eation of a young and daring imagination. But we are getting far from
the tragic poet whom you were speaking of, Cyprian, and I hope you will
tell us at once to whom you allude, although I fancy I have a strong
idea?"

"I was very nearly breaking in upon your conversation, as I did once
before, with strange words and sayings," answered Cyprian, "which you
would not have understood, inasmuch as you were not seeing the images
of my waking-dream. Nevertheless, I cry out 'No! Since the days of
Shakespeare there never stalked such a Being across the stage as this
superhumanly terrible, gruesome old man!' And that you may not remain a
moment longer in doubt on the subject, I add at once that no modern
poet can congratulate himself on such a loftily tragic and powerful
creation as the author of the Soehne des Thales."

The friends looked at each other in amazement. They made a rapid
pass-muster of the principal characters in Zacharias Werner's pieces,
and then came to the same conclusion--that in every case there was a
certain element of the strange and singular, and often of the
commonplace, mingled with the truly great, the grandly tragic which
seemed to indicate that the author had never come to any really clear
seeing of his heroes, and that he was doubtless deficient in that
absolute health and soundness of the inner mind which Lothair
considered indispensible to every writer of tragedy.

Theodore alone had been laughing within himself, as if he were of
another opinion, and now began:

"Halt! Halt! ye worthy Serapion Brethren. Don't be in too great a
hurry. I know very well, in fact, I am the only one of you who can
know, that Cyprian is speaking of a work which the writer never
finished, which is consequently unknown to the world, although friends
in the writer's neighbourhood, to whom he communicated sketches of
scenes from it, had ample reason to be convinced that it would rise to
the position of being amongst the grandest and most powerful, not only
that he ever produced, but which have been seen in modern days."

"Of course," said Cyprian, "I was talking of the second part of the
'Kreuz an der Ostsee,' in which it is that the terrible, gruesome,
gigantic character to whom I was alluding occurs, the old King of
Prussia, Waidewuthis. It may be impossible for me to give you a
distinct idea of this character, which the poet, by virtue of some
mighty spell at his command, seems to have conjured up from the
mysteriou