half its saccharine matter. This conviction has naturally and very properly caused a restlessness, and a striving after something more perfect. It is certain, that those who have resisted all innovation, and adhered to the original methods and machinery, have been the most successful; but, if all had been equally cautious, little improvement would have been made, and the nation and mankind would have been at a remoter period, and in a less degree, benefited. Nevertheless, we fully believe, that the cotton manufactory has never been established in any country with so few failures, and so little loss and fluctuation, as the beet-sugar business in France, and other countries of the Continent.

But we may now safely assert, that the great desideratum which the French manufacturers of beet sugar have always felt, and have been striving to supply, is at length attained; that a method has been discovered by which the beet is deprived of all its saccharine, be the same more or less, and that this matter is obtained and operated upon in such a manner as to be nearly all in a crystallizable state. Hitherto, about 50 per cent. of the saccharine has resulted in molasses. This residuum is of comparatively small value; and every thing which arrests the formation of it, adds by so much to the deposite of sugar, and to the profits of the proprietor.

Mr. Schuzenbach, a chemist of Carlsruhe, in the Grand Duchy of Baden, is the author of this important improvement. Having obtained his result in the laboratory, he communicated it to distinguished capitalists in Baden, who thereupon formed a company; not with a view, in the first instance, of erecting a manufactory upon the new system, but merely of proving its pretensions. To this end, they advanced a considerable sum for setting up experimental works so large, that the thing could be tried on a manufacturing scale. Having done this at Ettingen, near Carlsruhe, they appointed a scientific and practical Commission to follow closely the experiments which Mr. Schuzenbach should make. Commissioners from the governments of Wurtemberg and Bavaria likewise attended. The experiments were carried on during five or six weeks, in which time several thousand pounds of sugar, of superior grain and purity, were produced.

The Baden company were so well satisfied with the Report of the Commission, that they immediately determined

to erect an immense establishment, at an expense of more than $200,000 for fixtures only. A like sum was devoted to the current expenses of the works. Factories were simultaneously erected at or near Munich, Stuttgard, and Berlin. The arrangements were made with remarkable intelligence and caution; and we cannot doubt, that the new method will prove of immense importance to the prosperity, comfort, and improvement of the northern nations and colonies of the Old World and the New.

ART. VI.- La Chute d'un Ange; Episode. Par ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE. Bruxelles. 1838.

THIS work, like "Jocelyn," is an episode in a poem on a large scale, the composition of which has occupied many years of Lamartine's life, and which, in design, he justly calls "immense.' It was the favorite scheme of his youth, and continues to be the labor of his advanced age. In his view, the period of epic poetry has gone by. It was the form in which the poetic spirit clothed itself in the infancy of nations, before the birth of criticism, when history was blended with fable, and the bards were the chroniclers of great events. In modern times the individualities, that constituted the interest and charm of the epopee, are merged in truths of wider range. The illusion of imagination is broken. The poet sways the mind of his reader by a power of another kind. The sphere of human vision is enlarged by the influence of philosophy and religion. Man perceives "that he constitutes only an imperceptible part of a vast and various whole; that the work of perfecting his nature is a comprehensive and eternal work." Men now interest themselves in whatever pertains to the race. In a word, the epopee is no longer national or heroic, but cosmopolitan, or, as Lamartine expresses it, humanitaire.

Our author's great poem is constructed on this plan. His epic, he tells us, is adapted not only to present time and place, but to the world, and to the future. It is accordingly founded upon a subject which, embodying human thought in all its stages, permits the poet to be at the same time local and

universal, marvellous and true. That subject is the moral destiny of man; the successive steps of progress, through which the human soul reaches the goal appointed by its Creator.

Independently of the task of judging how M. de Lamartine accomplishes the vast work thus laid out, there is something formidable in the idea of simply perusing a poem of such proportions, that two volumes duodecimo contain only an episode. But more serious objections than its length will probably prevent the favorable reception the writer would anticipate from the public for his Poème Humanitaire.

The lyrics of M. de Lamartine commanded attention and admiration both in his own and other countries. The vigor and purity of thought and feeling, the richness and graphic beauty of imagery, and the mastery of versification, they displayed, secured at once for the author the first place among the living poets of France. He embodied the highest, the most serious, feelings of his age, and every cultivated mind acknowledged the truth of his sentiments. Unfortunate enough, however, to have few worthy rivals, the adulation lavished upon him, if it did not wholly blind him to his faults, incapacitated him for that high perception of excellence in his art, so indispensable to improvement. Nor was this all. He was essentially deficient in the loftiest attributes of genius. He possessed a pure heart, an active fancy, a ready apprehension of the beautiful, and an almost unbounded command of language. But not to him belonged the original faculty, that bodies forth the forms of things unknown"; that penetrates the hidden recesses of nature, and brings us thence new objects of delight, new themes for meditation. Nor had he the overwhelming passion, that leads the soul captive, and is inferior only to the inventive power. His genius was imitative. It received its impulse, perhaps unconsciously, from the writers of other countries, though the novelty of his sentiments and his style gave him an ascendency over those of his own.

