The Project Gutenberg EBook of The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5., by Various This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net Title: The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. Author: Various Release Date: July 12, 2004 [EBook #12888] Language: English Character set encoding: ASCII *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GERMAN CLASSICS *** Produced by Stan Goodman, Leah Moser and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team. VOLUME V THE GERMAN CLASSICS Masterpieces of German Literature TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH Patrons' Edition IN TWENTY VOLUMES ILLUSTRATED 1914 CONTRIBUTORS AND TRANSLATORS VOLUME V * * * * * Special Writers FRANK THILLY, PH.D., LL.D., Professor of Philosophy, Cornell University: The Romantic Philosophers--Fichte, Schelling, and Schleiermacher. GEORGE H. DANTON, PH.D., Professor of German, Butler College: Later German Romanticism. Translators PERCY MACKAYE, Dramatist and Poet: Departure; Would I were Free as are My Dreams. A.I. DU P. COLEMAN, A.M., Professor of English Literature, College of the City of New York: Taillefer; The Lion's Bride; The Crucifix; The Old Singer; From My Childhood Days; The Invitation; A Parable; At Forty Years; etc. MARGARETE MUeNSTERBERG: Selections from The Boy's Magic Horn; Union Song; The Mother Tongue; Spring Greeting to the Fatherland; Freedom; Charlemagne's Voyage; Chidher; etc. HERMAN MONTAGU DONNER: Luetzow's Wild Band; Cavalryman's Morning Song. LOUIS H. GRAY, PH.D.: Addresses to the German Nation. FREDERIC H. HEDGE: The Destiny of Man; The Wonderful History of Peter Schlemihl; The Golden Pot. GEORGE RIPLEY: On the Social Element in Religion. J. ELLIOT CABOT: On the Relation of the Plastic Arts to Nature. MRS. A.L.W. WISTER: From the Life of a Good-for-nothing. MARGARET HUNT: The Frog King, or Iron Henry; The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids; Rapunzel; Haensel and Grethel; The Fisherman and His Wife. F.E. BUNNETT: Selections from Undine. H.W. DULCKEN: Song of the Fatherland; The White Hart; Evening Song; Before the Doors. C.T. BROOKS: Men and Knaves; Prayer During Battle; Song of the Mountain Boy; The Chapel; etc. W.W. SKEAT: The Shepherd's Sang on the Lord's Day; The Hostess' Daughter; The Good Comrade. W.H. FURNESS: The Lost Church; The Minstrel's Curse. HENRY W. LONGFELLOW: The Luck of Edenhall; Remorse; The Castle by the Sea. KATE FREILIGRATH-KROEKER: On the Death of a Child. C.G. LELAND: The Broken Ring. ALFRED BASKERVILLE: Morning Prayer; The Castle of Boncourt; Woman's Love and Life; The Spring of Love; etc. BAYARD TAYLOR and LILIAN BAYARD TAYLOR KILIANI: The Women of Weinsberg; Barbarossa; the Grave of Alaric. JOHN OXENFORD: The Sentinel. LORD LINDSAY: The Pilgrim Before St. Just's. BAYARD TAYLOR: He Came to Meet Me. CONTENTS OF VOLUME V The Romantic Philosophers--Fichte, Schelling, and Schleiermacher. By Frank Thilly Friedrich Schleiermacher On the Social Element in Religion. Translated by George Ripley Johann Gottlieb Fichte The Destiny of Man. Translated by Frederic H. Hedge Addresses to the German Nation. Translated by Louis H. Gray Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling On the Relation of the Plastic Arts to Nature. Translated by J. Elliot Cabot * * * * * Later German Romanticism. By George H. Danton Ludwig Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano The Boy's Magic Horn. Selections translated by Margarete Muensterberg. Were I a Little Bird The Mountaineer As Many as Sand-grains in the Sea The Swiss Deserter The Tailor in Hell The Reaper Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm Fairy Tales. Translated by Margaret Hunt. The Frog King, or Iron Henry The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids Rapunzel Haensel and Grethel The Fisherman and His Wife Ernst Moritz Arndt Song of the Fatherland. Translated by H.W. Dulcken Union Song. Translated by Margarete Muensterberg Theodor Koerner Men and Knaves. Translated by C.T. Brooks Luetzow's Wild Band. Translated by Herman Montagu Donner Prayer During Battle. Translated by C.T. Brooks Maximilian Gottfried von Schenkendorf The Mother Tongue. Translated by Margarete Muensterberg Spring Greeting to the Fatherland. Translated by Margarete Muensterberg Freedom. Translated by Margarete Muensterberg Ludwig Uhland The Chapel. Translated by C.T. Brooks The Shepherd's Song on the Lord's Day. Translated by W.W. Skeat The Castle by the Sea. Translated by Henry W. Longfellow Song of the Mountain Boy. Translated by C.T. Brooks Departure. Translated by Percy MacKaye Farewell. Translated by Alfred Baskerville The Hostess' Daughter. Translated by W.W. Skeat The Good Comrade. Translated by W.W. Skeat The White Hart. Translated by H.W. Dulcken The Lost Church. Translated by W.H. Furness Charlemagne's Voyage. Translated by Margarete Muensterberg Free Art. Translated by Margarete Muensterberg Taillefer. Translated by A.I. du P. Coleman Suabian Legend. Translated by Margarete Muensterberg The Blind King. Translated by C.T. Brooks The Minstrel's Curse. Translated by W.H. Furness The Luck of Edenhall. Translated by Henry W. Longfellow On the Death of a Child. Translated by Kate Freiligrath-Kroeker Joseph von Eichendorff The Broken Ring. Translated by C.G. Leland Morning Prayer. Translated by Alfred Baskerville From the Life of a Good-for-nothing. Translated by Mrs. A.L.W. Wister Adalbert von Chamisso The Castle of Boncourt. Translated by Alfred Baskerville The Lion's Bride. Translated by A.I. du P. Coleman Woman's Love and Life. Translated by Alfred Baskerville The Women of Weinsberg. Translated by Bayard Taylor and Lilian Bayard Taylor Kiliani The Crucifix. Translated by A.I. du P. Coleman The Old Singer. Translated by A.I. du P. Coleman The Old Washerwoman. From the _Foreign Quarterly_ The Wonderful History of Peter Schlemihl. Translated by Frederic H. Hedge Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann The Golden Pot. Translated by Frederic H. Hedge Friedrich Baron de la Motte-Fouque Selections from Undine. Translated by F.E. Bunnett Wilhelm Hauff Cavalryman's Morning Song. Translated by Herman Montagu Donner The Sentinel. Translated by John Oxenford Friedrich Rueckert Barbarossa. Translated by Bayard Taylor and Lilian Bayard Taylor Kiliani From My Childhood Days. Translated by A.I. du P. Coleman The Spring of Love. Translated by Alfred Baskerville He Came to Meet Me. Translated by Bayard Taylor The Invitation. Translated by A.I. du P. Coleman Murmur Not. Translated by A.I. du P. Coleman A Parable. Translated by A.I. du P. Coleman Evening Song. Translated by H.W. Dulcken Chidher. Translated by Margarete Muensterberg At Forty Years. Translated by A.I. du P. Coleman Before the Doors. Translated by H.W. Dulcken August von Platen-Hallermund The Pilgrim Before St. Just's. Translated by Lord Lindsay The Grave of Alaric. Translated by Bayard Taylor and Lilian Bayard Taylor Kiliani Remorse. Translated by Henry W. Longfellow Would I were Free as are My Dreams. Translated by Percy MacKaye Sonnet. Translated by Margarete Muensterberg ILLUSTRATIONS--VOLUME V Heidelberg Friedrich Schleiermacher. By E. Hader The Three Hermits. By Moritz von Schwind Johann Gottlieb Fichte. By Bury Volunteers of 1813 before King Friedrich Wilhelm III in Breslau. By F.W. Scholtz Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling. By Carl Begas The Jungfrau. By Moritz von Schwind The Magic Horn. By Moritz von Schwind Ludwig Achim von Arnim. By Stroehling Clemens Brentano. By E. Linder The Reaper. By Walter Crane Wilhelm Grimm. By E. Hader Jacob Grimm. By E. Hader Haensel and Gretel. By Ludwig Richter Ernst Moritz Arndt. By Julius Roeting Theodor Koerner. By E. Hader Maximilian Gottfried von Schenkendorf Ludwig Uhland. By C. Jaeger The Villa by the Sea. By Arnold Boecklin Leaving at Dawn. By Moritz von Schwind Joseph von Eichendorff. By Franz Kugler Adalbert von Chamisso. By C. Jaeger The Wedding Journey. By Moritz von Schwind Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hofmann. By Hensel Friedrich Baron de la Motte-Fouque Wilhelm Hauff. By E. Hader The Sentinel. By Robert Haug Friedrich Rueckert. By C. Jaeger Memories of Youth. By Ludwig Richter August Graf von Platen-Hallermund The Morning Hour. By Moritz von Schwind THE ROMANTIC PHILOSOPHERS--FICHTE, SCHELLING, AND SCHLEIERMACHER By FRANK THILLY, PH.D., LL.D. Professor of Philosophy, Cornell University The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century had implicit faith in the powers of human reason to reach the truth. With its logical-mathematical method it endeavored to illuminate every nook and corner of knowledge, to remove all obscurity, mystery, bigotry, and superstition, to find a reason for everything under the sun. Nature, religion, the State, law, morality, language, and art were brought under the searchlight of reason and reduced to simple and self-evident principles. Human institutions were measured according to their reasonableness; whatever was not rational had no _raison d'etre_; to demolish the natural and historical in order to make room for the rational became the practical ideal of the day. Enlightenment emphasized the worth and dignity of the human individual, it sought to deliver him from the slavery of authority and tradition, to make him self-reliant in thought and action, to obtain for him his natural rights, to secure his happiness and perfection in a world expressly made for him, and to guarantee the continuance of his personal existence in the life to come. In Germany this great movement found expression in a popular commonsense philosophy which proved the existence of God, freedom, and immortality, and conceived the universe as a rational order designed by an all-wise and all-good Creator for the benefit of man, his highest product; while other thinkers regarded Spinozism as the only rational system, indeed as the last word of all speculative metaphysics; for them logical thought necessarily led to pantheism and determinism. In France, after reaching its climax in Voltaire, it ended in materialism, atheism, and fatalism; and in England, where it had developed the empiricism of Locke, it came to grief in the scepticism of Hume. If we can know only our impressions, then rational theology, cosmology, and psychology are impossible, and it is futile to philosophize about God, the world, and the human soul. Consistently carried out, the logical-mathematical method seemed to land the intellect in Spinozism or in materialism--in either case to catch man in the causal machinery of nature. In this dilemma many were tempted to throw reason overboard as an instrument of ultimate truth, and to seek for certainty through other functions of the human soul--in feeling, faith, or mystical vision of some sort; the claims of the heart and will were urged against the proud pretensions of the intellect (Hamann, Herder, Jacobi). Another way of escape was found by substituting the organic conception of reality for the logical-mathematical view of the _Aufklaerung_; nature and life, poetry, art, language, political, social, and religious institutions are not creations of reason, not things made to order, but organic--products of evolution (Lessing, Herder, Winckelmann, Goethe). Man, himself, moreover, is not mere intellect, but a being in whom feelings, impulses, yearnings, will, are elements to be reckoned with. And reality is not as transparent as the Enlightenment assumed it to be; existence divided by reason leaves a remainder, as Goethe had put it. It was Immanuel Kant who tried to arbitrate between the conflicting tendencies of his age. He was an _Aufklaerer_ in so far as he brought reason itself to the bar of reason and sat in judgment upon its claims, and, likewise, in so far as he insisted on the objective validity of physics and mathematics. But he was as much opposed to the pretentiousness of dogmatic metaphysics as to the pusillanimity of scepticism and