Your registrars and proctors!
We'll live without the lawyer's cares,
And die without the doctor's.
No discontented fair shall pout
To see her spouse so stupid:
We'll tread the torch of Hymen out,
And live content with Cupid.

F.H.

* * * * *

THE PHILOSOPHER STRAUSS AS A POET.

The writer of a sketch in a late number of a Leipsic journal presents
the famous author of the _Life of Jesus_, David Friederich Strauss, in
a new character. He mentions, first, that in the _Unterhaltungen am
haeuslichen Heerde_ ("Conversations around the Homehearth"), published
by Strauss in 1856, the latter makes, in the introduction, the
following graceful reference to the deceased friend of his youth, E.F.
Kauffmann: "If I were a philosophical emperor and wrote
self-confessions, I would thank the gods for giving me, among other
blessings, a poet and musician for an early friend. He is dead now,
alas! the noble man whom alone I have to thank that my ear, though
still unskillful, has been opened to the world of harmony. He was not
a professional musician, but he had a thoroughly musical nature. The
laws of composition he had studied theoretically, and he followed them
practically. His position, in reality, was that of a professor of
mathematics. But music was his secret love. He not only knew the great
masters, but he lived in them. He thought little of playing on the
piano the whole of one of Mozart's operas, note for note, without any
written music before him. I have often seen him do this. How much I
have owed to those hours! How he could draw his hearers into the right
mood! How he could illuminate the groping mind with the lightning
flash of thought!"

To this friend Strauss sent from Munich in 1851 ten sonnets. They were
accompanied by a versified dedication to Kauffmann himself, and they
constitute his claim to be considered a poet as well as a philosophic
theologian. The sonnets are all on musical subjects, and may be taken
as the natural outgrowth of that cultivation of his musical taste
which he owed to his intimate association with Professor Kauffmann.
The metrical dedication and the first five sonnets are given in the
sketch before referred to. The writer of that article looks upon the
tendency, thus displayed by Strauss, to "drop into poetry," as Mr.
Wegg was accustomed to say, as another strong proof of the
affinity--elsewhere noticed--between the genius of Strauss