Along his lips a smile ran in and out, How glorious was the rising of the sun, There, on a snowy cloth, had Rita piled And now, imprison'd in a crystal bell, In amber jelly laid, and speckled trout Bright from the mountain streamlet, nor forgot Then, as I smoothed the napkin on my knee, As one clothed with authority I spoke : 66 Rita, my child, I love you well enough To rate you soundly for your last night's work."- She broke in here, and fairly proved my case: But curb and spur are what poor Rita needs! But flattery is a springe that takes you all. Though not unsympathetic, let me own Or I shall shame your judgment by good deeds. If at the ventiquattro Renzo comes, He will come, surely?—to the garden wall, I'll make him sweet amends, in truth I will, For what his jealous fancy took amiss." "Sad brow and true maid, will you?"-"Nay," she said, "I cannot tell how sad my brow may be, But true maid will I prove, and truer wife."- And this but take them all-Faith, Hope, and Love, They will be valued doubly for your sake."- Now, all the long and sultry afternoon, And snatches of her clear soprano voice I sat out on the balcony, at night, With puffs of fragrance from th' Habaña drawn, Then, drawing some short prelude from her lute, "Faded Flower! Your empty cup "Come and gone! your term is brief, "Wither'd Leaf and faded Flower She ended, sighing: yet they sat and talk'd Across the gravel, but they paused midway, BARON BUNSEN.1 BY THE REV. F. D. MAURICE. FOURTEEN years have passed away since Baron Bunsen left England; nearly eight since he died. Page after page in his biography records that some friend who was dear to him went before him or has followed him. The generation that is growing up in both countries will only have a tradition of his name; will perhaps have learnt to connect it with some disparaging epithet. Events have moved on rapidly in our land; a seven days' war has changed the condition of his. Scarcely any controversy in which he took an interest is in the same state now as ten years ago. Statesmen and doctors with whom he conversed have altered, sometimes reversed, their relations to each other. Nevertheless, the biography which the Baroness. Bunsen has written of her husband will be read with ever-deepening interest, not only by those who owe him reverence and gratitude, but by those who have only the most indistinct, even the most unfavourable, impressions of him. The former will understand him far better than they did while they listened to his words; will feel how often they misconstrued him, how little they appreciated his purposes even when they were most impressed by his gifts and received most benefits from his kindness. Those who have no memories to revive and no wrong judgments to repent of may welcome this book as one of the most useful and agreeable helps to a knowledge of events that have been passing, of men that have been acting, in the times nearest their own. I believe it interprets not only much that we have been 1 "A Memoir of Baron Bunsen." By his widow, Frances Baroness Bunsen. Two vols. Longmans, 1868. "God in History; or, the Progress of Man's Faith in the Moral Order of the World." By C. C. J. Baron Bunsen. Translated by Susannah Winkworth. Longmans, 1868. thinking of and searching after, but much that our children will be obliged to be thinking of and searching after far more vigorously than we have done. Such a book will not be much affected by criticisms-cordial, hostile, or lukewarm. It will make its own way. The stateliness of the language in which it is written, if not quite in accordance with the fashion of the hour, will leave an impression upon the reader's mind that the book is destined to last, that it will tell the days to come what has been done and felt in ours. Merely as a story it would possess great attractions. It records the fortunes of a poor boy, the son of a Dutch soldier who had much ado to maintain existence on a few acres of land and a small pension that had been allotted him. This boy became the friend and counsellor of two Prussian monarchs, a negotiator with cardinals and popes, an ambassador in England enjoying the confidence of bishops, nobles, princes. What sensational incidents, unexpected gold mines, unparalleled patrons, can account for a result so romantic and improbable? The real marvel of the narrative is the utter absence of all such machinery. There are no marvels, no great benefactors, the most thorough independence. A calm simple life is maintained through all these changes. The rule of fiction, "Servetur ad imum Qualis ab initio processerit," is exhibited in fact. The hard-working boy at Corbach is the hard-working man in Rome and in London; delighted to leave the society of courtiers that he may work still more vigorously in a house at Heidelberg on a translation of the Bible for the German people. "For me," he writes to one of his sons in the year 1847, when he was in the full sunshine of London fortune, " God ordained "from earliest childhood a rigorous "training; through poverty and distress "I was compelled to fight my way "through the world, bearing nothing "with me but my own inward conscious66 ness and a determination to live for an "ideal aim, disregarding all else as in"significant." (Vol. ii. p. 131.) He What this ideal aim was, the book, I think, very clearly reveals. But it certainly exhibits to us no stoic whose heart is closed against the impressions of the outward world, or the influences of human intercourse. A man so thoroughly sympathetic, so much affected by the persons with whom he conversed and the sights which he saw, one does not often meet with or read of. And they were not transitory effects. did not, like so many men who aim at self-culture, learn a little from this man and a little from that, and then, having sucked the orange, cast away that which contained it as rind. A man or woman from whom he had learned any lessons or received any blessing was an object of gratitude for ever. His sister Christiana seems to have had a vast power over his youth; from her his first definite religious convictions had been received. He was only too ready to pay her deference in manhood till she claimed a kind of dominion over him which would have hindered the fulfilment of sacred tasks and duties to which he was pledged. But her stern faith did not cease to be a potent element in his life, even when his thoughts had become most free and discursive. At Göttingen he was in the midst of a circle of friends full of zeal for German freedom, afterwards to be leaders of German science. He seems to have been the centre of them, not because he exercised authority over them, but because he could enter more than any into the thoughts and feelings of the rest. There was scarcely one of them with whom he did not maintain throughout life a genial intercourse. He felt the power of Schleiermacher during a short visit to Berlin when he was twenty-four; of Niebuhr, he said, at the same age, "It would be hard to describe my No. 104.-VOL. XVIII. "astonishment at his command over "the entire domain of knowledge. All "that can be known seems to be within "his grasp, and everything known to "him to be at hand as if he held it by a thread." (Vol. i. p. 84.) 66 The influence which began thus never ceased to act upon him. Niebuhr's precepts and example determined in many ways the course of his studies. Under Niebuhr he learnt to join study with practical life. The Toryism of Niebuhr's European politics, so much contrasted with his love of Athenian democracy, evidently, for a time, had great mastery over Bunsen. But it did not expel his earlier passion for popular liberty. It helped to give that greater firmness and solidity-to prepare him for clearer views of what was demanded of people and monarchs, when the crisis came which was to test them both; a crisis which Niebuhr dreaded, and which Bunsen lived to see. No deeper moral is to be learnt from this biography than that which these passages of it disclose, that the truly receptive man, if he is also humble and reverent, acquires a strength and independence of purpose that is never reached by a man who is always on the watch lest his opinions should be stolen from him, who dreads the intrusion of every new thought lest it should disturb what he has already. The different elements among which he works help to mould, not a pliable and changeable but a selfsubsisting character, which, because it is self-subsisting, has unlimited capacity for growth and development. The critical moment of Bunsen's life was when he arrived in Florence in 1816. He had been tutor to a young American, Mr. Astor. Whilst travelling with him he had been studying Persian. His great longing was to visit India; there he thought he should be able to learn how the languages, religions, and arts of the East bore upon the West; there he should be at the well-head of the culture that he desired for himself the culture that was needed for his country. He must prepare himself for this work. Till he was fit for it L |