the _Schwaermerei_ of mysticism. He repudiated the shallow proofs of the existence of God, freedom, and immortality no less emphatically than he rejected materialism with its atheism, fatalism, and hedonism. He tried to save everything worth saving--rational knowledge, modern science, the basal truths of the old metaphysics, and the most precious human values. For the scientific intelligence, so he held, nature and the self are absolutely determined; every physical occurrence and every human act are necessary links in a causal chain. But such knowledge is possible only in the field of phenomena (_Erscheinungen_); through sense-perception and the discursive understanding we cannot reach the inner core of reality; nor can we pierce the veil of appearances by means of intellectual intuitions, mystical visions, feeling, or faith, i.e., through the emotional and instinctive parts of our nature. It is the presence of the moral law or categorical imperative within us that points to a spiritual world beyond the phenomenal causal order and assures us of our freedom, immortality, and God. It is because we possess this deeper source of truth in practical reason that freedom and an ideal kingdom in which purpose reigns are vouchsafed to us, and that we can free ourselves from the mechanism of the natural order. It is moral truth that both sets us free and demonstrates our freedom, and that makes harmony possible between the mechanical theory of science and the teleological conception of philosophy. The scientific understanding would plunge us into determinism and agnosticism; from these, faith in the moral law alone can deliver us. In this sense Kant destroyed knowledge to make room for a rational faith in a supersensible world, to save the independence and dignity of the human self and the spiritual values of his people. In claiming a place for the autonomous personality in what _appeared to be_ a mechanical universe, Kant gave voice to some of the deeper yearnings of the age. The German Enlightenment, the new humanism, mysticism, pietism, and the faith-philosophy were all interested in the human soul, and unwilling to sacrifice it to the demands of a rationalistic science or metaphysics. In seeking to rescue it, the great criticist, piloted by the moral law, steered his course between the rocks of rationalism, sentimentalism, and scepticism. It was his solution of the controversy between the head and the heart that influenced Fichte, Schelling, and Schleiermacher. They differed from Kant and among themselves in many respects, but they all glorified the spirit, _Geist_, as the living, active element of reality, and they all rejected the intellect as the source of ultimate truth. They followed him in his anti-intellectualism, but they did not avoid, as he did, the attractive doctrine of an inner intuition; according to them we can somehow grasp the supersensible in an inner experience which Fichte called intellectual, Schelling artistic, Schleiermacher religious. The bankruptcy of the intelligence was overcome in their systems by the discovery of a faculty that revealed to them the living, dynamic nature of the universe. They were all more or less influenced by the romantic currents of the times, seeking with Herder and Jacobi an approach to the heart of things other than through the categories of logic. Like Lessing and Goethe, they were also attracted to the pantheistic teaching of Spinoza, though rejecting its rigid determinism so far as it might affect the human will. They likewise accepted the idea of development which the leaders of German literature, Lessing, Herder, and Goethe, had already opposed to the unhistorical _Aufklaerung_, and which came to play such a prominent part in the great system of Hegel. Johann Gottlieb Fichte was born in Ramenau, Oberlausitz, May 19, 1762, the son of a poor weaver. Through the generosity of a nobleman, the gifted lad was enabled to follow his intellectual bent; after attending the schools at Meissen and Schulpforta he studied theology at the universities of Jena, Leipzig, and Wittenberg with the purpose of entering the ministry. His poverty frequently compelled him to interrupt his studies by accepting private tutorships in families, so that he never succeeded in preparing him self for the examinations. In 1790 he became acquainted with Kant's philosophy, which two students had asked him to expound to them, and to which he now devoted himself with feverish zeal. It revolutionized his entire mode of thought and determined the course of his life. The anonymous publication of his book, _Attempt at a Critique of all Revelation_, in 1792, written from the Kantian point of view and mistaken at first for a work of the great criticist, won him fame and a professorship at Jena (1794). Here, in the intellectual centre of Germany, Fichte became the eloquent exponent of the new idealism, which aimed at the reform of life as well as of _Wissenschaft_; he not only taught philosophy, but _preached_ it, as Kuno Fischer has aptly said. During the Jena period he laid the foundations for his "Science of Knowledge" (_Wissenschaftslehre_) which he presented in numerous works: _The Conception of the Science of Knowledge_, 1794; _The Foundation of the Entire Science of Knowledge_, 1794; _The Foundation of Natural Rights_, 1796; _The System of Ethics_, 1798--(all these translated by Kroeger); the two _Introductions to the Science of Knowledge_, 1797 (trans. by Kroeger in _Journal of Speculative Philosophy_). The appearance of an article _Concerning the Ground of our Belief in a Divine World-Order_, 1798, in which Fichte seemed to identify God with the moral world-order, brought down upon him the charge of atheism, against which he vigorously defended himself in his _Appeal to the Public_ and a series of other writings. Full of indignation over the attitude which his government assumed in the matter, be offered his resignation (1799) and removed to Berlin, where he presented his philosophical notions in popular public lectures and in writings which were characterized by clearness, force, and moral earnestness rather than by their systematic form. There appeared: _The Vocation of Man_, 1800 (translated by Dr. Smith); _A Sun-Clear Statement concerning the Nature of the New Philosophy_, 1801 (trans. by Kroeger in _Journal of Speculative Philosophy_); _The Nature of the Scholar_, 1806 (trans. by Smith); _Characteristics of the Present Age_, 1806 (trans. by Smith); _The Way towards the Blessed Life_, 1806 (trans. by Smith). After the overthrow of Prussia by Napoleon, in 1806, Fichte fled from Berlin to Koenigsberg and Sweden, but returned when peace was declared in 1807, and delivered his celebrated _Addresses to the German Nation_, 1807-08, in which he sought to arouse the German people to a consciousness of their national mission and their duty even while the French army was still occupying the Prussian capital. Fichte was appointed professor of philosophy (1810) in the new University of Berlin, for which he had been invited to construct a plan and in the establishment of which he took a lively interest. During the last period of his life he devoted himself to the development of his thoughts in systematic form and wrote a number of books; most of these were published after his death, which occurred January 27, 1814. Among them we mention: _General Outline of the Science of Knowledge_, 1810 (trans. by Smith); _The Facts of Consciousness_, 1813; _Theory of the State_, published 1820. The Complete Works, edited by his son, J.H. Fichte, appeared 1843-46. New editions of particular works are now appearing. The world for Fichte is at bottom a spiritual order, the revelation of a self-determining ego or reason; hence the science of the ego, or reason, the _Wissenschaftslehre_, is the key to all knowledge, and we can understand nature and man only when we have caught the secret of the self-active ego. Philosophy must, therefore, be _Wissenschaftslehre_, for in it all natural and mental sciences find their ultimate roots; they can yield genuine knowledge only when and in so far as they are based on the principles of the Science of Knowledge--mere empirical sciences having no real cognitive value. The ego-principle itself, however, without which there could be no knowledge, cannot be grasped by the ordinary discursive understanding with its spatial, temporal, and causal categories. Kant is right: if we were limited to the scientific intellect, we could never rise above the conception of a phenomenal order absolutely ruled by the causal law. But there is another source of knowledge: in an act of inner vision or intellectual intuition, which is itself an act of freedom, we become conscious of the universal moral purpose; the law of duty or the categorical imperative commands us to be free persons. We cannot refuse to accept this law without abandoning ourselves as persons, without conceiving ourselves as _things_, or mere products of nature; the choice of one's philosophy, therefore, depends upon what kind of man one is--upon one's values, upon one's will. The type of man who is a slave of things, who cannot raise himself out of the causal mechanism, who is not free, will never be able to conceive himself otherwise than as a cog in a wheel. Fichte accepts the ego, or spirit, as the ultimate and absolute principle, because it alone can give our life worth and meaning. Thus he grounds his entire philosophy upon a moral imperative which presents itself to the ego in an inner vision. He also tells us that we can become immediately aware of the pure activity of the ego, of our free action, in a similar act of intellectual intuition. But we cannot know this free act unless we perform it ourselves; no one can understand the idealistic philosophy who is not free; hence philosophy begins with an act of freedom--_im Anfang war die Tat_. In order that we may rise to free action, opposition is needed, and this we get in the spatial-temporal world of phenomena, or nature, which the ego creates for itself in order to have resistance to overcome. Fichte conceives of nature as "the material of our duty," as the obstacle against which the ego can exercise its freedom. There could be no free action without something to act upon, and there could be no purposive action without a world in which everything happens according to law; and such a causal world we have in our phenomenal order, which is the product of the absolute spiritual principle. By the ego Fichte did not mean the subjective ego, the particular individual self with all its idiosyncrasies, but the universal ego, the reason that manifests itself in all conscious individuals as universal and necessary truth. In his earlier period he did not define his thought very carefully, but in time the absolute ego came to be conceived as the principle of all life and consciousness, as universal life, and ultimately identified with God. His philosophy is, therefore, not subjective idealism, although it was so misinterpreted, but objective idealism; nature is not the creation of the particular individual ego, but the phenomenal expression, or reflection, in the subject of the universal spiritual principle. Upon such an idealistic world-view Fichte based the ethical teachings through which he exercised a lasting influence upon the German people and the history of human thought. The universal ego is a moral ego, an ego with an ethical purpose, that realizes itself in nature and in man; it is, therefore, the vocation of man to obey the voice of duty and to free himself from the bondage of nature, to be a person, not a thing, to cooeperate in the realization of the eternal purpose which is working itself out in the history of humanity, to sacrifice himself for the ideal of freedom. Every individual has his particular place in which to labor for the social whole; how to do it, his conscience will tell him without fail. And so, too, the German people has its peculiar place in