ulate, were a matter of small moment with him. What he wanted was a
divinely commissioned church with sacred mysteries--a spiritual house of
refuge from the weary battle of intellectual east winds, blasting and
barren, with which he saw Protestant Germany desolated. This house of
refuge he found in Cologne, in Vienna; and having once made up his mind
that spiritual unity and peace were to be found only in the one mother
church of Christendom, not being one of those half characters who,
"making _I dare not_ wait upon _I would_," are continually weaving a net
of paltry external _no's_ to entangle the progress of every grand decided
_yes_ of the inner man, Schlegel did not for a moment hesitate to make
his thought a deed, and publicly profess his return to Romanism in the
face of enlightened and "ultra-Protestant" Germany. To do this certainly
required some moral courage; and no just judge of human actions will
refuse to sympathize with the motive of this one, however little he may
feel himself at liberty to agree with the result.

But Frederick Schlegel, a well informed writer has said,[F] "became
Romanist in a way peculiar to himself, and had in no sense given up his
right of private judgment." We have not been able to see, from a careful
perusal of his works, (in all of which there is more or less of
theology,) that there is any foundation for this assertion of Varnhagen.
Frederick Schlegel, the German, was as honest and stout a Romanist in
this nineteenth century as any Spanish Ferdinand Catholicus in the
fifteenth. Freedom of speculation indeed, within certain known limits,
and spirituality of creed above what the meagre charity of some
Protestants may conceive possible in a Papist, we do find in this man;
but these good qualities a St Bernard, a Dante, a Savonarola, a Fenelon,
had exhibited in the Romish Church before Schlegel, and others as great
may exhibit them again. Freedom of thought, however, in the sense in
which it is understood by Protestants, was the very thing which Schlegel,
Goeres, Adam Mueller, and so many others, did give up when they entered the
Catholic Church. They felt as Wordsworth did when he wrote his beautiful
ode to "Duty;" they had more liberty than they knew how to use--

"Me this uncharter'd freedom tires;
I feel the weight of chance desires;
My hopes no more must change their name--
I long for a repose that ever is the same."

And if it seem strange to any one that Frede