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school-house had been lately enlarged: the discipline, also, had become unremitting; and devotional exercises formed a laborious part of the employment of the numerous pupils. The young Wieland here made a rapid progress in Greek, and grew remarkably fond of Xenophon, whose Cyropodia was the study of his class: but he took less part than others in the sports of his school-fellows, their play-ground being to him rather a show than an arena. Adelung, afterward the celebrated glossologist, was one of the scholars with whom he formed a permanent friendship. During his leisure-hours, he applied to English literature, and read the Spectator and Shaftesbury's Characteristics. All-curious, too, at this time, he peeped into some libertine books, but felt compunction after the indulgence. Indeed his conscientiousness was extremely sensible, whatever were his topics of self-reproach: "how often," he says, "I almost bathed in tears of contrition, and wrung my hands sore; I would fain but could not fashion myself into a saint."

When seventeen years old, Wieland left school, and passed some months at Erfurt with a relation named Baumer; who gave him instructions, and advised him, as his lungs were weak, to abandon the intention of taking orders and to study the law. In the year following he returned home, and obtained the reluctant permission of his father to prepare for college on this new plan.

Sophia von Gutterman, the daughter of a physician at Augsburg, a young lady of beauty and intellect, was now staying at Biberach, and visited at the house of Wieland's father. Two or three years older than this youth, who was still treated as a school-boy, and debarred by a specific engagement from any prospect of alliance with him, she saw neither danger nor impropriety in walking out frequently with a lad whose talents and accomplishments she could discern and appreciate: but Wieland fell enthusiastically in love with her. One Sunday, when his father had been preaching from the text God is love, he accompanied Sophia after service into the fields; said that he thought a warmer discourse might have been inspired by the topic; and began to declaim in a rhapsodical phraseology, recollected or modified from Plato's dialogues. "You may inagine," says Wieland's own narrative, "whether I spoke coldly when I gazed in her eyes, and whether the gentle Sophia heard unpersuaded, when she looked benignly at me. short, neither of us doubted the rectitude of my system: but Sophia expressed a wish, probably because she thought that my delivery was too lyrical, that I would put down my ideas in writing. As soon as I left her, I was at my desk, and endeavoured

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deavoured to versify my theory." The fruits of this enthusiastic stroll were the lines intitled The Nature of Things, which form a conspicuous part of Wieland's first publication; the poem was dilated afterward, but the substance originated at the time mentioned.

Term now drew nigh; Sophia was returning to her friends; the Platonic lovers separated; and Wieland proceeded in 1751 to the college at Tubingen, a cheap and not a celebrated university. The professors did not attract his attention, and he shut himself up in his room and wrote verses. While a student there in 1752, he printed his earliest volume of poems, which are chiefly didactic: The Nature of Things, the Anti-Ovid, the Moral Epistles, and some Sacred Stories, being of the number. As they were adapted to the state of the reading world at that period, and superior to the extant German poetry of the same kind, they excited some sensation, which has since diminished.

At Tubingen, Wieland also began an epic poem in Ossianic prose, intitled Arminius, or Germany freed, which has been translated into English. He sent the MS. of the first five cantos of this epopea, without his name, to Bodmer, the conductor of an eminent Swiss Review, soliciting the critical opinion of this literary patriarch; who thought well of the specimen; and, having shewn it to Hagedorn and others, who corroborated his judgment, he printed a complimentary acknowlegement to his unknown correspondent. Wieland then named himself; and Bodmer invited the young genius to pass the vacation at his house near Zurich. He complied with the proposal, in October 1752, and beheld the dwelling of Bodmer adapted for a temple of the Muses. Situated at the foot of a hill, between the town and the country, it was retired without being lonely; a vineyard, bounded at top by fig-trees, rose at the back of the garden; the Uto glittered in front; and a magnificent landscape of city, lake, and mountain, embosomed the modest residence. To Wieland was assigned an apartment which Klopstock, already known to fame, had occupied in the year before. Within view, or a walk, were to be seen traces or ruins of the dwellings of Owe, Warte, Husen, and other poets of the Swabian period, who had founded the romantic literature of Germany; and whose manuscript-remains, collected and preserved by the care of Rudiger Maness of Zurich, were now about to be edited by Bodmer. Visits to and from the literary men of the neighbourhood varied the domestic circle, of which Gesner, the author of the Idyls, often formed a part: but Breitinger, a canon of Zurich, was the one of Bodmer's friends who shewed most

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attention to Wieland; and, in a dedication addressed to them jointly, the latter has recorded an enduring sense of their kindness.

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Bodmer, who had lost a wife and children, was glad of an habitual companion; and he could also employ the labour of Wieland profitably in critical animadversion, and contributions to periodical publications. Insensibly, the stay was prolonged, and arranged on a footing of mutual advantage. Wieland, quite in his element, and delighted with his new independence, dropped the project of returning to college, devoted himself wholly to the cares of authorship, and managed an extensive literary correspondence, which included the conspicuous names of Haller, Gleim, Hagedorn, Gellert, Klopstock, and Sulzer. His attachment to Bodmer, the author of his comforts, was signalized by a panegyrical analysis of the Noah of that writer, which displays less of the sagacity of justice than the partiality of friendship.