civilization, its unique contribution to make in the struggle of the human race for the development of free personality. It is Germany's mission to regain its nationality, in order that it may take the philosophical leadership in the work of civilization, and to establish a State based upon personal liberty, a veritable kingdom of justice, such as has never appeared on earth, which shall realize freedom based upon the equality of all who bear the human form. The Fichtean philosophy holds the mirror up to its age. With the Enlightenment it glorifies reason, the free personality, nationality, humanity, civilization, and progress; in this regard it expresses the spirit of all modern philosophy. It goes beyond the _Aufklaerung_ in emphasizing the living, moving, developing nature of reality; for it, life and consciousness constitute the essence of things, and universal life reveals itself in a progressive history of mankind. Moreover, the dynamic spiritual process cannot be comprehended by conceptual thought, by the categories of a rationalistic science and philosophy, but only by itself, by the living experience of a free agent. In the categorical imperative, and not in logical reasonings, the individual becomes aware of his destiny; in the sense of duty, the love of truth, loyalty to country, respect for the rights of man, and reverence for ideals, spirit speaks to spirit and man glimpses the eternal. Among the elements in this idealism that appealed to the Romanticists were its anti-intellectualism, its intuition, the high value it placed upon the personality, its historical viewpoint, and its faith in the uniqueness of German culture. They welcomed the _Wissenschaftslehre_ as a valuable ally, and exaggerated those features of it which seemed to chime with their own views. The ego which Fichte conceives as universal reason becomes for them the subjective empirical self, the unique personality, in which the unconscious, spontaneous, impulsive, instinctive phase constitutes the original element, the more extravagant among them transforming the rational moral ego into a romantic ego, an ego full of mystery and caprice, and even a lawless ego. Such an ego is read into nature; for, filled with occult magic forces, nature can be understood only by the sympathetic divining insight of the poetic genius. And so, too, authority and tradition, as representing the instinctive and historical side of social life, come into their own again. Fichte's chief interest was centred upon the ego; nature he regarded as a product of the absolute ego in the individual consciousness, intended as a necessary obstacle for the free will. Without opposition the self cannot act; without overcoming resistance it cannot become free. In order to make free action possible, to enable the ego to realize its ends, nature must be what it is, an order ruled by the iron law of causality. This cheerless conception of nature--which, however, was not Fichte's last word on the subject, since he afterward came to conceive it as the revelation of universal life, or the expression of a pantheistic God--did not attract Romanticism. It was Schelling, the erstwhile follower and admirer of Fichte, who turned his attention to the philosophy of nature and so more thoroughly satisfied the romantic yearnings of the age. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling was born at Leonberg, Wuertemberg, January 27, 1775, the son of a learned clergyman and writer on theology. He was a precocious child and made rapid progress in his studies, entering the Theological Seminary at Tuebingen at the age of fifteen. Between the ages of nineteen and twenty-two he wrote a number of able treatises in the spirit of the new idealism, and was recognized as the most talented pupil of Fichte and his best interpreter. After the completion of his course at the University (1795), he became the tutor and companion of two young noblemen with whom he remained for two years (1796-98) at the University of Leipzig, during which time he devoted himself to the study of mathematics, physics, and medicine, and published a number of philosophical articles. In 1798 he received a call to a professorship at Jena, where Fichte, Schiller, Wilhelm Schlegel, and Hegel became his colleagues, and where he entered into friendly relations with the Romantic circle of which Caroline Schlegel, who afterward became his wife, was a shining light. This was the most productive period of his life; during the next few years he developed his own system of philosophy and gave to the world his most brilliant writings. In 1803 he accepted a professorship at Wuerzburg, but came into conflict with the authorities; in 1806 he went to Munich as a member of the Academy of Sciences and Director of the Academy of Fine Arts; in 1820 he moved to Erlangen; and in 1827 he returned to Munich as professor of philosophy at the newly-established University and as General Curator of the Scientific Collections of the State. He was called to Berlin in 1841 to help counteract the influence of the Hegelian Philosophy, but met with little success. He died in 1854. The earlier writings of Schelling either reproduced the thoughts of the _Wissenschaftslehre_ or developed them in the Fichtean spirit. Among those of the latter class we note: _Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature_, 1797; _On the World-Soul_, 1798; _System of Transcendental Idealism_, 1800. During the second period, in which the influence of Bruno and Spinoza is prominent, he works out his own philosophy of identity; at this time he publishes _Bruno, or, Concerning the Natural and Divine Principle of Things_, 1802, and _Method of Academic Study_, 1803. In the third period the philosophy of identity becomes the basis for a still higher system in which the influence of German theosophy (Jacob Boehme) is apparent; with the exception of _Philosophy and Religion_, 1804, the _Treatise on Human Freedom_, 1809, and a few others, the works of this period did not appear until after Schelling's death. His previous philosophy is now called by him "negative philosophy;" the higher or positive philosophy has as its aim the rational construction of the history of the universe, or the history of creation, upon the basis of the religious ideas of peoples; it is a philosophy of mythology and revelation. Translations of some of Schelling's works are to be found in the _Journal of Speculative Philosophy_, an American periodical founded by W.T. Harris, which devoted itself to the study of post-Kantian idealism. His Complete Works, edited by his son, appeared in 14 volumes, 1856. There is a revival of interest in his philosophy, and new editions of his books are now being published. Like most philosophers of note, Schelling reckons with the various tendencies of his times. With idealism he interprets the universe as identical in essence with what we find in our innermost selves; it is at bottom a living dynamic process. If that is so, nature cannot be a merely externalized obstacle for the ego, nor a dead static spatial mechanical system; as the expression of an active spiritual principle there must be reason and purpose in it. But reason is not identified by Schelling with self-conscious intelligence, for with the faith-philosophies and Romanticism he takes it in a wider sense; in physical and organic nature it is a slumbering reason, an unconscious, instinctive, purposive force similar to the Leibnizian monad, Schopenhauer's will, and Bergson's _elan vital_. In this way the dualism between mechanism and teleology is reconciled. Nature is a teleological order, an evolution from the unconscious to the conscious; in man, the highest stage and the climax of history, nature becomes self-conscious. With this organic conception both Romanticists and many natural scientists of the age were in practical agreement; it was the view that had always appealed to Goethe--and Herder before him--and it gained for Schelling a large following. In his earlier system he regarded nature as a lower stage in the evolution of reason and sought to answer the problems: How does Nature become Consciousness or Ego? the problem of the Philosophy of Nature; and, How does Consciousness or the Ego become Nature? the problem of Transcendental Idealism. In his philosophy of identity, nature and mind are conceived as two different aspects of one and the same principle, which is both mind and nature, subject and object, ego and non-ego. All things are identical in essence but differentiated in the course of evolution. It was not inconsistent with these tenets that Schelling sought, in his last period, to discover the meaning of universal history in the obscure beginnings of mythology and revelation rather than in the lucid regions of an advanced civilization. With the opponents of rationalism Schelling agrees that we cannot reach the inner meaning of reality, "the living, moving element in nature," through the scientific intelligence, but that we must envisage it in intuition. "What is described in concepts," he tells us, "is at rest; hence there can be concepts only of _things_ and of that which is finite and sense-perceived. The notion of movement is not movement itself, and without intuition we should never know what motion is. Freedom, however, can be comprehended only by freedom, activity only by activity." Schelling, who is a poet as well as a philosopher, comes to regard this intuition or inner vision as an artistic intuition. In the products of art, subject and object, the ideal and the real, mind and nature, form (or purpose) and matter, are one; here the harmony aimed at by philosophy lies before our very eyes, and may be seen, touched, and heard. The creative artist creates like nature in realizing the ideal; hence, art must serve as the absolute model for the intuition of the world--it is the true and eternal organ of philosophy. Like the artistic genius, the philosopher must have the faculty for perceiving the harmony and identity in the universe; esthetic intuition is absolute knowing. Art aims to reveal to us the profoundest meaning of the world, which is the union of form and matter, of the ideal and the real; in art alone the striving of nature for harmony and identity is realized; the beautiful is the infinite represented and made perceivable in finite form; here mind and nature interpenetrate. In creative art the artist imitates the creative act of nature and becomes conscious of it; in esthetic intuition, or the perception of beauty, the philosophical genius discovers the secret of reality; nature herself is a poem and her secret is revealed in art. This philosophy is a far cry from the logical-mathematical method of the _Aufklaerung_; it is a protest against this, a protest in which the leaders of the new German literature, Herder, Goethe, Schiller, as well as the Romanticists, willingly joined. Goethe's entire view of nature, art, and life rested upon the teleological or organic conception; he, too, regarded the ability to peer into the heart of things--to see the whole in its parts, the ideal in the real, the universal in the particular, as the poet's and thinker's highest gift. He called it an _apercu_, "a revelation springing up in the inner man that gives him a hint of his likeness to God." It is this gift which Faust craves and Mephisto sneers at as _die hohe Intuition_. Dass ich erkenne was die Welt Im innersten zusammenhaelt, Schau alle Wirkungskraft and Samen Und tu' nicht mehr in Worten kramen. There was much that was fantastic in the _Naturphilosophie_ and much _a priori_ interpretation of nature that tended to withdraw the mind from the actualities of existence; it often dealt with bold assertions, analogies, and figures of speech, rather than with facts and proofs. But it had its merits; for it aroused an interest in nature and nature-study, it kept alive the _philosophical_ interest in the outer world, the desire for unity, _Einheitstrieb_, which has remained a marked characteristic of German science from Alexander von Humboldt down to Robert Mayer, Helmholtz, Naegeli, Haeckel, Ostwald, Hertz, and Driesch. It opposed the one-sided mechanical method of science, and emphasized conceptions (the idea of development, the notion of the dynamic character of reality, pan-psychism, and vitalism) which are still moving the minds of men today, as is evidenced by the popularity of Henri Bergson, who, with our own William James, leads the contemporary school of philosophical Romanticists. Fichte's chief contribution to German thought was the _Wissenschaftslehre_, Schelling's the _Naturphilosophie_, and Schleiermacher's the philosophy of religion. All these thinkers took account of the prevailing tendencies of the times--_Aufklaerung_, Kantian criticism, faith-philosophy, Romanticism, and Spinozism--and were more or less affected by them. Schleiermacher also came under the influence of Fichte, Schelling, and Greek idealism, particularly of Plato's philosophy; many were the sources from which he drew his material for the construction of a great system of Protestant theology that exercised a profound influence far beyond the boundaries of his country and won for him the title of the founder of the New Theology. Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, the son of a clergyman of the reformed church, was born at Breslau, November 21, 1768, and was educated at the Moravian schools at Niesky and Barby. Made sceptical by the newer criticism, he left the Moravian brotherhood and entered the University of Halle (1787), where he devoted himself with equal zeal to the study of theology and philosophy. After his ordination in 1794 he occupied various pulpits until 1803, when he was made a professor and university preacher at Halle. In 1806 he removed from Halle to Berlin, becoming the preacher of Trinity Church in 1809 and professor of theology at the newly founded University in 1810, positions which he filled with marked ability until his death, February 12, 1834. It was in Berlin that he came into friendly touch with the leaders of the Romantic school, Tieck, Friedrich Schlegel, and Novalis, but he did not allow himself to be carried away by their extravagances. He distinguished himself as a preacher, theologian, philosopher, and philologist, and, by his study of the sources of philosophy, added much to the knowledge of its history. Among the books published during his life-time are: _Addresses on Religion_, 1799; _Monologues_, 1800; _Principles of a Criticism of Previous Systems of Ethics_, 1803; translations of Plato's _Dialogues_, with introductions and notes, 1804-28; _The Christian Faith_, 1821-22. Complete Works, 1834-64. Schleiermacher's conception of religion is opposed to the rationalistic theology of the eighteenth century, as well as to the Kantian moral theology which has remained popular in Germany to this day. For him religion is not science or philosophy; it does not consist in theoretical dogmas or rationalistic proofs; neither theories about religion nor virtuous conduct nor acts of worship are religion itself; nor is religion based upon a rational moral faith, as Kant had taught. He bravely took the part of Fichte in the atheism-controversy, when the great leaders of German culture, Kant, Herder, and even Goethe, abandoned him to his fate. He rejected the shallow proofs of the _Aufklaerung_, as well as the orthodox utilitarian view of God as the dispenser of rewards and punishments, and showed that the real foes of religion were the rational and practical persons who endeavored to suppress the yearning for the transcendent in man and to drive out all mystery in seeking to make everything clear to him. We cannot have conceptual knowledge of God, for conceptual thought is concerned with differences and opposites, whereas God is without such differences and oppositions: he is the absolute union or identity of thought and being. Religion is grounded in feeling, or divining intuition; in feeling, we come into direct relation with God; here the identity of thought and being is immediately experienced in self-consciousness, and this union is the divine element in us. Religion is the feeling of absolute dependence upon an absolute world-ground; it is the immediate consciousness that everything finite is infinite and exists through the infinite. The conception of God as the unity of thought and being, and the idea of man's absolute dependence upon the world-ground, call to mind the pantheism of Spinoza. Schleiermacher seeks to tone this down by giving the world of things a relative independence; God and the world are inseparable, and yet must be distinguished. God is unity without plurality, the world plurality without unity; the world is spatial-temporal, while God is spaceless and timeless. He is, however, not conceived as a personality, but as the universal creative force, as the source of all life. The determinism implied in this world-view is softened by giving the individual a measure of freedom and independence. The particular individuals are subject to the law of the whole; but each self has its unique endowment or gifts, its individuality, and its freedom consists in the unfolding of its peculiar capacities. With Goethe, Schiller, and Romanticism, our philosopher rejects the rigoristic Kantian-Fichtean view of duty which, in his opinion, would suppress individuality and reduce all persons to a homogeneous mass; like them he regards the development of unique personalities as the highest moral task. "Every man should express humanity in his own peculiar way in a unique mixture of elements, in order that it may reveal itself in every possible form, and that everything may become real in the infinite fulness which can spring from its lap." "The same duties can be performed in many different ways. Different men may practise justice according to the same principles, each man keeping in view the general welfare and personal merit, but with different degrees of feeling, all the way from extreme coldness to the warmest sympathy." The command, therefore, is not merely: Be a person; but: Be a unique person, live your own individual life. There is no irreconcilable conflict between the natural law and the moral law, between impulse and reason. For the same reasons he defends the diversity of religions and the claims of personal religion; in each unique individual, religion should be left free to express itself in its own unique and intimate way. His ideal is the development of unique, novel, original personalities; and these are expressions of the divine, which rationalism cannot bring under either its theoretical or practical rubrics. The individual cannot become conscious of, and prize, his own individuality without at the same time valuing uniqueness in others; the higher a value he sets upon his own self, the more the personalities of others must impress him. "Whoever desires to cultivate his individuality must have an appreciation of everything that he is not." "The sense of universality (_der allgemeine Sinn_) is the supreme condition of one's own perfection." Hence the ethical life is a life in society--a society of unique individuals who respect humanity in its uniqueness, in themselves and in others. "They are among themselves a chorus of friends. Every one knows that he too is a part and product of the universe, that in him too are revealed its divine life and action." "The more every one approximates the universe, the more he communicates himself to others, the more perfect unity will they all form; no one has a consciousness for himself alone, every one has, at the same time, that of the other; they are no longer only men, but mankind; rising above themselves and triumphing over themselves, they are on the road to true immortality and eternity." In the feeling of piety man recognizes that his desire to be a unique personality is in harmony with the action of the universe; hence that he can, ought, and must make the development of his uniqueness the goal, the strongest motive, and the highest good, and that he can surely realize what he is striving for, because the universe which created and determined him created him for that. _FRIEDRICH SCHLEIERMACHER_ * * * * * ON THE SOCIAL ELEMENT IN RELIGION (1799) [1] TRANSLATED BY GEORGE RIPLEY Those among you who are accustomed to regard religion as a disease of the human mind, cherish also the habitual conviction that it is an evil more easily borne, even though not to be cured, so long as it is only insulated individuals here and there who are infected with it; but that the common danger is raised to the highest degree, and everything put at stake, as soon as a too close connection is permitted between many patients of this character. In the former case it is possible by a judicious treatment, as it were by an antiphlegistic regimen, and by a healthy spiritual atmosphere, to ward off the violence of the paroxysms; and if not entirely to conquer the exciting cause of the disease, to attenuate it to such a degree that it shall be almost innocuous. But in the latter case we must despair of every other means of cure, except that which may proceed from some internal beneficent operation of Nature. For the evil is attended with more alarming symptoms, and is more fatal in its effects, when the too great proximity of other infected persons feeds and aggravates it in every individual; the whole mass of vital air is then quickly poisoned by a few; the most vigorous frames are smitten with the contagion; all the channels in which the functions of life should go on are destroyed; all the juices of the system are decomposed; and, seized with a similar feverous delirium, the sound spiritual life and productions of whole ages and nations are involved in irremediable ruin. Hence your antipathy to the church, to every institution which is intended for the communication of religion, is always more prominent than that which you feel to religion itself; hence, also, priests, as the pillars and the most efficient members of such institutions, are, of all men, the objects of your greatest abomination. Even those among you who hold a little more indulgent opinion with regard to religion, and deem it rather a singularity than a disorder of the mind, an insignificant rather than a dangerous phenomenon, cherish quite as unfavorable impressions of all social organization for its promotion. A slavish immolation of all that is free and peculiar, a system of lifeless mechanism and barren ceremonies--these, they imagine, are the inseparable consequences of every such institution and are the ingenious and elaborate work of men, who, with almost incredible success, have made a great merit of things which are either nothing in themselves, or which any other person was quite as capable of accomplishing as they. I should pour out my heart but very imperfectly before you, on a subject to which I attach the utmost importance, if I did not undertake to give you the correct point of view with regard to it. I need not here repeat how many of the perverted endeavors and melancholy fortunes of humanity you charge upon religious associations; this is clear as light, in a thousand utterances of your predominant individuals; nor will I stop to refute these accusations, one by one, in order to fix the evil upon other causes. Let us rather submit the whole conception of the church to a new examination, and from its central point, throughout its whole extent, erect it again upon a new basis, without regard to what it has actually been hitherto, or to what experience may suggest concerning it. If religion exists at all, it must needs possess a social character; this is founded not only in the nature of man, but still more in the nature of religion. You will acknowledge that it indicates a state of disease, a signal perversion of nature, when an individual wishes to shut up within himself anything which he has produced and elaborated by his own efforts. It