ders, low, long-winded, and speaks not the word intended, but
another; so that here the scarcely intelligible, in these endless
convolutions, becomes the wholly unreadable; and often we could ask,
as that mad pupil did of his tutor in Philosophy, "But whether is
Virtue a fluid, then, or a gas?" If the fact, that Schlegel, in the
city of Dresden, could find audience for such high discourse, may
excite our envy; this other fact, that a person of strong powers,
skilled in English Thought and master of its Dialect, could write the
_Origin and Prospects of Man_, may painfully remind us of the
reproach, that England has now no language for Meditation; that
England, the most calculative, is the least meditative, of all
civilised countries.

It is not our purpose to offer any criticism of Schlegel's Book; in
such limits as were possible here, we should despair of communicating
even the faintest image of its significance. To the mass of readers,
indeed, both among the Germans themselves, and still more elsewhere,
it nowise addresses itself, and may lie forever sealed. We point it
out as a remarkable document of the Time and of the Man; can recommend
it, moreover, to all earnest Thinkers, as a work deserving their best
regard; a work full of deep meditation, wherein the infinite mystery
of Life, if not represented, is decisively recognised. Of Schlegel
himself, and his character, and spiritual history, we can profess no
thorough or final understanding; yet enough to make us view him with
admiration and pity, nowise with harsh contemptuous censure; and must
say, with clearest persuasion, that the outcry of his being "a
renegade," and so forth, is but like other outcries, a judgment where
there was neither jury, nor evidence, nor judge. The candid reader, in
this Book itself, to say nothing of all the rest, will find traces of
a high, far-seeing, earnest spirit, to whom "Austrian Pensions," and
the Kaiser's crown, and Austria altogether, were but a light matter to
the finding and vitally appropriating of Truth. Let us respect the
sacred mystery of a Person; rush not irreverently into man's Holy of
Holies! Were the lost little one, as we said already, found "sucking
its dead mother, on the field of carnage," could it be other than a
spectacle for tears? A solemn mournful feeling comes over us when we
see this last Work of Friedrich Schlegel, the unwearied seeker, end
abruptly in the middle; and, as if he _had not_ yet found, as if