The people of Leipzig have just had their “Schiller-fest,” or Schiller's festival, in honor of the great national poet and tragedian. Schiller was, indeed, a native of Würtemberg, and he lived in Mannheim and Weimar. But Germany, which has no metropolis, enjoys a great many capitals: and as the ancients had a god of the sun, the moon, and the various constellations, so do the Germans have a capital of poetic art, another of music, another of painting, and so on. Leipzig is, or pretends to be, the great literary metropolis, and in this capacity the good city holds an annual festival in honor of Schiller. On the present occasion there was a public dinner, with pompous speeches by Messrs. Gutzkow, Bothe, and Apel, while in the Leipzig theatre Shakspeare's “Macbeth” was given in Schiller's adaptation to the German stage.
The Berlin journals announce the arrival in that city of Doctor Zahn, so well known for his researches in Pompeii and Herculaneum. His work thereon is one of the most important archæological productions extant. He has passed not fewer than twenty-five years of his life among those ancient ruins.
The foreign obituary includes the name of Dr. Meinhold—a name which will live in connection with The Amber Witch and with the singular circumstances attending the reception of that powerful tale.
The English admirers of Humboldt's Kosmos will be glad to learn that an important addition has been made to the commentaries on that great work, by Herr Bronne's “Collection of Maps for the Kosmos.” The first series, containing six plates, has just been published by Krais and Hoffmann, at Stuttgardt. These six plates are to be followed by thirty-six others, and contain the planetary, solar, and lunar systems, the plain globes, and the body of the earth, and the elevations of its surface, with a variety of diagrams, and a set of explanatory notes.
An intelligent and appreciative German, Siegfried Kupper, has been attracted by the fine simplicities and interests of the popular poetry of Servia, and has woven together, out of the lays which commemorate the Achilles-Ulysses-Hercules-Leonidas of Servia, Lazar, der Serbenczar. Ein Helden-gedicht “Lazar, the Czar of the Serbs. A Heroic poem.” “Among the earliest announcers of the beauty of the Servian popular poetry,” says the London Literary Journal, “was Theresa Jakob, the daughter of the well-known German Professor, and now for many years married to the American Dr. Robinson, the author of Biblical Researches in Palestine. This lady (a translation of whose History of the Colonization of America we lately reviewed) published, five-and-twenty years ago, some translated specimens of Servian song, which quite took captive the heart of old Goethe, whose praises introduced them to the notice of educated Europe. Other Germans, and even some Frenchmen, followed in the same direction; and our own Bowring's Specimens of Servian Poetry, is probably familiar to many readers. With the growing importance of the Slavonian tribes, a new interest attaches to their copious literature; and to any enterprising young litterateur, in quest of an unexplored field of research, we would recommend the poetry, recent and ancient, of the Slavonic races.”