CURRENT LITERATURE.
Withered Leaves. By Rudolf von Gottschall. Translated from the German by Bertha Ness. 3 vols. (Remington and Co.)—Time and patience are essential to the reading of the 1,026 pages of this ponderous German romance. With these, and a taste for German sentimentalism, fine-writing, philosophical moralising, and plenty of unreal and disagreeable love-making, a reader may doubtless hope for pleasure in their perusal. Any other advantage we will answer for his not deriving from it. Diluted with high-flown descriptions of scenery and the seasons, and sentimental analogies between nature and life, we have a number of very unreal and entirely uninteresting love-affairs ; only a passage or two of which, here and there, are amusing,—notably those about Dr. Kuhl, and his theory of all-embrac- ing love, and no slavish ties. We may indicate the unreality of the whole thing by an outline of the hero's adventures. On an Italian lake he falls in love with an enchantress, and after three days' rap- ture, they part, in total ignorance of each other. She, it appears, is a branded convict's wife, though she did not know of his guilt when she married. The young gentleman hero afterwards joins a strange religious society, and becomes enamoured of one of its priestesses, whom he seduces. Losing sight of her, he falls in love with a sylph in a wood, and he becomes betrothed. At the betrothal, the young lady introduces him to her mother, the priestess whom he had seduced. The betrothal is annulled. The girl falls into the arms of her beloved mother, and resigns her lover to her, and goes and drowns herself. But, of course, the young gentleman sdeclines mamma, who dies in some sad way. - Next, he again comes across the divinity of the Italian lake, who, it now appears, is a great singer. She agrees to marry him, thinking she has destroyed the proofs that she is already a wife ; the convict, however, turns up, the night before the wedding, with all the proofs, but accepts the bride's diamond tiara—an heirloom of her bridegroom's family— es hush-money, and goes, as he came, through the mirror of her chamber, and a labyrinth of staircases and passages that unite the castle with the lake. The marriage takes place, but the convict, who is also a smuggler, gets shot by the police ; and of course the young Baron happens to be present, and hears all about his wife's first marriage, and is shown the tiara as proof. The convict dies, the Baron goes to the wars, the bride hides herself in a fisherman's hut, and is fortunately present, two years afterwards, when the Baron gets wounded in battle; she nurses him, and they are consequently re- conciled, and go and live in Cashmere, with the lotus-flowers. In these German romances, we notice that all the young gentlemen and ladies are exquisitely pure and good, whatever they do. Everything is holy love.
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