We have entire faith in
the benignant influence of Truth, the sunlight of the moral world, and
believe that slavery, like other worn-out systems, will melt gradually
before it. "All the earth cries out upon Truth, and the heaven
blesseth it; ill works shake and tremble at it, and with it is no
unrighteous thing."
* * * * *
REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.
_History of Flemish Literature_. By OCTAVE DELEPIERRE, LL. D. 8vo.
London. John Murray. 1860.
"When I write in Danish," says Oehlenschlaeger, "I write for only six
hundred persons." And so, in view of this somewhat exaggerated
statement, he himself translated his best works into the more favored
and more widely spread Germanic idiom. It requires a certain amount of
courage in an author to write in his own native tongue only, when he
knows that he thereby limits the number of his readers. We see in our
own days, among the Sclavonic races, men whose writings breathe the
most ardent patriotism, whose labors and researches are all
concentrated within the sphere of their nationality, publishing, not
in their own Polish, Czechish, or Serbian, but in German or French.
The history of language shows us a two-fold tendency,--one of
divergence from some common stem, followed by one of concentration, of
unity, in the literature. Thus, in France, the _Langue d'Oil_
superseded the richer and more melodious Provencal; in Spain the
Castilian predominated; while for several centuries it has been the
steady tendency of the High-German to become the language of letters
and of the upper classes among the various Teutonic races.
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