The average German professor spends his life in making lanterns fit to
guide us through the obscurest passages of all the _ologies_ and _ysics_,
and there are none in the world of such honest workmanship. They are
durable, they have intensifying glasses, reflectors of the most
scientific make, capital sockets in which to set a light, and a handsome
lump of potentially illuminating tallow is thrown in. But, in order to
_see_ by them, the explorer must make his own candle, supply his own
cohesive wick of common-sense, and light it himself. And yet the
admirable thoroughness of the German intellect! We should be ungrateful
indeed if we did not acknowledge that it has supplied the raw material in
almost every branch of science for the defter wits of other nations to
work on; yet we have a suspicion that there are certain lighter
departments of literature in which it may be misapplied, and turn into
something very like clumsiness. Delightful as Jean Paul's humor is, how
much more so would it be if he only knew when to stop! Ethereally deep as
is his sentiment, should we not feel it more if he sometimes gave us a
little less of it,--if he would only not always deal out his wine by
beer-measure? So thorough is the German mind, that might it not seem now
and then to work quite through its subject, and expatiate in cheerful
unconsciousness on the other side thereof?
With all its merits of a higher and deeper kind, it yet seems to us that
German literature has not quite satisfactorily answered that so
long-standing question of the French Abbe about _esprit_.
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