but an empty, altogether insufficient concern; and the whole scene of life had become hopeless enough.  Unhappily, such feelings are yet by no means so infrequent with ourselves, that we need stop here to depict them.  That state of Unbelief from which the Germans do seem to be in some measure delivered, still presses with incubus force on the greater part of Europe; and nation after nation, each in its own way, feels that the first of all moral problems is how to cast it off, or how to rise above it.  Governments naturally attempt the first expedient; Philosophers, in general, the second.

The Poet, says Schiller, is a citizen not only of his country, but of his time.  Whatever occupies and interests men in general, will interest him still more.  That nameless Unrest, the blind struggle of a soul in bondage, that high, sad, longing Discontent, which was agitating every bosom, had driven Goethe almost to despair.  All felt it; he alone could give it voice.  And here lies the secret of his popularity; in his deep, susceptive heart, he felt a thousand times more keenly what every one was feeling; with the creative gift which belonged to him as a poet, he bodied it forth into visible shape, gave it a local habitation and a name; and so made himself the spokesman of his generation. Werter is but the cry of that dim, rooted pain, under which all thoughtful men of a certain age were languishing:  it paints the misery, it passionately utters the complaint; and heart and voice, all over Europe, loudly and at once respond to it.  True, it prescribes no remedy; for that was a far different, far harder enterprise, to which other years and a higher culture were required; but even this utterance of the pain, even this little, for the present, is ardently grasped at, and with eager sympathy appropriated in every bosom.  If Byron’s life-weariness, his moody melancholy, and mad stormful indignation, borne on the tones of a wild and quite artless melody, could pierce so deep into many a British heart, now that the whole matter is no longer new,—­is indeed old and trite,—­we may judge with what vehement acceptance this Werter must have been welcomed, coming as it did like a voice from unknown regions; the first thrilling peal of that impassioned dirge, which, in country after country, men’s ears have listened to, till they were deaf to all else.  For Werter infusing itself into the core and whole spirit of Literature, gave birth to a race of Sentimentalists, who have raged and wailed in every part of the world, till better light dawned on them, or at worst, exhausted Nature laid herself to sleep, and it was discovered that lamenting was an unproductive labour.  These funereal choristers, in Germany a loud, haggard, tumultuous, as well as tearful class, were named the Kraftmaenner or Power-men; but have all long since, like sick children, cried themselves to rest.  Byron was our English Sentimentalist and Power-man; the strongest of his