With Bodmer the great recipe for composition was to transplant from foreign writers all that he could employ in his native tongue. My own talent for stealing," says Wieland jocosely in one of his letters," was evolved and cultivated under him: there is much of the echo in my nature; and I never read a book with delight but that, for a long time afterward, my imagination was endeavouring to reproduce a similar plan of fable, or similar efforts at expression." One of his poetical works that was strongly tinctured with this imitative spirit was his volume of Epistles from the Dead to the Living, published in 1753; when he had just been reading Mrs. Rowe's Friendship in Death. Yet, if more of plagiarism than of invention be found in the matter, and if Klopstock's Elegies taught the style, it is by copying fine art that authors, like painters, may best learn to produce it. Wieland's Trial of Abraham, however, (published in 1755,) is an imitation of Bodmer's manner in which the resemblance extends to the faults.Sympathies, Vision of a World of innocent Men, Hymns in verse, and Psalms in prose, are other writings of this date; and, in the dedication prefixed, Wieland holds up to public animadversion some Odes of Uz, which he was destined afterward to outstrip in lascivious delineation. In some poetical epistle, Uz had ventured to yawn over the Trial of Abraham. Gleim, without any other provocation than his Anacreontics, was likewise chidden in the solemn tone of ecclesiastical displeasure; so completely was Wieland still an adherent of the ascetic morality and somewhat bigoted intolerance of Bodmer and his set. Indeed, those passages in the Sympathies which inveigh against the libertinisms of litera

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Sure are too eloquent not to have been sincere; although, when stationed as an appendix to the later works of Wieland, they are read with the loud laugh of irony. He pities Petrarch, for speaking of his Laura with an idolatry to which no human excellence can be intitled from man; he laments that the sublime genius of Pindar had been squandered on the decoration of a heathen and profane mythology; and he adds that whoever did not consider indifference to religion as an honour was bound in duty infinitely to prefer the feeblest spiritual hymns of the ecclesiastical poets, to the seductive imagery of the finest odes of Uz or Gleim.' Bodmer was enraptured with this pious tone, and described Wieland in his Review as "protected by the seraph Eloa, who with sheltering wings scatters inspiration over him, and reaches to him a harp to which the souls of men and even the rolling spheres must listen.”

In 1753, Wieland was invited by Professor Müchler to undertake some academic situation connected with the education of select noble pupils, and in consequence drew up a plan of the intended academy, which however was eventually relinquished: but the sketch was preserved among some fugitive pieces printed in 1758, and probably occasioned at a later period the idea of Wieland being made preceptor to the Duke of Saxe-Weimar. In the Letters of Literature, Lessing, who was the best prose-writer of the Germans, criticized this sketch, and censured the style of the author as redundant, finical, and overrun with Gallicism: the remark was not lost; a reformation ensued, and Wieland's first good prose may be dated from this wholesome severity.

In 1756 occurred the seven years' war of Germany, which gave importance to public opinion and to its literary heralds. The Catholic writers embraced the cause of Maria Theresa: but, as the Prussian monarch was an adherent and patron of the French free-thinking, an alliance insensibly took place between protestantism and philosophy, which liberalized the Prussian clergy, and shook the pillars of orthodoxy. The frequent idleness of the camps and garrison-towns formed a new set of readers; the mess-room became an important tribunal of literary appretiation; and books of amusement were multiplied in which a lascivious turn prevailed, and which were welcomed in the colleges as much as in the barracks. The desultory anarchy, also, which rendered literary success independent of any metropolitan verdict, favoured a variety and an originality of manner among the different writers, which baffled the rules of criticism, and often bestowed on caprice the laurel-wreath of genius. Wieland, in common

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with other Protestants, was a well-wisher to the cause of Frederic II., composed a loyal poem on Wille's statue of the King, and gradually imbibed the cast of opinion that was prevalent among the Prussian writers: but he was principally occupied at this time about an epic poem, to be intitled Cyrus, which he began in German hexameters. With Xenophon for his ostensible guide, the court of Babylon was probably to have shadowed forth that of Vienna, and the hero to have represented Frederic the Great. After having completed five cantos, which were printed, the poet grew tired, and desisted; and his readers have not much wondered or much grieved at his fatigue,

Already in 1754 Wieland had quitted his host in order to take separate lodgings, having felt some restraint from the perpetual interference of Bodmer with his employments; and being inclined to give private lessons in Greek to some pupils of family, whom he could not so well receive at the apartment of a friend. A band of players having come to Zurich in 1758, he attended the theatre with eagerness, formed an acquaintance with the manager Ackerman, was solicited by him for something new, and translated for him Rowe's Lady Jane Gray. The tragedy, which had been slightly altered, was suffered to pass as an original; it succeeded, and was printed; and it forms the first specimen of German drama in five-feet iambic blank verse: rimed Alexandrines having been hitherto employed, as in French tragedy. These players were proceeding to Berne; and, as Wieland, through the medium of his pupils, had the offer of a preceptorship there in the house of M. Sinner, he determined to leave Zurich. He next attempted, unsuccessfully, an original tragic drama, founded on the story of Clementina of Poretta, from Sir Charles Grandison; and another on the story of Araspes and Panthea, which was not accepted by the players, but was afterward expanded and published separately as a romance in dialogue. He was more fortunate in refashioning Lesage's Pandora. - At Berne, Wieland became personally known to Dr. Zimmermann, the author of the work on Solitude, with whom he corresponded; and he visited, perhaps from sensual motives, perhaps out of a mere literary curiosity, at the lodgings of Julia Bondeli, the acquaintance of Rousseau; to whose declining charms M. GRUBER ascribes the power of having occasioned in Wieland a more than friendly attachment.'

From Berne he was suddenly called in the year 1760 to his native city; the town-clerk-ship having become vacant, and the corporation of Biberach, without any solicitation on his

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