the ground among
thorns and thistles. _Der liebe Gott_ said to him, "You are very
badly lodged there; why don't you build yourself a house?" "Before I
take the trouble," said Anselm, "I should like to know how long I
have to live." "About thirty years," said _Der liebe Gott_. "Oh,
for so short a time," replied he, "it's not worth while," and turned
himself round among the thistles.'

Dr. Franck told me a story of which I had never heard before.
Voltaire had for some reason or other taken a grudge against the
prophet Habakkuk, and affected to find in him things he never wrote.
Somebody took the Bible and began to demonstrate to him that he was
mistaken. '_C'est egal_,' he said impatiently, '_Habakkuk etait
capable de tout_!'

_Oct._ 30, 1853.

I am not in love with the _Richtung_ (tendency) of our modern
novelists. There is abundance of talent; but writing a pretty,
graceful, touching, yet pleasing story is the last thing our writers
nowadays think of. Their novels are party pamphlets on political or
social questions, like _Sybil_, or _Alton Locke_, or _Mary Barton_,
or _Uncle Tom_; or they are the most minute and painful dissections
of the least agreeable and beautiful parts of our nature, like those
of Miss Bronte--_Jane Eyre_ and _Villette_; or they are a kind of
martyrology, like Mrs. Marsh's _Emilia Wyndham_, which makes you
almost doubt whether any torments the heroine would have earned by
being naughty could exceed those she incurred by her virtue.

Where, oh! where is the charming, humane, gentle spirit that dictated
the _Vicar of Wakefield_--the spirit which Goethe so justly calls
_versohnend_ (reconciling), with all the weaknesses and woes of
humanity? . . . Have you read Thackeray's _Esmond_? It is a curious
and very successful attempt to imitate the style of our old
novelists. . . . Which of Mrs. Gore's novels are translated? They
are very clever, lively, worldly, bitter, disagreeable, and
entertaining. . . . Miss Austen's--are they translated? They are
not new, and are Dutch paintings of every-day people--very clever,
very true, very _unaesthetic_, but amusing. I have not seen _Ruth_,
by Mrs. Gaskell. I hear it much admired--and blamed. It is one of
the many proofs of the desire women now have t