al attitude, bespeaking the grief it only
seemed to hide, was no doubt highly expressive.

And in this point of view, it may afford no bad illustration of that
suggestive language of poetry, which sometimes throws the veil, not to
conceal the passion, or to leave it to another imagination to discover,
but as the best means of betraying it.

We repeat that we do not profess to give any thing approaching to an
analytical review of the lectures of M. Girardin; the illustrations,
being taken from the poetry of another nation, would often require a
length of explanatory detail quite inconsistent with our limits. We
persist, therefore, in regarding them in the one point of view already
indicated-namely, as a protest against certain vitiated tastes and
deleterious sentiments which prevail at the present day.

We again revert, therefore, to the lecture upon suicide, for the sake of
a remark that we find there upon _Werther,_ and on its celebrated
author. It is rarely that we hear any one speak out so plainly upon
Goethe. After speaking of the "moral vitality" which supports the
fatigues and inures us to the self-denials of life, he says:--

There are characters, on the contrary, who we perceive, at
first sight, are predestined to die. Ardent and enthusiastic,
wanting force and patience--life is evidently not made for them.
Such is Werther. Goethe had not created him to live, and he knew
this well; so that when some German author, I know not whom,
undertook to correct the catastrophe of the romance, and make
Werther live instead of committing suicide, Goethe said--'The poor
man has no idea that the evil is without remedy, and that a mortal
insect has stung our Werther in the flower of his youth.'

What is this mortal insect that has stung the youth of
Werther? Mistake it not, it is the spirit of doubt, the
spirit of the eighteenth century; and it is not Werther only
that the insect has stung--it is Goethe himself. Goethe
belongs to the eighteenth century; he is its disciple, its
heir; he is, like it, the sceptic, but he is also the poet.
It is this which conceals his universal doubt. Besides, as
he perceived, with that admirable tact which accompanies his
genius, that his scepticism would injure his poetry, he has
laboured to correct its influence, and, for this purpose,
has called to his aid all the resources of art and scie