His latest productions exhibit, in a higher degree, the defects, both of conception and manner, growing out of his poetical self-complacency. "Jocelyn," the first of his scenes, given to the world "to interrogate its judgment respecting a species of poetry never yet submitted by the author to criticism," possessed an unusual degree of local interest. It is a fragment of the history of the heart, "le type chrétien

à notre époque." Its hero is a character familiar to us all ; the village curé, the gospel priest. The details of the story are touching and true. But it creates no favorable opinion of the genius or taste of the author, to see how this simple and affecting tale has been transformed by his idealizing process into something that has no trace of probability; how the traits of humanity have faded into vague and mystic images; how sentiment is elaborated till it loses all its effect; how our sympathies are strewed about and evaporated, like the poetic dews he describes as flung to spirit breezes ;

"Even as the pearly tears that morning weeps,
Coloring the fields at dawn, which gathered all
Would flow a river, but which noiseless sink
Upon the traveller's path."

The story of "Jocelyn" is beautiful, and we feel that we ought to be affected by it. That we are not, is the writer's fault. The scenery is magnificent, but the descriptions leave only a vague and confused impression of loveliness and grandeur. The thoughts are noble, but clad in phrase so gorgeous and amplified, that they astonish instead of elevating. It is as if we stood before a picture, where was exhibited every variety of color and figure to charm the sense, but where there was no shading or relief; the mental eye aches with the accumulation of objects and their confused brilliancy. The language is one glowing mass of illustration; it loses effect from its want of adaptation to the subjects presented. In feeling our author is not less elaborate and exaggerated than in description. His love is not like the love of ordinary mortals; even his religion is etherealized beyond the limits of reason and nature.

"The Fall of an Angel," he tells us, has less of the "nature contemporaine" which distinguished "Jocelyn," and which is to mark other episodes not yet published. The scene being laid in the antediluvian age of the world, the fantastic enters into this poem as a necessary element. The romance is in the form of a "Vision," related by an aged man dwelling on the summit of Libanus. The ascent toward the abode of this mysterious prophet is described, from the first glimpse caught from beneath, of the group of Lebanon, "veiled by tempests, their giant arms kindled with the fires of the empyrean, stretching like vast skeletons in the sunlight," where the eye sank under the shadow of the steeps

that sustained the granite ramparts, where, from time to time,
in the clefts of rocks, the dark walls of some monastery
stood forth, scarcely distinguishable from the crag itself, even
by the pilot's eye; to the sacred spot, a cave enclosed by
inaccessible rocks, on the highest visible peak; a spot to
which led no path trod by mortal foot, which the mountaineer
would seek for days in vain, and which only a miracle could
reveal. On this perilous enterprise two pilgrims ventured;
"From mountain crest to where the torrents swept,
Three days our winding, toilsome course we kept ;
Saw at our feet the tribes of savage birth,
The desert's children, refuse of the earth;
The warlike, dark-eyed tribes of haughty mien,
Who bow before the calf that crops the green;
And Arab swains, who lead their wandering flocks
From far-off plains to drink beneath these rocks;
The followers of the Sun, whose dwellings light
Amid the foliage gleamed in clusters white;
'Mong all to sleep secure, or sust'nance claim,
For sacred in the East the stranger's name!
Till by the distant sound of convent bell
We knew where they, the holy brethren, dwell;
And o'er those dizzy peaks, swept by the wind,
Clambering, we left their sombre walls behind."
The mountain was a crater at our feet,

By hundred caverns ploughed its massive round,
Where the eye, plunging o'er the verge profound,
Night, dizzy horror, death, alone could meet!
The snows, that melt in pale and yellow foam,
Smoke like the fires, that light the shepherd's home;
In thousand torrents toward the abyss they haste,
And fill with thunderous sound the startled waste.
Trembling we climb, where scarce the eagles dare
To perch, and round the peaks that pierce the air,
We greet with wonder, 'twixt us and the
The shadow of the trees of Lebanon.

sun,

Cedars by God's hand planted, solemn crown,
Wherewith the king of thunders wreathes his brow,
Beneath their shade in sacred gloom we bow,

As in a fane where the Most High comes down."

Then follows the narration, heard from the lips of the ancient prophet. The opening scene, as described by him, is striking and beautiful. The time is that when earth and