ecutive delights. At the same time, the neck of land over which our vessels are dragged at St. Marie, are fully as worthy of attention at home, as the Isthmus of Tehuantepec is worthy of negotiation abroad. The genius of our Constitution, the fair lady to whom all political haranguers delight to appeal, scours the whole world to find objects of her favor, while she utterly neglects and despises the homely affairs of her own country. She reminds one of the Hoosier lady whom we once saw, who flaunted her ribbons and protected her head with a gaudy parasol, while she tramped out on a pleasure walk barefooted.

The destructive influence of the niggardly policy of the government beyond the Falls of St. Marie can hardly be estimated. Here are millions of acres of land, a fraction only of which can be sold while shut out from connection with the commerce of the lower lakes. It is impossible to tell how many enterprises among fishermen and lumbermen are abandoned because of the difficulties of pursuing their calling. It is beyond dispute, that a large number of both copper and iron companies would pursue their business with energy, aided by an adequate amount of capitol, if the Falls of St. Marie, and the obstruction in Lake George, between Lake Huron and the Sault, could be overcome. Half a million of dollars would make a channel navigable for all the craft that navigates the lakes, from the lower lakes to Lake Superior. They would not cost the interest of the additional money which would come into the national treasury within five years after their completion, as a direct consequence.

In Lake George, six miles below St. Marie, is a bar of indurated clay, which precludes all craft whose draught is over 6 and 6 feet. It is 100 yards wide, and competent judges declare it could be cut out for $10,000. The estimate of Col. Abert, United States Topographical Engineer, for a ship canal at St. Marie one mile in length, 100 feet wide, and 12 feet deep, was $454,107 66.

It is hardly competent for the government to refuse an appropriation, after the lavish grants already made in various forms designed expressly to add value to our domains, and bring them into market, by creating roads and canals.

The improvements at the St. Clair flats and the Falls of St. Marie, then, are most emphatically national objects, in neither of which are the people of Michigan themselves more interested than in the enlargement of Buffalo Harbor. The whole nation corporate is interested for the value of the public domain; and, as a matter of self-preservation, in case of war, the merchant is interested for his property, the mariner for his life-the consumer of every barrel of flour and of every pound of iron and copper in the United States for his personal comfort. To our apprehension it is perfectly clear, that to the vast internal trade of our country, now in its infancy, a generous and liberal conduct of the government, under express provisions of the Constitution, is not a boon, a favor, a concession, but an act of the plainest common sense and simple justice.

These considerations have run on "currente calamo," to show by illustration from a single State how gigantic internal commerce was becoming, and how vital an element it has already become in the general prosperity. That Michigan should in 1830 commence with a population of a little more than 30,000, and in 1850 encroach close upon half a million, is a matter of astonishment. She has already outgrown all the New England States but two, and in twenty years more will probably outstrip them all, including the revered mother of States, Massachusetts herself. At this

moment but a small part of the territory of Michigan is settled. When the whole shall be settled with the density of Massachusetts, she will contain six millions of inhabitants. Not looking to the average population of Great Britain, 223 to the square mile, or of France, 165 to the square mile, but the average population only of the best of agricultural Europe, 110 to the square mile, then Michigan will contain a population of six and a half million souls. This calculation is followed out to exhibit in prospect the probable destiny of one small fraction of our boundless empire. The imagination reels to contemplate the mighty fabric of power, opulence, and population, which the calculation unfolds when applied to the whole of our territories capable of development. It almost makes one shudder to think of their fate, and believe that the wisdom of man is too limited to frame and maintain a government capable of embracing and fostering the mighty population and their myriad interests.

The increase of the commerce of Michigan has been as magical as that of her population, starting at zero ten years since and rolling up to fifteen millions, and all this while oppressed with horrible embarrassments. As prejudice wears away, and the credit of her people and government are restored, population, instead of being retarded, must increase with accelerated rapidity. But commerce always increases in a far more rapid ratio than population. By the necessity of position, Michigan must become the great fishing, lumber, and mining State of the north-west. Having unri valled facilities for manufacturing, whenever the two ultimate conditions shall exist on which manufactures thrive well-density of population, and surplus capital-then she must become a manufacturing State also.

