THE WOODSTREAM. A FRAGMENT FROM THE GERMAN. THE pine had finished his story, uttering his last words in a low and melancholy tone. A deep silence lay over the whole forest; the babble of the Woodstream was the only sound which interrupted the solemnity, as it touched the stones and the roots with continued strokes-the eternal time-piece of the forest; and as it prattled, the pictures which its surface reflected sometimes clearly glittered in the sunshine, sometimes sadly wandered through the shadows of the trees and the clouds, whilst the monotonous sounds began to assume the form of rational discourse. Though the little flowers and trees appeared to wait anxiously for the Woodstream to tell his story, the solemn stillness continued yet awhile. Ah, that silence of the forest! Who does not know it? to whom has it not appeared as a holy Sabbath for the young flowers that dwell there? Even the stag breathes more gently, and the sportsman himself, overwhelmed with a holy, loving awe, falls on the grass in the calm recesses of the wood. That is the time when the stream tells old stories; and thus he began:-Do you know my origin? That of the meadow-stream is well known. He comes clearly out over some stone or little mound-a small but bright spring; and then he grows larger and larger, so that his short, grassy dress is no longer sufficient, however tall, for love of him, it tries to make itself. He puts on at last a short boddice of rushes, with loose, flowing feathers. The course of the mountain-stream is also known. Snow lies on the heights-that is the everlasting cap of the forests -dyed only by the rising and setting sun, and adorned by the clouds as they pass and repass with veils of unrivalled beauty. Notwithstanding its unchangeable appearance, gay life reigns within. There are little springs bubbling through the clefts, and drops of water playing eternal hide-and-seek. The all-powerful sun kisses these mountain-tops, and even this ice-cold heart is melted by his eternal love. The Fountains are the children of these kisses, and there they play at hide-and-seek till their home is too narrow for them, and then they find an outlet. But when they first catch a glimpse of the far world lying before them, they are frightened and overcome, and do not receive courage to go on till they are joined by other little curious streams; and then they proceed-first slowly and cautiously, afterwards faster and faster, till at length a bright mountain-stream bursts forth, springing from rock to rock like the chamois-goat, whose origin is likewise hard by. Sometimes he foams on high, like the snow of the mountain; sometimes he flows, shining clearly, an unbroken mirror, like the ice of the glaciers; and then descending into the valley, he reposes in the midst of nature's calm beauty. But where do I, the Woodstream, originate? You will not find the source which gave me birth - neither the snow nor the ice whose child I am. Here you think he arises, and you peep behind a stone or mossheap; but far off, behind a knotted tree-root, he laughs at you. Now hiding himself behind a thousand herbs and blossoms, then sinking into a whirl, among stones, old time-worn stones, which put green caps on their grey heads because they are jealous of the forest's verdure. Now look farther on still, and there you will see me flowing, peeping out here and there-but you will not find my source. That remains the riddle of the forest. But if you listen I will unravel it. Above, on a clear cloud which lightly passed over the plain, sat a little sprite, the favourite servant of the fairy queen, arranging her lady's ornaments. She took out of the casket a long string of costly pearls, a present from the ocean queen. Titania had ordered her to take great care of them, because they were her favouri ornaments. There are other pearls, but these, although tears, she does not weep; and they are only brought to light by the fisherman who wrenches them from her at the peril of his life. The little fairy, delighted in her occupation, held the string high in the air, thinking, perhaps, they would glitter more in the sunbeams; but these pearls are not like precious stones, which borrow their brilliancy from the world around them. The tear of the ocean encloses its lustre within itself, and sends forth radiance from within. Behind the fairy sat Puck, the wag who provokes men and sprites; and while the little creature rejoiced over her pearls, he cut the string, and down they rolled, gliding over the clouds, and at length alighting on the earth. For a moment the little fairy sat paralysed with consternation; then putting forth all her strength, she flew after the falling treasure. Flying an unmeasured space between the earth and the clouds, and seeing the little balls roll glittering past her on all sides, she would have returned hopelessly, had she not remarked under her, in a green field, on the grass and flowers, a thousand lustrous pearls. She thought they were some of those she had lost, and began diligently to collect them into the casket she held in her hand. The box was nearly filled, when Titania's lovely servant remarked that they were not pearls, the tears of the ocean, but dew, the tears of the flowers. Still she went on seeking the lost treasure. Seeing tears hang from a mother's eye, who bent over her dying child, she collected them-these were tears of love. Going on, she found many other weeping eyes; so many tears that I cannot give names to them all. Ah, how many tears are shed on earth! Out of men's eyes spring a wondrous stream-its source is the heart. Against