the Christian life. Theology is by no means the sum-total of Christianity or the Christian life. But theology is, both by giving and receiving, intimately connected with them. The Christian life of any age depends to some noteworthy extent upon the theology of that age; the theology of any age depends also upon the Christian life of the same and preceding ages. When, then, we insist upon piety in the method of theology, we are only affirming that to understand the science of the Christian life one must know something of the subject. In certain aspects of the subject, it is to be known only by experience. Piety is the requisite experience. Nor can he find and understand the work of God in nature and history who does not take the spirit of devotion, trust and allegiance into his researches. And on the other hand, for the sake of the coming Christian life, we insist upon the imperative obligation which rests upon Christian students and upon the whole Christian Church, to prepare aright the way for "the new theology." The work of the schools of theologic training has an interest broader even than that which is most obvious. They must educate the student to lead the people kindly and safely in the path of God's great cosmic providences. It is not by frantic efforts to lift up or pull down the present orthodoxy that this part of the mission of the clergy can be fulfilled. It is rather by docile, patient, minute, and untrammeled, though devout, research. Every man who loves Christ and the church, and especially every young man, should have some intelligent conception of this demand upon his energies in his life-work, provided that work lies in the direction of dealing with theologic truths. With a clear eye, with an ear deaf to unseemly clamors, with cautious but free and manly step, with a loyal, loving, and cheerful heart, should he go forward into the truths which invite his research, and which concern the primal source and revealer of truth, who is God. ARTICLE V.-MR. LETTSOM'S VERSION OF THE MIDDLE GERMAN EPIC. The Niebelungenlied. Translated by WILLIAM NANSON LETTSecond edition. Williams & Norgate. London and Edinburgh. Fr. Frommann. Jena, 1874. pp. 447. SOM. Most readers of English remember Mr. Carlyle's account of the Niebelungenlied, which account dates back to 1831 and was so admirably fitted to excite curiosity. Of late years the intercourse between Germany and America has greatly increased, and the young men who have studied in Germany (without perhaps having had time to master Middle German) have brought back such statements of the fervor with which the Germans regard their great medieval epic as to make a translation* of the poem very desirable. The translation by Mr. Lettsom, whose title we have placed at the beginning of these remarks, was doubtless originally received in England with a good deal of enthusiasm. But nine years elapsed (it was first issued in 1865) before it passed to a second edition, and not many American scholars even if familiar with German literature were aware of its existence until the appearance of this second edition. Therefore, for a large circle of readers, especially for the many who have entered into different fields of scholarship during the last decade with a deep interest in German literature this book when re-announced was practically a new translation and as such calls for some attention. If it does not prove tiresome to those who have not read the old poem in the original, it will certainly offend those who have even superficially busied themselves with the sensuous Middle German. The titles of the book are enough to excite displeasure. The title on the back is "The Niebelungenlied." As this is the name by which the poem was introduced to English readers by Mr. Carlyle and is the name by which the poem has since been * Professor Birch's rendering into English (Berlin, 1848) has been little known and generally inaccessible. known in our literature we may perhaps accept it as the title of the poem. But it is no translation, except of the definite article. It is an adoption of the term Niebelungenlied as a sort of confession that the extent of intercourse between the two countries has made the untranslated title of the great poem possible as the title in the foreign country. But there seems to be no reason why it should not sound as strangely as "Das Paradise Lost" for Milton's epic would to a German if used in place of "Das Verlorene Paradies," or as The Ilias Hoinois sounds to us. But it is not because Mr. Lettsom did not know how to translate the title that it so appears on the back. On the title page it is translated "The Fall of the Niebelungers." "Das Niebelungenlied " literally rendered means "The Song of the Niebelungs," if we may take the German proper name into English and make it a plural, or "The Song of the Mistlings," if we may coin an English word. The inserted er of Professor Birch and Mr. Lettsom has no place in the translation except by a false analogy. But where does Mr. Lettsom get the word, fall? Probably from the other title of the poem which has the word nôt instead of liet, "Der Niebelunge Nôt." But the word nôt does not mean fall, rather need, extreme misery, contest-tribulation. Our translator tells us (Note 1, p. 419) that the better manuscripts have nôt instead of liet (the name of the national poems is generally found in the last line of the manuscript of the poem) and still decides to call his poem, "The Niebelungenlied." If nôt is the better title, why not approve