To the historian and political economist, such a growth and development seem a miracle. Gazing at the result, it rivals the wildest vagaries that ever entered into the head of the enthusiast. We look upon it as an acted poem. We are proud of it as a triumph of the Anglo-Norman race in one of the paths of its selection. But to the actor in these scenes of conquest and progress, the picture has its dreary phases. When the experiment is so far perfected as it is in Michigan, and some twenty years only has rolled round, a whole generation of pioneers has been exhausted and worn out, too many of them, alas! sleeping in premature graves. Disease has made its ravages. Labor and toil of a few years has exhausted many a buoyant and bold spirit before the soberest calculations are realized. In fact, one generation has been worn out in preparing homes for the next. The silk-worm perishes in its chrysalis state that the inheritor of its toils may be robed in elegance. An empire growing up in twenty years is a fit subject of wonder and surprise; yet twenty years is adequate to the waste of a generation of men. Let no young dreamer imagine that the fate and fortune of the individual resembles the history of the State. It is too often the reverse. Yet each and every one of the population of a new country, whatever his fate-whether in poverty his eyes are closed in a strange land by strange hands, or whether a kindly fate awaits himparticipates in all those bold conceptions and that glowing enthusiasm, which the laying out and founding a great empire is calculated to inspire. He is a fortunate patriarch who, resisting all diseases and hazards, shall survive to tell the tale. His fate is like that of the aged mariner or soldier, who, surviving for half a century his early associates, thinks only in age of his perils and romantic adventures, his pleasures and enjoyments, and forgets entirely the far wider and gloomier picture of his toils, anxieties, and sufferings.

Art. II. THE MERCHANT. GERMAN PROSE WRITERS.*

THOSE who are not acquainted with German Prose Literature, can desire no better introduction to it than the volume of select translations from the Prose Writers of Germany, just published, in a beautiful and substantial octavo, by Messrs. Carey & Hart. Nor can they have a better friend to introduce them than the Rev. Frederic H. Hedge, the translator and edi. tor. We say this, of course, on the supposition that they have not the time or courage to undertake the original, of which these translations present inviting specimens. It certainly takes time to learn the German, with any accuracy; and it certainly requires courage to attempt the ruggedness and intricacies of German prose, above all, (if we may speak from hearsay, without personal experience,) of the prose Metaphysics. Unlike the French and Italian, the prose of which is much easier for the student than the poetry, German poetry is far more manageable and tractable than the Teutonic Musa pedestris. And hence, to our mind, this work derives a peculiar value, serving, as it does, as a guide to the most intricate and least approachable parts of German Literature.

We have hinted at the superior style in which this work has been got up. Before making a remark or two, which we propose to offer, on the value and richness of German Literature, and, in particular, on its interest and importance in a mercantile and even national point of view, we must be allowed to speak of another excellent feature, in what we hardly know whether to call the mechanical, or literary part of the work. The gallery of portraits which has been added, present a series of truly remarkable faces, familiar and home-like, yet different from our Anglo-Saxon lineaments, alter et idem, full of genius, even in the engraving. Here, accompanying the selections from each, we have portraits of Luther, Lessing, Goethe, Richter, Schiller, Mendelssohn and others.

The design of Mr. Hedge, in this work, has been, not so much to give extracts from every German, even of celebrity, who has written prose-not a collection, but such a selection from the leading writers-from Luther, who died in 1546, to Von Chamisso, who died in 1839, and of pieces of such a length, as give an idea and furnish a fair estimate of German Prose Literature as a whole.

Prefixed to the selection from each author, we have a biographical notice, brief but discriminating, in which are given the leading facts of their lives, together with a critique on their literary character and writings. We were surprised at the amount of matter which Mr. Hedge has thus compressed into a short space. The notices of Goethe and Schiller struck us as particularly full; but we are hardly prepared to agree with the edi tor in thinking ill of that growing preference for Schiller, that critical spirit, which, reversing the old idea of Goethe's supremacy, recognizes, after all, in Schiller, the more prevailing poet.

It may be, as is urged, that with Schiller the impulses of the man, sometimes morbidly tinged, cast a sickly hue, if you will, over the inspiration of the poet. It is certain that Goethe possessed, to a wonderful degree, the power of putting off self, of laying aside one's proper personality, and of putting on the feeling, thoughts, and modes of being of other men,

The Prose Writers of Germany. By FREDERIC H. HEDGE. Illustrated with Portraits. Philadelphia: Carey & Hart.

other minds, other ages, other characters. But, to our mind, there is rather too much of this power in Goethe. Or, more properly speaking, it is not counterbalanced or supported by another great requisite of the great poet, sympathy, properly so called; not sympathy of the intellect, but that of the heart. If this power enabled Goethe's genius to throw itself into almost any plastic posture, it was accompanied also with a plastic and marble-like coldness, which is not life. It is very idle to compare, for a moment, this sort of intellectual indifference, this sort of artistic skepticism to which all thoughts, feelings, and opinions, were indeed alike easy of comprehension and portrayal, but to which they were also all alike the objects of a mere cold inspection and analysis, with Shakspeare's genial and sympathetic discernment. In Shakspeare the world has gained Lear, Hamlet, Lady Macbeth, Rosalind; but it has not lost Shakspeare in his creations. Everywhere we feel the presence of that sympathy of the heart which feels with us, as well as of that sympathy of the intellect which makes its thoughts our thoughts. If it was Schiller's fault to think through his heart, so to speak, it was Goethe's to feel through his head, and make the feelings and failings, the hopes and the fears of humanity, too much the objects of mere critical inspection; like the snakes and curious reptiles, whose motions and writhings he was fond of watching, as he reposed in his garden at courtly Weimar.

