his unknown sister? How rescue Victor from
his self-imposed delicacy and win for him a bride? This is the substance
of the story, hampered by wild, spasmodic interpolations and intrigues
and didactic explanations.

The reader must also become inured, by a course of physical training, to
resist the fiery onslaughts of a sentimentality which was the first
ferment of Jean Paul's sincere and huge imagination. See, for instance,
Vol. II. p. 229. And we cannot too much admire the tact which Mr. Brooks
has brought to the decanting of these seething passages into tolerable
vernacular limits. Sometimes, indeed, he misses a help which he might
have procured for the reader, to lift him, with less danger of
dislocation, to these pinnacles of passion, by transferring more of the
elevated idiom of the style: for, in some of the complicated paragraphs,
a too English rendering of the clauses gives the sentiment a dowdy and
prosaic air. We should not object to an occasional inversion of the
order, even where Jean Paul himself is more direct than usual; for this
always appeared to us to lend a racy German flavor to the page. No doubt
Jean Paul needs, first of all, to be made comprehensible; but if his
style is too persistently Anglicized, many places will be reached where
the sense itself must suffer for want of the picturesqueness of the
German idiom. The quaintness will grow flat, the color of the sentiment
will almost disappear, the rich paragraphs will run thinly clad,
disenchanted like Cinderella at midnight. Some of Mr. Carlyle's
translations from the German are invigorated by this Teutonicizing of
the English, and by the sincerity of phrases transferred directly as
they first came molten from the pen. This may be pushed to the point of
affectation; but judiciously used, it is suited to Jean Paul's fervor
and abandonment.

There is also a rhythm in his exalted moments, a delicate and noble
swing of the clauses, not easy to transfer: as in the Eighth
Dog-Post-Day, the paragraph commencing, "Wehe groeszere Wellen auf mich
zu, Morgenluft!" "Thou morning-air, break over me in greater waves!
Bathe me in thy vast billows which roll above our woods and meadows, and
bear me in blossom clouds past radiant gardens and glimmering streams,
and let me die gently floating above the earth, rocked amid flying
flowers and butterflies, and dissolving with outspread arms beneath the
sun; while all my veins fall blended into red morning-flakes down t