this, pain, melancholy, repentance, and sometimes also joy, must knock, and then the stream flows. It is a powerful talisman; it has a most potent charm. That man's heart must be hard indeed when even a stranger's tears fail to move him. Though people contradict this, and say, I have no pity for those tears, they are deserved; but this is very false, for they are tears still; and perhaps come from the heart which has been most severely pierced. Well; our little fairy collected them, and holding the casket firm under her arm, she swept on high to the clouds. The little box became heavier and heavier-for tears do not weigh light-and lo! when she opened it, all the imaginary pearls had liquified: and hopelessly she fled from cloud to cloud-for these loved her-and she poured her complaint into their ear. The clouds sent their rain down to the earth, to fetch the lost. It streamed and flowed, and trees and leaves bent themselves, and the dew was wiped up, but the ocean's pearls were not found again. Puck, the wag, saw the poor little fairy's pain which he had caused, and it troubled him-for he liked to laugh at her, but not to give her pain. Down he dipped into the lap of earth, and fetched, by means of his friends the goblins and gnomes, gay, glittering ore, and shining spangles. "There you have all your trash again," said he; " or, rather, better and more shining." The little fairy rejoiced, and the clouds left off raining. But when she looked nearer to the gift, it was nothing better than glittering trumpery; and angrily she took the shell wherein it lay, and threw it afar off, making a wide radiant circle over the whole horizon. That was the first rainbow. Often since that time, when the clouds weep, Puck fetches his spangles, and the comedy is repeated. Beautiful is the rainbow; we all rejoice to see it, and so does man. But it is a vain deceitful object-a gift of the gnomes-a production of Puck, the wag. R People know this quite well, because when they run after it it disappears before their faces. And where does it go? It has fallen into the sea, say the children, the water-nymphs make their gay dresses of it. Well, it happened, as I say, by accident; but Puck repeated it intentionally, for he passed over with the remaining spangles, and so formed a second rainbow. This is why this brilliant appearance presents itself twice in the horizon at the same time. The fairy continued to sit sadly on the cloud, and could not rejoice at the first rainbow. Presently Titania came by. Fortunately at that time the splenetic queen was in a good humour. Perhaps she could the more easily forget her loss because an ocean sprite, whose heart she had won, gave her the promise of another set. For the great are generous, even with tears. But what should she do with the heavy contents of the casket? "Hasten down to the most secret part of the forest," said Titania, "and pour these drops in the midst of the salubrious plants; let the tears remain what they are, but united they shall remain one great tear of the forest." So In The little servant obeyed the queen's order, and thus the Woodstream had its source. So you see the forest has likewise its tear-like that of man. likewise do I spring from the heart-the hidden heart of the forest. When Sorrow, Desire, or Pain, knock at it, then the tear streams forth. In the summer, when so many children of the forest are destroyed and annihilated, I flow gently, but unceasingly. the autumn, when everything says farewell, I weep in silent sorrow over the blossoms and leaves which fall in my way, that they also may be entombed with regret. In the wild solitude of winter I am benumbed, and the tear becomes a pearl, like the closed grief of the ocean. Thus I hang with faint lustre on stones and roots, which look like weeping eyes. In the spring, when desire rises in every heart, then the tear of the forest flows in pensive joy. I overflow the borders of my course, greeting flowers and grass as far as I can. Often pity moves me; for when the clouds weep rain or the flowers dew, the Woodstream swells. Do you not perceive by the breath of feeling and melancholy which is exhaled from me, that I spring from the heart of the forest? The heaving rush presses itself nearer and nearer to ne. Where I flow the sensitive forget-me-not more especially flourishes; it glances at me, as you have seen blue eyes at the hour of parting. The weeping willow hangs her branches down to my eternally murmuring waves. Everywhere, I excite feeling; even the stone which stops my course-the unchangeable stone, over which time passes unmarked-weeps over me transparent tears, and my kisses are the only things to which it does not oppose itself. Now Puck the wag is envious of the Woodstream, whom he would surpass with his trash, but sees him, nevertheless, maintain continued importance; and often oddly puts a knotted root or pointed branch in my way, that my drops may spring up and be disturbed. You will then see in the sunbeams gay colours play around me, like those of the rainbow: that is Puck's trumpery, which he hangs about my lustre as if he would say, "Are not my gifts beautiful?" But soon they are gone, and I flow unchangeably: so often is the mirthful and ludicrous linked with sorrow and melancholy, as if contrived by the spirit of contradiction. Even the heart of man, when breaking beneath a load of sorrow, bursts forth into ludicrous sallies-a laugh is seen on the weeping face: in the midst of Nature's profoundest harmony a vacant distortion meets us; on the richest carpets of lawn a knotted root or faded dry branch