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England has done. To illustrate this we need but think of the religion, the philosophy and the academical institutions of Scotland.

We have now come down to the actual present, in which all the different springs and agencies of which we have treated, have doubled in strength, although English pride or self-sufficiency is not always ready to acknowledge this. The mental gulf separating us from England visibly lessens every year both through the increasing commercial and political intercourse, and through the circumstance that the questlons concerning national education are becoming the subject of more serions deliberation, a circumstance which has turned the attention of educational men and statesmen, for obvions reasons, to Germany more than to any other country. Excellent periodicals such as the Saturday Review, Quarterly Review(Edinburgh) and many others are instrumental in bringing about a closer union.

As for the poets of our own days, there are on the whole but few names that rise above the common level of mediocrity. The majority are divided into different groups which incline partly to the old classical school, partly exhibit a germanizing tendency. But it would be difficult to prove that any of the more important dramatical and lyrical poets such as E. Browning, Lytton, Aytoun, Alex. Smith or the noble author of the„Idyls of the Kings“ Alfred Tennyson himself could have been able to resist this influence altogether.

III.

We have now to show the influence of Germany on the youngest and at the same time grandest of modern nations of the civilized Occident, we mean that portion of the inhabitants of Northern America which speaks the English tongue.

It is to be regretted that only a small part of the reading public of Europe, and of Germany in particular is as yet intimately acquainted with the poetry and the literature in general of Northern America. There are but a few, who are aware of the fact that the people of rapid political rising and of unexampled development with regard to mechanics, exact sciences and commerce, that the people of surprising inventions and discoveries has indeed, in spite of the marked preponderance of materialism, brought forth some beautiful blossoms in poetry, belles-lettres and history. At the most the generality of readers have read the novels of Cooper or the exquisite essays of Washington Irving aud the famons work of Mrs. Beecher Stowe and more recently Longfellow's poetry, which has become more accessible by the publication in the Tauchnitz Collection, while the richest literary treasures are still withheld even from the majority of those who are acquainted with the English tongue. Now this is partly to be explained by the enormous distance that separates us from America and the difficulty of mental intercourse arising from this circumstance, and partly by the manner in which our neighbours the English have been hitherto in the habit of treating the American literary productions. For it cannot be denied that England has looked and still looks upon them, with a feeling of jealousy generally leading to injustice, and although the gigantic material progress can not well be denied, yet the