is the disposition of man to reveal and to communicate whatever is in him, in the indispensable relations and mutual dependence not only of practical life, but also of his spiritual being, by which he is connected with all others of his race; and the more powerfully he is wrought upon by anything, the more deeply it penetrates his inward nature, so much the stronger is this social impulse, even if we regard it only from the point of view of the universal endeavor to behold the emotions which we feel ourselves, as they are exhibited by others, so that we may obtain a proof from their example that our own experience is not beyond the sphere of humanity. [Illustration: FRIEDRICH SCHLEIERMACHER] You perceive that I am not speaking here of the endeavor to make others similar to ourselves, nor of the conviction that what is exhibited in one is essential to all; it is merely my aim to ascertain the true relation between our individual life and the common nature of man, and clearly to set it forth. But the peculiar object of this desire for communication is unquestionably that in which man feels that he is originally passive, namely, his observations and emotions. He is here impelled by the eager wish to know whether the power which has produced them in him be not something foreign and unworthy. Hence we see man employed, from his very childhood, in communicating those observations and emotions; the conceptions of his understanding, concerning whose origin there can be no doubt, he allows to rest in his own mind, and still more easily he determines to refrain from the expression of his judgments; but whatever acts upon his senses, whatever awakens his feelings, of that he desires to obtain witnesses, with regard to that he longs for those who will sympathize with him. How should he keep to himself those very operations of the world upon his soul which are the most universal and comprehensive, which appear to him as of the most stupendous and resistless magnitude? How should he be willing to lock up within his own bosom those very emotions which impel him with the greatest power beyond himself, and in the indulgence of which he becomes conscious that he can never understand his own nature from himself alone? It will rather be his first endeavor, whenever a religious view gains clearness in his eye, or a pious feeling penetrates his soul, to direct the attention of others to the same object, and, as far as possible, to communicate to their hearts the elevated impulses of his own. If, then, the religious man is urged by his nature to speak, it is the same nature which secures to him the certainty of hearers. There is no element of his being with which, at the same time, there is implanted in man such a lively feeling of his total inability to exhaust it by himself alone, as with that of religion. A sense of religion has no sooner dawned upon him, than he feels the infinity of its nature and the limitation of his own; he is conscious of embracing but a small portion of it; and that which he cannot immediately reach he wishes to perceive, as far as he can, from the representations of others who have experienced it themselves, and to enjoy it with them. Hence, he is anxious to observe every manifestation of it; and, seeking to supply his own deficiencies, he watches for every tone which he recognizes as proceeding from it. In this manner, mutual communications are instituted; in this manner, every one feels equally the need both of speaking and hearing. But the imparting of religion is not to be sought in books, like that of intellectual conceptions and scientific knowledge. The pure impression of the original product is too far destroyed in this medium, which, in the same way that dark-colored objects absorb the greatest proportion of the rays of light, swallows up everything belonging to the pious emotions of the heart, which cannot be embraced in the insufficient symbols from which it is intended again to proceed. Nay, in the written communications of religious feeling, everything needs a double and triple representation; for that which originally represented, must be represented in its turn; and yet the effect on the whole man, in its complete unity, can only be imperfectly set forth by continued and varied reflections. It is only when religion is driven out from the society of the living, that it must conceal its manifold life under the dead letter. Neither can this intercourse of heart with heart, on the deepest feelings of humanity, be carried on in common conversation. Many persons, who are filled with zeal for the interests of religion, have brought it as a reproach against the manners of our age that, while all other important subjects are so freely discussed in the intercourse of society, so little should be said concerning God and divine things. I would defend ourselves against this charge by maintaining that this circumstance, at least, does not indicate contempt or indifference toward religion, but a happy and very correct instinct. In the presence of joy and merriment, where earnestness itself must yield to raillery and wit, there can be no place for that which should be always surrounded with holy veneration and awe. Religious views, pious emotions, and serious considerations with regard to them--these we cannot throw out to one another in such small crumbs as the topics of a light conversation; and when the discourse turns upon sacred subjects, it would rather be a crime than a virtue to have an answer ready for every question, and a rejoinder for every remark. Hence, the religious sentiment retires from such circles as are too wide for it, to the more confidential intercourse of friendship, and to the mutual communications of love, where the eye and the countenance are more expressive than words, and where even a holy silence is understood. But it is impossible for divine things to be treated in the usual manner of society, where the conversation consists in striking flashes of thought, gaily and rapidly alternating with one another; a more elevated style is demanded for the communication of religion, and a different kind of society, which is devoted to this purpose, must hence be formed. It is becoming, indeed, to apply the whole richness and magnificence of human discourse to the loftiest subject which language can reach--not as if there were any adornment, with which religion could not dispense, but because it would show a frivolous and unholy disposition in its heralds if they did not bring together the most copious resources within their power and consecrate them all to religion, so that they might thus perhaps exhibit it in its appropriate greatness and dignity. Hence it is impossible, without the aid of poetry, to give utterance to the religious sentiment in any other than an oratorical manner, with all the skill and energy of language, and freely using, in addition, the service of all the arts which can contribute to flowing and impassioned discourse. He, therefore, whose heart is overflowing with religion, can open his mouth only before an auditory, where that which is presented, with such a wealth of preparation, can produce the most extended and manifold effects. Would that I could present before you an image of the rich and luxurious life in this city of God, when its inhabitants come together each in the fulness of his own inspiration, which is ready to stream forth without constraint, but, at the same time, each is filled with a holy desire to receive and to appropriate to himself everything which others wish to bring before him. If one comes forward before the rest, it is not because he is entitled to this distinction, in virtue of an office or of a previous agreement, nor because pride and conceitedness have given him presumption; it is rather a free impulse of the spirit, a sense of the most heartfelt unity of each with all, a consciousness of entire equality, a mutual renunciation of all First and Last, of all the arrangements of earthly order. He comes forward in order to communicate to others, as an object of sympathizing contemplation, the deepest feelings of his soul while under the influence of God; to lead them to the domain of religion in which he breathes his native air; and to infect them with the contagion of his own holy emotions. He speaks forth the Divine which stirs his bosom, and in holy silence the assembly follows the inspiration of his words. Whether he unveils a secret mystery, or with prophetic confidence connects the future with the present; whether he strengthens old impressions by new examples, or is led by the lofty visions of his burning imagination into other regions of the world and into another order of things, the practised sense of his audience everywhere accompanies his own; and when he returns into himself from his wanderings through the kingdom of God, his own heart and that of each of his hearers are the common dwelling-place of the same emotion. If, now, the agreement of his sentiments with that which they feel be announced to him, whether loudly or low, then are holy mysteries--not merely significant emblems, but, justly regarded, natural indications of a peculiar consciousness and peculiar feelings--invented and celebrated, a higher choir, as it were, which in its own lofty language answers to the appealing voice. But not only, so to speak; for as such a discourse is music without tune or measure, so there is also a music among the Holy, which may be called discourse without words, the most distinct and expressive utterance of the inward man. The Muse of Harmony, whose intimate relation with religion, although it has been for a long time spoken of and described, is yet recognized only by few, has always presented upon her altars the most perfect and magnificent productions of her selectest scholars in honor of religion. It is in sacred hymns and choirs, with which the words of the poet are connected only by slight and airy bands, that those feelings are breathed forth which precise language is unable to contain; and thus the tones of thought and emotion alternate with each other in mutual support, until all is satisfied and filled with the Holy and the Infinite. Of this character is the influence of religious men upon one another; such is their natural and eternal union. Do not take it ill of them that this heavenly bond--the most consummate product of the social nature of man, but to which it does not attain until it becomes conscious of its own high and peculiar significance--that this should be deemed of more value in their sight than the political union which you esteem so far above everything else, but which will nowhere ripen to manly beauty, and which, compared with the former, appears far more constrained than free, far more transitory than eternal. But where now, in the description which I have given of the community of the pious, is that distinction between priests and laymen, which you are accustomed to designate as the source of so many evils? A false appearance has deceived you. This is not a distinction between persons, but only one of condition and performance. Every man is a priest, so far as he draws others around him, into the sphere which he has appropriated to himself and in which he professes to be a master. Every one is a layman, so far as he is guided by the counsel and experience of another, within the sphere of religion, where he is comparatively a stranger. There is not here the tyrannic aristocracy, which you describe with such hatred; but this society is a priestly people, a perfect republic, where every one is alternately ruler and citizen, where every one follows the same power in another which he feels also in himself, and with which he, too, governs others. How then could the spirit of discord and division--which you regard as the inevitable consequence of all religious combinations--find a congenial home within this sphere? I see nothing but that All is One, and that all the differences which actually