find, if he will, in a man’s shadow that outward expression of himself which shows that he has been touched, like others, by the light of heaven.  But essentially the story is a poet’s whim.  Later writings of Chamisso proved him to be one of the best lyric poets of the romance school of his time, entirely German in his tone of thought.  His best poem, “Salas y Gomez,” describes the feeling of a solitary on a sea-girt rock, living on eggs of the numberless sea-birds until old age, when a ship is in sight, and passes him, and his last agony of despair is followed by a triumph in the strength of God.

“Alone and world-forsaken let me die;
   Thy Grace is all my wealth, for all my loss: 
On my bleached bones out of the southern sky
   Thy Love will look down from the starry cross.”

The “Story Without an End”—­a story of the endless beauty of Creation—­is from a writer who has no name on the rolls of fame.  The little piece has been made famous among us by the good will of Sarah Austin.  The child who enjoyed it, and for whom she made the delicate translation which here follows next after Chamisso’s “Peter Schlemihl,” was that only daughter who became Lady Duff-Gordon, and with whom we have made acquaintance in this Library as the translator of “The Amber Witch.”

To make up the tale of pages in this little book without breaking its uniformity, I have added a translation of the “Hymns to Night” of Novalis.  It is a translation made by myself seven-and-forty years ago, and printed in a student’s magazine that I then edited.  “Novalis” was the name assumed by a poet, Friedrich von Hardenberg, who died on the 25th March, 1801, aged twenty-nine.  He was bred among the Moravian brethren, and then sent to the University of Jena.  Two years after his marriage to a young wife, Sophie von Kuhn, she died.  That was in 1797.  At the same time he lost a brother who was very dear to him.  It was then—­four years before his own death—­that he wrote his “Hymns to Night.”

H. M.

PETER SCHLEMIHL, THE SHADOWLESS MAN.

INTRODUCTORY EPISTLE FROM A. VON CHAMISSO TO JULIUS EDWARD HITZIG.

You, who forget nobody, must surely remember one Peter Schlemihl, whom you used to meet occasionally at my house—­a long-legged youth, who was considered stupid and lazy, on account of his awkward and careless air.  I was sincerely attached to him.  You cannot have forgotten him, Edward.  He was on one occasion the hero of our rhymes, in the hey-day of our youthful spirits; and I recollect taking him one evening to a poetical tea-party, where he fell asleep while I was writing, without even waiting to hear my effusion:  and this reminds me of a witticism of yours respecting him.  You had already seen him, I know not where or when, in an old black frock-coat, which, indeed, he constantly wore; and you said, “He would be a lucky fellow if his soul were half as immortal