d fashionable readers. The ideal and absolute in art he
finds in the drama, which is the sum and type of all other artistic
creations. But no drama yet produced satisfies him, and he tells the
reasons why without hesitation. Those who wish to be entertained and set
thinking by an author who is in earnest even when most paradoxical, may
look at Wagner's book with advantage.

* * * * *

THORWALDSEN.--The Danish Government some time since sent Mr. Thiele, a
competent person, to Rome, for the purpose of collecting every thing
that could be obtained toward a history of the life and works of this
illustrious sculptor, whose early life is so obscure that even the date
and place of his birth are unknown, as well as the employment he made of
the first years that he was in Italy. Mr. Thiele has found a number of
casks in the cellars of the Tomati Palace at Rome, filled with letters,
addressed to Thorwaldsen, and among them a long and constant
correspondence between him and his mother, who lived part of the time in
Denmark and part of the time in Iceland, her native country. It seems
that Thorwaldsen had the habit of preserving his papers, even to the
most trifling, by flinging them confusedly into a cedar box in his room;
when that was full they were emptied into the casks where they have now
been found; these casks were not noticed when all the other contents of
the palace were removed to Copenhagen. Whatever is interesting in these
papers will, of course, be published. Mr. Thiele has also discovered in
the same cellar the model of a bas-relief by the same great artist,
representing the Muses dancing by Helicon. It will be added to the
collection of his works at Copenhagen.

* * * * *

THE artist HEIDEL has published at Berlin a series of Eight
Illustrations to Goethe's Iphigenia. He aims in them to preserve unmixed
the spirit of antique art, and thus to prove that the Germans are the
true successors of the Greeks. The subjects of his designs are:--The
Fall of Tantalus; the Departure of Agamemnon; the Sacrifice of
Iphigenia; the Death of Agamemnon; the Death of Clytemnestrae; the Flight
of Orestes; the Meeting of Orestes and Iphigenia; and the Return of
Iphigenia. The designs are praised by the German critics. They say that
in beholding the Flight of Orestes, pursued by the Furies, who dare not
enter the sacred temple of Apollo where he seeks refuge, one imagines