exist in religion, by means of this very union of the pious, are gently blended with one another. I have directed your attention to the different degrees of religiousness, I have pointed out to you the different modes of insight and the different directions in which the soul seeks for itself the supreme object of its pursuit. Do you imagine that this must needs give birth to sects, and thus destroy all free and reciprocal intercourse in religion? It is true, indeed, in contemplation, that everything which is separated into various parts and embraced in different divisions, must be opposed and contradictory to itself; but consider, I pray you, how Life is manifested in a great variety of forms, how the most hostile elements seek out one another here, and, for this very reason, what we separate in contemplation all flows together in life. They, to be sure, who on one of these points bear the greatest resemblance to one another, will present the strongest mutual attraction, but they cannot, on that account, compose an independent whole; for the degrees of this affinity imperceptibly diminish and increase, and in the midst of so many transitions there is no absolute repulsion, no total separation, even between the most discordant elements. Take which you will of these masses which have assumed an organic form according to their own inherent energy; if you do not forcibly divide them by a mechanical operation, no one will exhibit an absolutely distinct and homogeneous character, but the extreme points of each will be connected at the same time with those which display different properties and properly belong to another mass. If the pious individuals, who stand on the same degree of a lower order, form a closer union with one another, there are yet some always included in the combination who have a presentiment of higher things. These are better understood by all who belong to a higher social class than they understand themselves; and there is a point of sympathy between the two which is concealed only from the latter. If those combine in whom one of the modes of insight, which I have described, is predominant, there will always be some among them who understand at least both of the modes, and since they, in some degree, belong to both, they form a connecting link between two spheres which would otherwise be separated. Thus the individual who is more inclined to cherish a religious connection between himself and nature, is yet by no means opposed, in the essentials of religion, to him who prefers to trace the footsteps of the Godhead in history; and there will never be wanting those who can pursue both paths with equal facility. Thus in whatever manner you divide the vast province of religion, you will always come back to the same point. If unbounded universality of insight be the first and original supposition of religion, and hence also, most naturally, its fairest and ripest fruit, you perceive that it cannot be otherwise than that, in proportion as an individual advances in religion and the character of his piety becomes more pure, the whole religious world will more and more appear to him as an indivisible whole. The spirit of separation, in proportion as it insists upon a rigid division, is a proof of imperfection; the highest and most cultivated minds always perceive a universal connection, and, for the very reason that they perceive it, they also establish it. Since every one comes in contact only with his immediate neighbor, but, at the same time, has an immediate neighbor on all sides and in every direction, he is, in fact, indissolubly linked in with the whole. Mystics and Naturalists in religion, they to whom the Godhead is a personal Being, and they to whom it is not, they who have arrived at a systematic view of the Universe, and they who behold it only in its elements or only in obscure chaos--all, notwithstanding, should be only one, for one band surrounds them all and they can be totally separated only by a violent and arbitrary force; every specific combination is nothing but an integral part of the whole; its peculiar characteristics are almost evanescent, and are gradually lost in outlines that become more and more indistinct; and at least those who feel themselves thus united will always be the superior portion. Whence, then, but through a total misunderstanding, have arisen that wild and disgraceful zeal for proselytism to a separate and peculiar form of religion, and that horrible expression--"no salvation except with us." As I have described to you the society of the pious, and as it must needs be according to its intrinsic nature, it aims merely at reciprocal communication, and subsists only between those who are already in possession of religion, of whatever character it may be; how then can it be its vocation to change the sentiments of those who now acknowledge a definite system, or to introduce and consecrate those who are totally destitute of one? The religion of this society, as such, consists only in the religion of all the pious taken together, as each one beholds it in the rest--it is Infinite; no single individual can embrace it entirely, since so far as it is individual it ceases to be one, and hence no man can attain such elevation and completeness as to raise himself to its level. If any one, then, has chosen a part in it for himself, whatever it may be, were it not an absurd procedure for society to wish to deprive him of that which is adapted to his nature--since it ought to comprise this also within its limits, and hence some one must needs possess it? [Illustration: THE THREE HERMITS Moritz Von Schwind] And to what end should it desire to cultivate those who are yet strangers to religion? Its own especial characteristic--the Infinite Whole--of course it cannot impart to them; and the communication of any specific element cannot be accomplished by the Whole, but only by individuals. But perhaps then, the Universal, the Indeterminate, which might be presented, when we seek that which is common to all the members? Yet you are aware that, as a general rule, nothing can be given or communicated, in the form of the Universal and Indeterminate, for specific object and precise form are requisite for this purpose; otherwise, in fact, that which is presented would not be a reality but a nullity. Such a society, accordingly, can never find a measure or rule for this undertaking. And how could it so far abandon its sphere as to engage in this enterprise? The need on which it is founded, the essential principle of religious sociability, points to no such purpose. Individuals unite with one another and compose a Whole; the Whole rests in itself, and needs not to strive for anything beyond. Hence, whatever is accomplished in this way for religion is the private affair of the individual for himself, and, if I may say so, more in his relations out of the church than in it. Compelled to descend to the low grounds of life from the circle of religious communion, where the mutual existence and life in God afford him the most elevated enjoyment and where his spirit, penetrated with holy feelings, soars to the highest summit of consciousness, it is his consolation that he can connect everything with which he must there be employed, with that which always retains the deepest significance in his heart. As he descends from such lofty regions to those whose whole endeavor and pursuit are limited to earth, he easily believes--and you must pardon him the feeling--that he has passed from intercourse with Gods and Muses to a race of coarse barbarians. He feels like a steward of religion among the unbelieving, a herald of piety among the savages; he hopes, like an Orpheus or an Amphion, to charm the multitude with his heavenly tones; he presents himself among them, like a priestly form, clearly and brightly exhibiting the lofty, spiritual sense which fills his soul, in all his actions and in the whole compass of his Being. If the contemplation of the Holy and the Godlike awakens a kindred emotion in them, how joyfully does he cherish the first presages of religion in a new heart, as a delightful pledge of its growth even in a harsh and foreign clime! With what triumph does he bear the neophyte with him to the exalted assembly! This activity for the promotion of religion is only the pious yearning of the stranger after his home, the endeavor to carry his Fatherland with him in all his wanderings, and everywhere to find again its laws and customs as the highest and most beautiful elements of his life; but the Fatherland itself, happy in its own resources, perfectly sufficient for its own wants, knows no such endeavor. _JOHANN GOTTLIEB FICHTE_ * * * * * THE DESTINY OF MAN (1800) ADAPTED FROM THE TRANSLATION BY FREDERIC H. HEDGE BOOK III: FAITH * * * * * "Not merely to know, but to act according to thy knowledge, is thy destination." So says the voice which cries to me aloud from my innermost soul, so soon as I collect and give heed to myself for a moment. "Not idly to inspect and contemplate thyself, nor to brood over devout sensations--no! thou existest to act. Thine actions, and only thine actions, determine thy worth." * * * * * Shall I refuse obedience to that inward voice? I will not do it. I will choose voluntarily the destination which the impulse imputes to me. And I will grasp, together with this determination, the thought of its reality and truth, and of the reality of all that it presupposes. I will hold to the viewpoint of natural thinking, which this impulse assigns to me, and renounce all those morbid speculations and refinements of the understanding which alone could make me doubt its truth. I understand thee now, sublime Spirit![2] I have found the organ with which I grasp this reality, and with it, probably, all other reality. Knowledge is not that organ. No knowledge can prove and demonstrate itself. Every knowledge presupposes a higher as its foundation, and this upward process has no end. It is Faith, that voluntary reposing in the view which naturally presents itself, because it is the only one by which we can fulfil our destination--this it is that first gives assent to knowledge, and exalts to certainty and conviction what might otherwise be mere illusion. It is not knowledge, but a determination of the will to let knowledge pass for valid. I hold fast, then, forever to this expression. It is not a mere difference of terms, but a real deep-grounded distinction, exercising a very important influence on my whole mental disposition. All my conviction is only faith, and is derived from a disposition of the mind, not from the understanding. * * * * * There is only one point to which I have to direct incessantly all my thoughts: What I must do, and how I shall most effectually accomplish what is required of me. All my thinking must have reference to my doing--must be considered as means, however remote, to this end. Otherwise, it is an empty, aimless sport, a waste of time and power, and perversion of a noble faculty which was given me for a very different purpose. I may hope, I may promise myself with certainty, that when I think after this manner, my thinking shall be attended with practical results. Nature, in which I am to act, is not a foreign being, created without regard to me, into which I can never penetrate. It is fashioned by the laws of my own thought, and must surely coincide with them. It must be everywhere transparent, cognizable, permeable to me, in its innermost recesses. Everywhere it expresses nothing but relations and references of myself to myself; and as certainly as I may hope to know myself, so certainly I may promise myself that I shall be able to explore it. Let me but seek what I have to seek, and I shall find. Let me but inquire whereof I have to inquire, and I shall receive answer. [Illustration: JOHANN GOTTLIEB FICHTE] I That voice in my interior, which I believe, and for the sake of which I believe all else that I believe, commands me not merely to