His Legends closely resemble those collected by Grimm, and, like them, are
curious and instructive. He obtained them, one from a Gipsey, others from
peasants in the mountain districts, and others from some companies of
Hessian soldiers. He remarks that many such ancient legends are yet
floating about among the German people, and that they ought to be
collected before they are lost.

ZEND AVESTA, or On the things of Heaven and the World beyond the Grave, is
the title of a new book in three volumes just published at Leipzig, in
German, of course, by GUSTAV THEODOR FECHNOR. The author attempts to prove
the possibility, if not the certainty, of a future life of the individual
after death. His demonstrations are drawn from the analogies of the
natural world. He exhibits a wide acquaintance with nature and with
literature, but is not thought to have made any positive additions to
psychological science.

Those who are conversant with the curiosities of the Middle Ages, and have
read the entertaining history of "_Ye Nigromancer Virgilius_," in which
the Mantuan bard lives no longer in the magic of song, but that of literal
sorcery, will peruse with pleasure the _Virgil's Fortleben im
Mittelalter_, or The Life of Virgil continued in the Middle Ages, by G.
RAPPERT. Of all the wild romantic legends which the romantic time brought
forth, none surpass in singularity and interest this singular narration.

TEMPERANCE TALES are produced in Germany as well as elsewhere. JEREMIAS
GOTTHELF is the best author who there cultivates this style of
composition. His _Duersli, the Brandy drinker_, has just passed through a
fourth edition, and _How five Maidens miserably perished in Brandy_, to a
second. Gotthelf has the talent of combining great dramatic interest and
artistic freshness of narration, with a moral purpose. Hence the
popularity of these little books.

NIEHL'S _Burgerliche Gesellschaft_ (Civil Society) is greatly praised by
critics, as the most valuable work lately published in Germany, or indeed
in Europe, upon the State of Society and the causes operating to change
it. Especially good are its pictures of the different classes in Germany,
such as the nobility, the peasantry, the industrious middle class, and the
proletaries. These pictures are said to have the minuteness and fidelity
of daguerreotypes. The chapter on the "proletaries of intellectual labor,"
gives any thing but a flattering account