bird bounded higher aloft, as if in answering defiance.  I followed him with my eyes for a long time, until he disappeared in the east.  On the ground, about fifty paces beneath me, stood a stork; perfectly tranquil and impassive in the midst of the warring elements.  Twice or thrice she turned her head towards the quarter from whence the wind came, with an indescribable air of half indifferent curiosity; but at length she drew up one of her long sinewy legs, hid her head beneath her wing, and calmly composed herself to sleep.

I thought of Byron and Goethe; of the stormy sky that overhung both; of the tempest-tossed existence, the lifelong struggle, of the one, and the calm of the other; and of the two mighty sources of poetry exhausted and closed by them.

Byron and Goethe—­the two names that predominate, and, come what may, ever will predominate, over our every recollection of the fifty years that have passed away.  They rule; the master-minds, I might almost say the tyrants, of a whole period of poetry; brilliant, yet sad; glorious in youth and daring, yet cankered by the worm in the bud, despair.  They are the two representative poets of two great schools; and around them we are compelled to group all the lesser minds which contributed to render the era illustrious.  The qualities which adorn and distinguish their works are to be found, although more thinly scattered, in other poets their contemporaries; still theirs are the names that involuntarily rise to our lips whenever we seek to characterize the tendencies of the age in which they lived.  Their genius pursued different, even opposite routes; and yet very rarely do our thoughts turn to either without evoking the image of the other, as a sort of necessary complement to the first.  The eyes of Europe were fixed upon the pair, as the spectators gaze on two mighty wrestlers in the same arena; and they, like noble and generous adversaries, admired, praised, and held out the hand to each other.  Many poets have followed in their footsteps; none have been so popular.  Others have found judges and critics who have appreciated them calmly and impartially; not so they:  for them there have been only enthusiasts or enemies, wreaths or stones; and when they vanished into the vast night that envelops and transforms alike men and things—­silence reigned around their tombs.  Little by little, poetry had passed away from our world, and it seemed as if their last sigh had extinguished the sacred flame.

A reaction has now commenced; good, in so far as it reveals a desire for and promise of new life; evil, in so far as it betrays narrow views, a tendency to injustice towards departed genius, and the absence of any fixed rule or principle to guide our appreciation of the past.  Human judgment, like Luther’s drunken peasant, when saved from falling on one side, too often topples over on the other.  The reaction against Goethe, in his own country especially, which was courageously and justly begun by Menzel during