act in the abstract. That is impossible. All these general propositions are formed only by my voluntary attention and reflection directed to various facts; but they do not express a single fact of themselves. This voice of my conscience prescribes to me with certainty, in each particular situation of my existence, what I must do and what I must avoid in that situation. It accompanies me, if I will but listen to it with attention, through all the events of my life, and never refuses its reward where I am called to act. It establishes immediate conviction, and irresistibly compels my assent. It is impossible for me to contend against it. To harken to that voice, honestly and dispassionately, without fear and without useless speculation to obey it--this is my sole destination, this the whole aim of my existence. My life ceases to be an empty sport, without truth or meaning. There is something to be done, simply because it must be done--namely, that which conscience demands of me who find myself in this particular position. I exist solely in order that it may be fulfilled. To perceive it, I have understanding; to do it, power. Through these commandments of conscience alone come truth and reality into my conceptions. I cannot refuse attention and obedience to them without renouncing my destination. I cannot, therefore, withhold my belief in the reality which they bring before me, without, at the same time, denying my destination. It is absolutely true, without further examination and demonstration--it is the first truth and the foundation of all other truth and certainty--that I must obey that voice. Consequently, according to this way of thinking, everything becomes true and real for me which the possibility of such obedience presupposes. There hover before me phenomena in space, to which I transfer the idea of my own being. I represent them to myself as beings of my own kind. Consistent speculation has taught me or will teach me that these supposed rational beings, without me, are only products of my own conception; that I am necessitated, once for all, by laws of thought which can be shown to exist, to represent the idea of myself out of myself, and that, according to the same laws, this idea can be transferred only to certain definite perceptions. But the voice of my conscience cries to me: "Whatever these beings may be in and for themselves, thou shalt treat them as subsisting for themselves, as free, self-existing beings, entirely independent of thyself. Take it for granted that they are capable of proposing to themselves aims independently of thee, by their own power. Never disturb the execution of these, their designs, but further them rather, with all thy might. Respect their liberty. Embrace with love their objects as thine own." So must I act. And to such action shall, will, and must all my thinking be directed, if I have but formed the purpose to obey the voice of my conscience. Accordingly, I shall ever consider those beings as beings subsisting for themselves, and forming and accomplishing aims independently of me. From this viewpoint, I cannot consider them in any other light; and the above-mentioned speculation will vanish like an empty dream before my eyes. "I _think_ of them as beings of my own species," said I just now; but strictly, it is not a thought by which they are first represented to me as such. It is the voice of conscience, the command: "Here restrain thy liberty, here suppose and respect foreign aims." This it is which is first translated into the thought: "Here is surely and truly, subsisting of itself, a being like me." To consider them otherwise, I must first deny the voice of my conscience in life and forget it in speculation. There hover before me other phenomena which I do not consider as beings like myself, but as irrational objects. Speculation finds it easy to show how the conception of such objects develops itself purely from my power of conception and its necessary modes of action. But I comprehend these same things also through need and craving and enjoyment. It is not the conception--no, it is hunger and thirst and the satisfaction of these that makes anything food and drink to me. Of course, I am constrained to believe in the reality of that which threatens my sensuous existence, or which alone can preserve it. Conscience comes in, at once hallowing and limiting this impulse of Nature. "Thou shalt preserve, exercise and strengthen thyself, and thy sensuous power; for this sensuous power forms a part of the calculation, in the plan of reason. But thou canst preserve it only by a suitable use, agreeable to the peculiar interior laws of such matters. And, besides thyself, there are also others like thee, whose powers are calculated upon like thine own, and who can be preserved only in the same way. Allow to them the same use of their portion which it is granted thee to make of thine own portion. Respect what comes to them, as their property. Use what comes to thee in a suitable manner, as thy property." So must I act, and I must think conformably to such action. Accordingly, I am necessitated to regard these things as standing under their own natural laws, independent of me, but which I am capable of knowing; that is, to ascribe to them an existence independent of myself. I am constrained to believe in such laws, and it becomes my business to ascertain them; and empty speculation vanishes like mist when the warming sun appears. In short, there is for me, in general, no pure, naked existence, with which I have no concern, and which I contemplate solely for the sake of contemplation. Whatever exists for me, exists only by virtue of its relation to me. But there is everywhere but one relation to me possible, and all the rest are but varieties of this, i.e., my destination as a moral agent. My world is the object and sphere of my duties, and absolutely nothing else. There is no other world, no other attributes of my world, for me. My collective capacity and all finite capacity is insufficient to comprehend any other. Everything which exists for me forces its existence and its reality upon me, solely by means of this relation; and only by means of this relation do I grasp it. There is utterly wanting in me an organ for any other existence. To the question whether then in fact such a world exists as I represent to myself, I can answer nothing certain, nothing which is raised above all doubt, but this: I have assuredly and truly these definite duties which represent themselves to me as duties toward such and such persons, concerning such and such objects. These definite duties I cannot represent to myself otherwise, nor can I execute them otherwise, than as lying within the sphere of such a world as I conceive. Even he who has never thought of his moral destination, if any such there could be, or who, if he has thought about it at all, has never entertained the slightest purpose of ever, in the indefinite future, fulfilling it--even he derives his world of the senses and his belief in the reality of such a world no otherwise than from his idea of a moral world. If he does not comprehend it through the idea of his duties, he certainly does so through the requisition of his rights. What he does not require of himself he yet requires of others, in relation to himself--that they treat him with care and consideration, agreeably to his nature, not as an irrational thing, but as a free and self-subsisting being. And so he is constrained, in order that they may comply with this demand, to think of them also as rational, free, self-subsisting, and independent of the mere force of Nature. And even though he should never propose to himself any other aim in the use and fruition of the objects which surround him than that of enjoying them, he still demands this enjoyment as a right, of which others must leave him in undisturbed possession. Accordingly, he comprehends even the irrational world of the senses through a moral idea. No one who lives a conscious life can renounce these claims to be respected as rational and self-subsisting. And with these claims at least there is connected in his soul a seriousness, an abandonment of doubt, a belief in a reality, if not with the acknowledgment of a moral law in his innermost being. Do but assail him who denies his own moral destination and your existence and the existence of a corporeal world, except in the way of experiment, to try what speculation can do--assail him actively, carry his principles into life, and act as if he either did not exist, or as if he were a piece of rude matter, and he will soon forget the joke; he will become seriously angry with you, he will seriously reprove you for treating him so, and maintain that you ought not and must not do so to him; and, in this way, he will practically admit that you really possess the power of acting upon him, that he exists, that you exist, and that there exists _a medium through which you act upon him_; and that you have at least duties toward him. Hence it is not the action of supposed objects without us, which exist for us only and for which we exist only in so far as we already know of them; just as little is it an empty fashioning, by means of our imagination and our thinking, whose products would appear to us as such, as empty pictures; it is not these, but the necessary faith in our liberty and our power, in our veritable action and in definite laws of human action, which serves as the foundation of all consciousness of a reality without us, a consciousness which is itself but a belief, since it rests on a belief, but one which follows necessarily from that belief. We are compelled to assume that we act in general, and that we ought to act in a certain way; we are compelled to assume a certain sphere of such action--this sphere being the truly and actually existing world as we find it. And _vice versa_, this world is absolutely nothing but that sphere, and by no means extends beyond it. The consciousness of the actual world proceeds from the necessity of action, and not the reverse--i.e., the necessity of action from the consciousness of such a world. The necessity is first not the consciousness; that is derived. We do not act because we agnize, but we agnize because we are destined to act. Practical reason is the root of all reason. The laws of action for rational beings are _immediately_ certain; their world is certain _only because they are certain_. Were we to renounce the former, the world, and, with it, ourselves, we should sink into absolute nothing. We raise ourselves out of this nothing, and sustain ourselves above this nothing, solely by means of our morality. II * * * * * When I contemplate the world as it is, independently of any command, there manifests itself in my interior the wish, the longing, no! not a longing merely--the absolute demand for a better world. I cast a glance at the relations of men to one another and to Nature, at the weakness of their powers, at the strength of their appetites and passions. It cries to me irresistibly from my innermost soul: "Thus it cannot possibly be destined always to remain. It must, O it must all become other and better!" I can in no wise imagine to myself the present condition of man as that which is designed to endure. I cannot imagine it to be his whole and final destination. If so, then would everything be dream and delusion, and it would not be worth the trouble to have lived and to have taken part in this ever-recurring, aimless, and unmeaning game. Only so far as I can regard this condition as the means of something better, as a point of transition to a higher and more perfect, does it acquire any value for me. Not on its own account, but on account of something better for which it prepares the way, can I bear it, honor it, and joyfully fulfil my part in it. My mind can find no place, nor rest a moment, in the present; it is irresistibly repelled by it. My whole life streams irrepressibly on toward the future