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He at once seized the opportunity of accompanying them, impatiently desirous to revisit the island, and to bring to us Henrietta Bodmer, now become his wife. She is a simple, amiable Swiss girl, who suits us well, and who is delighted to see once more her kind aunt, now become her mother.
Theory and practice always act upon each other: one can see from their works what is the men's opinion, and, from their opinions, predict what they will do. Yet we must not dismiss our Swiss theory without doing it justice. Bodmer, with all the pains he took, remained theoretically and practically a child all his life.
In Switzerland, Bodmer essayed a more republican form of the same authority. At that time a traveller reports eight hundred authors in Zuerich alone! Young aspirant for lettered fame, in imagination clear away the lichens from their forgotten headstones, and read humbly the "As I am, so thou must be," on all!
But receptivity is always more or less subordinate to external impressions, and nothing but a perpetual activity of the creative faculty could prevent matter from exercising a blind violence over this quality. Now, every time this happens the feeling becomes vulgar instead of poetical. No genius of the simple class, from Homer down to Bodmer, has entirely steered clear of this quicksand.
The book is, therefore, not a literary history in the strict sense of the term. It gives a comprehensive view of the culture of German Switzerland during the eighteenth century. To Bodmer alone one hundred and seventy-five pages are devoted.
But receptivity is always more or less subordinate to external impressions, and nothing but a perpetual activity of the creative faculty could prevent matter from exercising a blind violence over this quality. Now, every time this happens the feeling becomes vulgar instead of poetical. No genius of the simple class, from Homer down to Bodmer, has entirely steered clear of this quicksand.
But those early attempts at a scientific treatment of the mother-tongue still bear very much a dilettante stamp, and strikingly remind us of our orthographic literature in the Bodmer- Klopstock period; and we may likewise without injustice assign but a modest place to the antiquarian researches of this epoch. Stilo
I have been here a week, and the only living creature who seemed to recollect me was the Pharaon. Bar the Sirons, of course, and the perennial Bodmer." "Is there no survivor?" I inquired. "Of our geological epoch? not one," he replied. "This is the city of Petra in Edom." "And what sort of Bedouins encamp among the ruins?" I asked. "Youth, Dodd, youth; blooming, conscious youth," he returned.
He early manifested strong powers of mind, and with a two-fold taste for literature and art, he was placed in Humanity College at Zurich, of which two distinguished men, Bodmer and Breitenger, were professors. Here he became the bosom companion of that amiable enthusiast, Lavater, studied English, and conceived such a love for the works of Shakspeare, that he translated Macbeth into German.
He was taught by the Alps to crave for something nobler and deeper. Bodmer, though far below such a function, rose by favor of circumstances into an apostle or missionary of truth for Germany. He translated passages of English literature. He inoculated with his own sympathies the more fervent mind of the youthful Klopstock, who visited him in Switzerland.
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