he genius of Destruction has done its work, there is now nothing more
to destroy. The doom of the Old has long been pronounced, and
irrevocable; the Old has passed away; but, alas, the New appears not
in its stead; the Time is still in pangs of travail with the New. Man
has walked by the light of conflagrations, and amid the sound of
falling cities; and now there is darkness, and long watching till it
be morning. The voice even of the faithful can but exclaim: "As yet
struggles the twelfth hour of the Night: birds of darkness are on the
wing, spectres up-rear, the dead walk, the living dream.--Thou,
Eternal Providence, wilt cause the day to dawn!"[52]

[Footnote 52: Jean Paul's _Hesperus_. Vorrede.]

Such being the condition, temporal and spiritual, of the world at our
Epoch, can we wonder that the world "listens to itself," and struggles
and writhes, everywhere externally and internally, like a thing in
pain? Nay, is not even this unhealthy action of the world's
Organisation, if the symptom of universal disease, yet also the
symptom and sole means of restoration and cure? The effort of Nature,
exerting her medicative force to cast out foreign impediments, and
once more become One, become whole? In Practice, still more in
Opinion, which is the precursor and prototype of Practice, there must
needs be collision, convulsion; much has to be ground away. Thought
must needs be Doubt and Inquiry, before it can again be Affirmation
and Sacred Precept. Innumerable "Philosophies of Man," contending in
boundless hubbub, must annihilate each other, before an inspired Poesy
and Faith for Man can fashion itself together.

* * * * *

From this stunning hubbub, a true Babylonish confusion of tongues, we
have here selected two Voices; less as objects of praise or
condemnation, than as signs how far the confusion has reached, what
prospect there is of its abating. Friedrich Schlegel's _Lectures_,
delivered at Dresden, and Mr. Hope's _Essay_, published in London, are
the latest utterances of European Speculation: far asunder in external
place, they stand at a still wider distance in inward purport; are,
indeed, so opposite and yet so cognate that they may, in many senses,
represent the two Extremes of our whole modern system of Thought; and
be said to include between them all the Metaphysical Philosophies, so
often alluded to here, which, of late times, from France, Germany,
England, have agitated and almost ov