The ground taken by those who defend Goethe from the charge of want of sympathy with the cause of German liberty, that, his mission being that of the thinker and poet, it behoved him to keep aloof from party, is hardly broad enough to cover the case; for the complaint is not merely that Goethe was not a liberal. As in his writings, where we often miss not merely the man, but the warm sympathies of man, Goethe was not merely not a liberal, but was in fact, by preference, a courtier, a partisan of the other side.

On the whole, for our part, we feel that the later judgment of Germany is truer than its first estimate of Goethe and Schiller. We feel that in Don Carlos at least, and in that sort of Trilogy of which Wallenstein is the subject, Schiller has written something as Shakspeare would have written, had he lived at the end of the 18th century.

All this, however, is by the way; for, in connection with the Prose Lit. erature of Germany, a discussion of the relative merits of two poets is hardly in place. It is suggested by the critical comparison which Mr. Hedge has deemed (and very properly) not away from the scope of his volume, and which has betrayed us into the expression of a cherished opinion. The excellent notices of Goethe and Schiller are not the only good ones, although the largest, in the volume. We would mention, in particular, the articles on Lessing, Herder, and Richter. Altogether, we have good sketches of the lives and writings of some thirty of the best writers of Germany. Mr. Hedge commands a direct and strong style; and is often able, by a few forcible words or a pointed quotation, to place vividly before us the character of a man, or the value of a book.

For instance, all the extracts from the mystic Böhme are not worth half as much, either in themselves, or as affording a specimen of the abilities of the man, as that one profound verse :

"If time be as eternity,

Eternity as time, to thee,

Then thou from strife art wholly free."

There is similar value and interest in that couplet of Luther's, also, which Mr. Hedge quotes, exhibiting a pious man's piety with no sour phase :"Who loves not wine, woman, and song,

Remains a fool his whole life long."

The reader who has gone through this volume, cannot but feel strongly drawn, if he have the time, to the study of the original German. He will have formed some notion of the extent and variety of German Literature, ranging from the abstrusest of metaphysics in Kant, to light fiction in Tieck and Chamisso; yet throughout, in the fiction as in the philosophy, marked and pervaded by soberness and thoroughness. One department, one vast branch of this literature, the volume before us gives little idea of, except indirectly; its profound scholarship in every kind of learning, particularly in philology. To the student of any aspiration, indeed, the German is almost an indispensable acquisition merely as an implement, a tool to work with, a means towards the higher aim of his studies. But this is a topic on which there is no need of enlarging. The last twenty years have witnessed the labors of Carlyle (some of whose fine versions from Goethe, Tieck, and Hoffinan, are given in this volume) and of other faithful students, who have secured, from the world of general readers in England and America, a pretty full and unqualified recognition of the excellences of German Literature.

But to the American, to the Merchant, we would address one or two remarks, in the pages of the Merchants' Magazine.

If it be any reason for studying Spanish that that language is of very extensive use and application in the mercantile relations of this country, German is equally worth studying, for the same reason. The commerce between the United States and Germany is growing every day. The northern States of Germany are devoting themselves with increasing zeal to manufactures; hence a constant increase of our export trade in cotton and tobacco.

In fact, any one who takes much interest in the fortunes of Germany, cannot be unaware of a change that is coming over that country. That people, the student, the thinker, the dreamer, perhaps, among nations, seems about to enter upon a new kind of existence, and to undergo a transition from the life of reflection to the life of action. Having studied "Philosophy, Jurisprudence, and Medicine, through and through," the German people, Faust-like, seem to be yielding to that yearning for activity, for the life of business, politics, and passion, which, in the cases of individuals, drives the student into what is called the World. Everywhere political agitation, everywhere railroads, growing manufactures in the North, and a commercial union of many of the States, too strikingly similar to the first movement towards our own political confederation, not to remind the most careless, all these things are signs of the change, are stages in it.

But there is one other feature in this change, more important, perhaps, than all the rest; one which, at least, is of most concern to Americans. The Germans have become a migratory people. Already the class of German merchants, resident here, and maintaining constant business com. munication with the land of their birth, is very large. But this is far from all. There is another, a national consideration connected with this fact. When we read American history, colonial and revolutionary, closing