f Balzac's nice _genre_ men and
women, and on a higher plane. Richter uses his persons of both sexes
principally to express the conditions of his feeling; they are cockles,
alternately dry and sparkling, underneath his mighty ebb and flow.

On one point we doubt if the American mind will understand Richter. He
believed in a love that one man might have for another man, which as
little corresponds to the average idea of friendship as the anti-slavery
sentiment of the "People's party" corresponds to Mr. Garrison's. In this
respect Richter creates an ideal and interfuses it with all his natural
ardor, which a German can understand better than the men of any other
nation, for in him is the tendency that Richter seeks to set forth by
his passionate imagination. Orestes and Pylades, David and Jonathan, and
the other famous loves of men, are suspected by the calculating breeds
of people. Brother Jonathan seldom finds his David, and he doubtless
thinks the Canon ought to have transferred that Scriptural friendship
into the Apocrypha. We shall sniff at the highly colored intercourse
of Richter's men, for it is often more than we can do to really love a
woman. We shall pronounce the relation affected, and the expression of
it turgid, even nauseous. But there is a genuine noble pulse in the
German heart, which beats to the rhythm of two men's heroic attachment,
and can expand till all the blood that flows through Richter's style
is welcomed and propelled by it. Still, we think that the unexpressed
friendship may also stand justified before the ideal.

The reader must be content to meet this stout and fervent man as he is,
not expecting that his genius will consult our tastes or prejudices,
or that his head will stoop at all for the sake of our company. Then
beneath his dense paragraphs and through his rambling pages his humility
will greet us, and fraternal regards draw us irresistibly to him. He is
a man for a people's reading, notwithstanding all the involutions of
style and thought which might suggest a different judgment. He certainly
does not write like Cobbett or Franklin, nor has he the thin, clear
polish of the popular historian. Yet his shrewdness and tenderness will
touch all simple-minded men; and twenty Cobbetts, or people's writers,
sharply rubbed together, could never light the flame of his imperial
imagination, for it is a kind of sunshine, sometimes hot enough, but
broad, impartial, and quickening, wherever there i