stretches itself; between healthy, full-blown roses you will find a mis-shapen sister obtruding her weird face. Puck causes all this. It is a deep mind that can see how Nature makes all these incongruities to end in harmony. The Woodstream ceased. Once more deep silence prevailed; leaves and blossoms dared only to whisper and murmur. Presently a dead branch cracked, and then fell from an old oak-top, disturbing the leaves and blossoms as they fell into the stream. This was Puck's work. A moment, and all was still. LAUNCE, PROTEUS, AND JULIA. Proteus. How now? Where have you been these two days loitering? Launce. Marry, sir, I carried mistress Silvia the dog you bade me. Pro. What says she to my little jewel? Launce. Marry, she says your dog was a cur; and tells you currish thanks is good enough for such a present. Pro. But she received the dog? Launce. No, indeed she did not; here, I have brought him back again. Pro. What I-didst thou offer her this from me? Launce. Ay, sir; the other squirrel was stolen from me by the hangman's boy, in the market-place, and then I offered her mine own, which is a dog as big as ten of yours; and, therefore, the gift's the greater. Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act iv., sc. iii, How exquisitely has the artist caught the spirit of the scene! How entirely realized our notions of the inconstant Proteus, the loving Julia, and the halfwitted but affectionate Launce! Even to the dog himself there has been given an air of canine intelligence which is quite in unison with our kindly prepossessions -a dog that poor Launce "had saved from drowning, when three or four of his blind brothers went to it! Is he not exactly the kind of animal to commit all the errors of judgment" imputed to him by his master? The sort of inquisitive-nosed fellow who would "thrust himself into the company of three or four gentleman like dogs under the duke's table;" the very cur for whom a master such as Launce could even be content to "sit in the stocks for puddings he hath stolen;" have gloried in standing in "the pillory for geese he hath killed;" remembering his faults only that they might be reproved, and forgiven? 66 And Julia, too, who for love of the fickle Proteus is content to disguise herself in boy's apparel, that she might be near him always; who, even when she receives the ring she gave her lover, with orders to carry it to her rival, is fain to weep for that same faithful heart so foully recompensed; who, in spite of the evidence of her quondam lover's frail and shallow truth, is yet constrained to pity him- "Because he loves me, he despises me; because I love him, I must pity him;" who even from her rival draws some natural tears of sympathy when she relates the story of fond Julia's love "She is beholden to thee, gentle youth," says Silvia; "alas, poor lady! desolate and left, I weep myself to think upon thy words;" who even for that lady of her lord's affection, "a virtuous gentlewoman, mild and beautiful," has yet some kindly wishes— I hope my master's suit will be but cold, Since she respects my mistress' love so much. Could anything be better conceived than the air of modest curiosity and retiring bashfulness which the artist has given to the lady in her male attire? Indeed, the whole scene is capitally rendered, and differs from anything hitherto attempted in connexion with the illustrations of this play, being at once vigorous and fresh. Mr. Nicholson has both originality and discretion; and, like gentlemen who are above their tailors, and can adorn themselves without imitation, he disdains to reproduce other men's ideas or dress his own in the left-off garments of conventionality, G. F. P. Ridebat curas, necnon et gaudia vulgi, Interdum et lacrymas.-JUVENAL, Satira x. FIVE years ago, Bon Gualtier, beloved of Blackwood and Tait and the Dublin University Magazines, after discussing in one of the three the merits of Mr. Charles Dickens, went on to say that he would back MICHAEL ANGELO TITMARSH against him, in his own line, for a hundred pounds--asserted that in his then existing writings there were some touches of nature that might compete with anything in our literature, and wound up by the dictum, "Titmarsh is not properly appreciated." Now, there are a good many prophets in the world, and an astonishing proportion of them turn out to be false ones. Almost every one of us claims to be a prophet some time or other in his life: for instance, when John Brown has gone to the dogs, we look knowing, and remark that we had always and long ago foreseen and foretold that; or when Thomas Smith has won golden opinions from all sorts of men, we exclaim with a complacent chuckle that we invariably and from time immemorial predicted Smith's ultimate success. This ex post facto sort of prophecy is got up with marvellous cheapuess, and on a singularly weak substratum of facts. "I always said that Thackeray was a clever fellow, and would make his way," is often enough said now that the gentleman has made his way and established his cleverness beyond a doubt. But Bon Gualtier, we beg to say, made the discovery before Thackeray had written Vanity Fair, or Pendennis, or Our Street, or Dr. Birch, or Mrs. Perkins' Ball, &c. He did not prophecy these celebrities, it is true, but he saw in a then unnoticed author the faculty which has since produced them; and we mention this because it seems to us that the comparison then ventured upon (odious as all comparisons may be, and especially to the star in the ascendant) between Michael Angelo the unregarded and Boz the world-famous, has been fairly and fully