ntions with deference. On Eckerman's
"Conversations with Goethe" he has a series of three papers, wherein
he deals chiefly with the critic and sage, exhibiting with honest
pride Goethe's admiration of some of the chief French writers, and his
acknowledgment of what he owed them. To a passage relating to the
French translation of Eckerman, M. Sainte-Beuve has the following
note, which we, on this side the Atlantic, may cherish as a high
tribute to our distinguished countrywoman: "The English translation is
by Miss Fuller, afterwards Marchioness Ossoli, who perished so
unhappily by shipwreck. An excellent preface precedes this
translation, and I must say that for elevated comprehension of the
subject and for justness of appreciation it leaves our preface far
behind it. Miss Fuller, an American lady of Boston, was a
person of true merit and of great intellectual vigor." A sympathetic
student of Goethe, Margaret Fuller purposed to write a life of him;
and seeing what critical capacity and what insight into the nature of
Goethe she has shown in this preface, we may be confident that she
would have made a genuine contribution to the Goethe "literature," had
she lived to do that and other high literary work. Her many friends
had nearer and warmer motives for deploring the early loss of this
gifted, generous, noble-hearted woman.

One of the busiest functions of the critic being to sift the
multifarious harvest of contemporaneous literature, he must have a
hand that can shake hard,--and hit hard, too, at times. For fifteen
years M. Sainte-Beuve furnished once a week, under the title of
"Causeries du Lundi," a critical paper, to a Paris daily journal; not
short, rapid notices, but articles that would cover seven or eight
pages of one of our double-columned monthly magazines. He was thus
ever in the thick of the literary _melee_. Attractions and repulsions,
sympathies and antipathies, there will be wherever men do congregate;
the aesthetic plane is as open as any other to personal preferences
and friendships. A literary circle as large as that of Paris,
if too miscellaneous and extensive to become one multitudinous
mutual-admiration-society, will, through cliques and coteries, betray
some of its vices. In this voluminous series of papers the critical
pen, when most earnestly eulogistic or most sharply incisive, is
wielded with so much skill and art and fine temper, that personality
is seldom transpicuous. The Parisian reader wil