of Lachmann's printing it as the title and then translate it exactly? It is not a favorable omen for this translation that the author having two titles to select from chooses one and then gives an inadequate rendering of the other. It is a species of eclecticism that has little to commend it, especially when one is dealing with a poem that has been the subject of so many contests and over which the fight is still raging. To say that "Der Niebelunge Nôt" is the title of the better manuscripts is to put oneself on Lachmann's ground, but to print "The Niebelungenlied" as the title is to put oneself on Holtzmann's and Pfeiffer's ground, and virtually to say that the better manuscripts have given the wrong title. Mr. Lettsom does not seem to be aware of the battle over the manuscripts, and that it was a greatly disputed point, a point underlying most of the modern controversies, whether A, the oldest Munich, or B, or C, the Lassberg manuscript, is the older and better. Such a fact a translator ought certainly to be acquainted with if he is to pronounce an opinion on the relative worth of the manuscripts. On reading the preface to Mr. Lettsom's translation one familiar even with the outlines of the controversies would be impressed with the inadequacy of his statements, and would regard most of his facts as either antiquated or inaccurate. The northern form of the legend is given at some length and a decision as to which is the original form of the saga unhesitatingly given. We are informed, on page xvii of the preface,* that "the author of the poem is unknown, and indeed, whether it be the work of one poet, or two or twenty, is still I believe a matter of dispute among German critics." Not a word is found in the preface on the question of referring the authorship of the poem to a von Kürenberg, which has been the prominent question since Pfeiffer's discourse before the Imperial Academy at Vienna, May 30, 1862, and which point was previously brought forward by Holtzmannt in 1854. It may be excusable in a translator not to know the minute condition of the public mind in the native country of the poem with. regard to a poem which he undertakes to translate. But it certainly argues a superficial interest, one which the freedom of intercourse between England and Germany makes it difficult to justify, to find a translator of this poem taking no note of the fact, that just as German scholars were and are divided on the excellence of manuscripts A, B, and C, so they are at variance on the question whether a von Kürenberg seven *The preface we suppose to be unaltered from that of the original edition, though no problems have been the subject of so much study and discussion in Germany during the decade intervening between the appearance of the two editions as the questions relating to this poem. Dr. Fischer's essay (Leipzig, 1874) may be commended to all who would get the result of these discussions in a concise and trustworthy shape. The full title of his essay is "Die Forschungen über das Niebelungenlied seit Karl Lachmann." It is a book of two hundred and seventy pages-and for all that is a concise presentation of the thousands of controversial pages that have appeared on this poem. + Dr. Vollmöller in his prize essay Kürenberg und die Niebelungen, Stuttgart, 1874, gives F. J. Mone the credit of half suggesting this conjecture in the first volume of Das badische Archiv, Karlsruhe, 1826. centuries ago wrote the poem of which our oldest manuscripts are a "Bearbeitung." Even if the short space of three years intervening between Pfeiffer's discourse and the first edition of this translation may excuse the omission in the preface to the first edition, twelve years seem time enough to have secured some recognition of the data in the preface to the second edition. What shall excuse the looseness of such statements as the following: "Of the inquirers who have endeavored to solve these dubious questions Professor Lachmann is contestably the chief. He commenced his operations about thirty years ago with a treatise in which he avowedly took Wolf's Prolegomena to Homer for the model of his researches. He has since published an edition of the poem, etc." One might infer that Mr. Lettsom, when writing this preface in 1865, did not know that Lachmann was dead. To be sure he does not exactly say so, and might claim that he knew he had been dead already fourteen years, but it was in 1816 that Lachmann “commenced his operations" by applying Wolf's principles in the analysis of this poem and in 1826 that he published his first edition, which our translator approves. It is now almost sixty years since Lachmann "commenced his operations" and fifty years since he published the first edition, so that we are justified, if we may make Mr. Lettsom responsible for the old preface in the new edition at the time of the publication of the latter, in regarding him as nearly thirty years behind the times in the scholarship relating to the poem. Mr. Lettsom finds much to admire in the six times accented Niebelungen verse. He shows how it differs from our ballad verse of fourteen syllables: The gentle warbling zephyr's breath low answered to all; and from the ordinary Alexandrine, The gentle warbling wind low answered to all. It is more like the verse, The gentle warbling zephyrs | low answered to all, and in Mr. Lettsom's view has a charm of variety which the other two forms do not present. But the six accents mark only the first three verses of each strophe. The last line of the |