substantiated by the literary annals of the last lustrum. Titmarsh was not properly appreciated at that time-but it was not everyone who could or would then and there say so. Still, he has made rapid strides since then. He has, during the interval, peopled the world of English fiction with some characters who stand a fair chance of living almost as long as Parson Adams, and uncle Toby, and Jeannie Deans, and Jonathan Oldbuck, and Falkland, and Nelly Trent. He has congregated in the booths and on the platforms of Vanity Fair that unique actress, consummate in her art, Rebecca Sharp, and the toocorpulent, too-susceptible Joseph Sedley, and that selfish humbug, that padded booby" (as Becky calls him), with neither wit, nor manners, nor heart, George Osborne-and his devoted little wife, and the noble William Dobbin, and the household of Crawleys, and ever so many besides. What charms us so in the etchings of Mr. Thackeray is, their truthfulness, their close adherence to life as it is. His fictions are not philosophical, in pretension at least, but practical; his portraits are not ideal, but real. His heroes and heroines are not faultless abstractions, but fallible flesh and blood, who, the best of them, have their weak points, which are open to the gaze of others as well as valets de chambre. Helen Pendennis, dear soul, can be cross and a little unjust once in a way, and Laura Bell be found abetting her. Amelia Osborne can be unreasonable, pettish, self-willed. Major Dobbin has a lisp in his speech, and is an awkward-looking animal, amenable to the sarcasms of refined life. But what exquisite observation of men and manners does our author manifest! The London of our own times-its higher and middle circles, at least-its merchants' drawing-rooms, its Russell-square dinner parties, its West End clubs, its fashionable slang, its Park drives and tittle-tattle, its conventional primnesses and pruderies and heartlessness, its snobs on the paré and flunkies in the servants' hall-where has it such a delineator? Dickens is undoubtedly an artist of firstrate powers, and in his own walk inimitable; but his descriptions of upper and middle life have none of the fidelity of Thackeray, none of the ease and accuracy and vitality; they are overdrawn or underdrawn-they are forced and unreal-they have redeeming touches of nature, but that is all. Where is there a true gentleman such as Thackeray hits off in a few strokes, in the whole of Dickens' sketches, from Pickwick to Copperfield? Not that we are for confining the idea of a gentleman to exclusive circles in Belgravia and Tyburniabut using the term in its technical acceptation, as the definition of a class; just as distinct and actual a class as the mercantile, or the legal, or the military. Be the cause what it may, we certainly feel that when Boz would draw a high-bred gentleman, he fails, and makes instead a puffy plebeian, a purvenu, or a “walking gentleman" of the kind incident to domestic dramas and minor theatres. Whereas Titmarsh finishes off a gentleman from the inside outwards, and can furnish you with specimens, in every grade of counterfeit or Brummagem gentility. The genuine article and the plated ware he is equally capable of supplying, being himself refined enough to appreciate the one, and quick-sighted enough to chronicle the other. If our great-grandchildren want to know how their greatgrandfathers and mothers taiked and behaved, what the ladies of A.D. 1850 conversed about after dinner, and the gentlemen down stairs over their claret-in fact to have a bird's-eye view of British society in its internal and domestic aspects at this present period-they cannot do better than consult the pictures of this cockney Michael Angelo;-remembering, however, that it is the Vanity Fair characteristics, to which the limner specially devotes himself, which will explain the continued vein of irony in which he indulges. Mr. Thackeray's earliest productions won him some hearty and hopeful admirers, but they were comparatively few in number. They rejoiced in his Irish Sketch Book, with its familiar personalities and vivacious descriptions--in the Paris Sketch Book, with its tasty observations on the Fine Arts, and its smart criticisms on George Sand and other French authors-in his frequent contributions to Frazer, including the Great Hoggarty Diamond (since republished, and quite as much commended as it deserves, or perchance a little more), the Yellow-plush Correspondence, the Shabby Genteel Story, Going to see a Man Hanged, in reference to the execution of Courvoisier, and many amusing jeux d'esprit on letters and the Fine Arts. Then came his connexion with Punch, and wise men exulted in the quiet, healthy philosophy abounding in Jeames's Diary, and the Book of Snobs. Happy is the name, and most spirited and life-like are the characters of Vanity Fair. Of the many and diversified people who keep stalls there, how many have we actually met, talked with, dined with, feared, or despised! Nothing can be more real than some of the descriptions. If Mr. Dickens was simultaneously assailed by an irate legion of Yorkshire schoolmasters, by whom his embodiment of that abominable Squeers was regarded as a gross personal libel, how many of all classes must be ready to pounce upon Mr. Thackeray with a similar charge! People who manage to live elegantly on nothing a year-people who keep on dropping per coach at your lodge-gate the most exciting tracts, such as ought to frighten the hair off your head-people (of the fair sex) who are handsome and fall in love with the utmost generosity, and ride and |