observe and relate only peculiarities and exceptional traits.  Incongruities are noted; congruities are only felt.  If a two-headed calf be born, the newspapers hasten to tell of it; but brave boys and beautiful girls by thousands grow to fulness of stature without mention.  We know so little of Homer and Shakspeare partly because they were Homer and Shakspeare.  Smaller men might afford more plentiful materials for biography, because their action and character would be more clouded with individualism.  The biography of a supreme poet is the history of his kind.  He transmits himself by pure vital impression.  His remembrance is committed, not to any separable faculty, but to a memory identical with the total being of men.  If you would learn his story, listen to the sprites that ride on crimson steeds along the arterial highways, singing of man’s destiny as they go.

THE GERMAN BURNS.

The extreme southwestern corner of Germany is an irregular right-angle, formed by the course of the Rhine.  Within this angle and an hypothenuse drawn from the Lake of Constance to Carlsruhe lies a wild mountain-region—­a lateral offshoot from the central chain which extends through Europe from west to east—­known to all readers of robber-romances as the Black Forest.  It is a cold, undulating upland, intersected with deep valleys which descend to the plains of the Rhine and the Danube, and covered with great tracts of fir-forest.  Here and there a peak rises high above the general level, the Feldberg attaining a height of five thousand feet.  The aspect of this region is stern and gloomy:  the fir-woods appear darker than elsewhere; the frequent little lakes are as inky in hue as the pools of the High Alps; and the meadows of living emerald give but a partial brightness to the scenery.  Here, however, the solitary traveller may adventure without fear.  Robbers and robber-castles have long since passed away, and the people, rough and uncouth as they may at first seem, are as kindly-hearted as they are honest.  Among them was born—­and in their incomprehensible dialect wrote—­Hebel, the German Burns.

We dislike the practice of using the name of one author as the characteristic designation of another.  It is, at best, the sign of an imperfect fame, implying rather the imitation of a scholar than the independent position of a master.  We can, nevertheless, in no other way indicate in advance the place which the subject of our sketch occupies in the literature of Germany.  A contemporary of Burns, and ignorant of the English language, there is no evidence that he had ever even heard of the former; but Burns, being the first truly great poet who succeeded in making classic a local dialect, thereby constituted himself an illustrious standard, by which his successors in the same path must be measured.  Thus, Bellman and Beranger have been inappropriately invested with his mantle, from the one fact of their being song-writers of a democratic stamp.  The Gascon, Jasmin, better deserves the title; and Longfellow, in translating his “Blind Girl of Castel-Cuille,” says,—­