whole house were suddenly changed into sorrow and lamentation and dismay. LUDWIG TIECK. The author of the foregoing tale, Ludwig Tieck, has lately been introduced to the English reader by an admirable translation of his two exquisite little novels, _The Pictures_ and _The Betrothing_. He is one among the great German writers who made their appearance during the last ten years of the eighteenth century; a period--whether from any extraordinary productiveness in the power that regulates the seed-time and the harvests of the human race, or from the mighty excitements and stimulants wherewith the world was then teeming--among the richest in the blossoming of genius. For not to mention the great military talents first developed in those days, among the holders of which were he who conquered all the continent of Europe, and he before whom that conqueror fell; turning away from the many rank but luxuriant weeds that sprang up in France, after all its plains had been manured with blood; and fixing the eye solely upon literary excellence, we find in our own country, that the chief part of those men by whom we may hope that the memory of our days will be transmitted to posterity as a thing precious and to be held in honour, that Wordsworth, and Coleridge, and Southey, and Lamb, and Landor, and Scott, put forth during those ten years the first-fruits of their minds; while in Germany, the same period was rendered illustrious by Fichte and John Paul Richter at its commencement, and subsequently by Schelling, and Hegel, and Steffens, Schleiermacher, and the Schlegels, and Novalis, and Tieck. Of this noble brotherhood, who all, I believe, studied at the same university, that of Jena, and who were all bound together by friendship, by affinity of genius, and by unity of aim, the two latter, Novalis and Tieck, were the poets: for though there are several things of great poetical beauty in the works of the Schlegels, their fame, upon the whole, rests on a different basis. The lovely dreamy mind of Novalis was cut off in the full promise of its spring; it only just awoke from the blissful visions of its childhood, to breathe forth a few lyrical murmurs about the mysteries it had been brooding over, and then fell asleep again. Upon Tieck, therefore, the character of German poetry in the age following those of Goethe and Schiller will mainly depend: and never did Norwegian or Icelandic spring burst forth more suddenly than the youth of Ludwig Tieck. I know not in