and better. Am I only to eat and to drink that I may hunger and thirst again, and again eat and drink, until the grave, yawning beneath my feet, swallows me up, and I myself spring up as food from the ground? Am I to beget beings like myself, that they also may eat and drink and die, and leave behind them beings like themselves, who shall do the same that I have done? To what purpose this circle which perpetually returns into itself; this game forever recommencing, after the same manner, in which everything is born but to perish, and perishes but to be born again as it was; this monster which forever devours itself that it may produce itself again, and which produces itself that it may again devour itself? Never can this be the destination of my being and of all being. There must be something which exists because it has been brought forth, and which now remains and can never be brought forth again after it has been brought forth once. And this, that is permanent, must beget itself amid the mutations of the perishing, and continue amid those mutations, and be borne along unhurt upon the waves of time. As yet our race wrings with difficulty its sustenance and its continuance from reluctant Nature. As yet the larger portion of mankind are bowed down their whole life long by hard labor, to procure sustenance for themselves and the few who think for them. Immortal spirits are compelled to fix all their thinking and scheming, and all their efforts, on the soil which bears them nourishment. It often comes to pass as yet, that when the laborer has ended, and promises himself, for his pains, the continuance of his own existence and of those pains, then hostile elements destroy in a moment what he had been slowly and carefully preparing for years, and delivers up the industrious painstaking man, without any fault of his own, to hunger and misery. It often comes to pass as yet, that inundations, storm-winds, volcanoes, desolate whole countries, and mingle works which bear the impress of a rational mind, as well as their authors, with the wild chaos of death and destruction. Diseases still hurry men into a premature grave, men in the bloom of their powers, and children whose existence passes away without fruit or result. The pestilence still stalks through blooming states, leaves the few who escape it bereaved and alone, deprived of the accustomed aid of their companions, and does all in its power to give back to the wilderness the land which the industry of man had already conquered for its own. So it is, but so it cannot surely have been intended always to remain. No work which bears the impress of reason, and which was undertaken for the purpose of extending the dominion of reason, can be utterly lost in the progress of the times. The sacrifices which the irregular violence of Nature draws from reason must at least weary, satisfy, and reconcile that violence. The force which has caused injury by acting without rule cannot be intended to do so in that way any longer, it cannot be destined to renew itself; it must be used up, from this time forth and forever, by that one outbreak. All those outbreaks of rude force, before which human power vanishes into nothing--those desolating hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanoes, can be nothing else but the final struggle of the wild mass against the lawfully progressive, life-giving, systematic course to which it is compelled, contrary to its own impulse. They can be nothing but the last concussive strokes in the formation of our globe, now about to perfect itself. That opposition must gradually become weaker and at last exhausted, since, in the lawful course of things, there can be nothing that should renew its power. That formation must at last be perfected, and our destined abode complete. Nature must gradually come into a condition in which we can count with certainty upon her equal step, and in which her power shall keep unaltered a definite relation with that power which is destined to govern it, that is, the human. So far as this relation already exists and the systematic development of Nature has gained firm footing, the workmanship of man, by its mere existence and its effects, independent of any design on the part of the author, is destined to react upon Nature and to represent in her a new and life-giving principle. Cultivated lands are to quicken and mitigate the sluggish, hostile atmosphere of the eternal forests, wildernesses, and morasses. Well-ordered and diversified culture is to diffuse through the air a new principle of life and fructification, and the sun to send forth its most animating beams into that atmosphere which is breathed by a healthy, industrious, and ingenious people. Science, awakened, at first, by the pressure of necessity, shall hereafter penetrate deliberately and calmly into the unchangeable laws of Nature, overlook her whole power, and learn to calculate her possible developments--shall form for itself a new Nature in idea, attach itself closely to the living and active, and follow hard upon her footsteps. And all knowledge which reason has wrung from Nature shall be preserved in the course of the times and become the foundation of further knowledge, for the common understanding of our race. Thus shall Nature become ever more transparent and penetrable to human perception, even to its innermost secrets. And human power, enlightened and fortified with its inventions, shall rule her with ease and peacefully maintain the conquest once effected. By degrees, there shall be needed no greater outlay of mechanical labor than the human body requires for its development, cultivation and health. And this labor shall cease to be a burden; for the rational being is not destined to be a bearer of burdens. But it is not Nature, it is liberty itself, that occasions the most numerous and the most fearful disorders among our kind. The direst enemy of man is man. * * * * * It is the destination of our race to unite in one body, thoroughly acquainted with itself in all its parts, and uniformly cultivated in all. Nature, and even the passions and vices of mankind, have, from the beginning, drifted toward this goal. A large part of the road which leads to it is already put behind us, and we may count with certainty that this goal, which is the condition of further, united progress, will be reached in due season. Do not ask History whether mankind, on the whole, have grown more purely moral! They have grown to extended, comprehensive, forceful acts of arbitrary will; but it was almost a necessity of their condition that they should direct that will exclusively to evil. Neither ask History whether the esthetic education and the rationalistic culture of the understanding, of the fore-world, concentrated upon a few single points, may not have far exceeded, in degree, that of modern times. It might be that the answer would put us to shame, and that the human race in growing older would appear, in this regard, not to have advanced, but to have lost ground. But ask History in what period the existing culture was most widely diffused and distributed among the greatest number of individuals. Undoubtedly it will be found that, from the beginning of history down to our own day, the few light-points of culture have extended their rays farther and farther from their centres, have seized one individual after another, and one people after another; and that this diffusion of culture is still going on before our eyes. And this was the first goal of Humanity, on its infinite path. Until this is attained, until the existing culture of an age is diffused over the whole habitable globe, and our race is made capable of the most unlimited communication with itself, one nation, one quarter of the globe, must await the other, on their common path, and each must bring its centuries of apparent standing still or retrogradation, as a sacrifice to the common bond, for the sake of which, alone, they themselves exist. When this first goal shall be attained, when everything useful that has been discovered at one end of the earth shall immediately be made known and imparted to all, then Humanity, without interruption, without cessation, and without retrocession, with united force, and with one step shall raise itself up to a degree of culture which we lack power to conceive. * * * * * By the institution of this one true State and the firm establishment of internal peace, external war also, at least between true States, will be rendered impossible. Even for the sake of its own advantage--in order that no thought of injustice, plunder and violence may spring up in its own subjects, and no possible opportunity be afforded them for any gain, except by labor and industry, in the sphere assigned by law--every State must forbid as strictly, must hinder as carefully, must compensate as exactly, and punish as severely, an injury done to the citizen of a neighbor-State, as if it were inflicted upon a fellow-citizen. This law respecting the security of its neighbors is necessary to every State which is not a community of robbers. And herewith the possibility of every just complaint of one State against another, and every case of legitimate defense, are done away. There are no necessarily and continuously direct relations between States, as such, that could engender warfare. As a general rule, it is only through the relations of single citizens of one State with the citizens of another--it is only in the person of one of its members, that a State can be injured. But this injury will be instantly redressed, and the offended State satisfied. * * * * * That a whole nation should determine, for the sake of plunder, to attack a neighboring country with war, is impossible, since in a State in which all are equal the plunder would not become the booty of a few, but must be divided equally among all, and, so divided, the portion of each individual would never repay him for the trouble of a war. Only, then, when the advantage to be gained falls to the lot of a few oppressors, but the disadvantages, the trouble, the cost fall upon a countless army of slaves--only then is a war of plunder possible or conceivable. Accordingly, these States have no war to fear from States like themselves, but only from savages or barbarians, tempted to prey by want of skill to enrich themselves by industry; or from nations of slaves, who are driven by their masters to procure plunder, of which they are to enjoy no part themselves. As to the former, each single State is undoubtedly superior to them in strength, by virtue of the arts of culture. As to the latter, the common advantage of all the States will lead them to strengthen themselves by union with one another. No free State can reasonably tolerate, in its immediate vicinity, polities whose rulers find their advantage in subjecting neighboring nations, and which, therefore, by their mere existence, perpetually threaten their neighbors' peace. Care for their own security will oblige all free States to convert all around them into free States like themselves, and thus, for the sake of their own safety, to extend the dominion of culture to the savages, and that of liberty to the slave nations round about them. And so, when once a few free States have been formed, the empire of culture, of liberty, and, with that, of universal peace, will gradually embrace the globe. * * * * * In this only true State, all temptation to evil in general, and even the possibility of deliberately determining upon an evil act, will be cut off, and man be persuaded as powerfully as he can be to direct his will toward good. There is no man who loves evil because it is evil. He loves in it only the advantages and enjoyments which it promises, and which, in the present state of Humanity, it, for the most part, actually affords. As long as this state continues, as long as a price is set upon vice, a thorough reformation of mankind, in the whole, is scarcely to be hoped for. But in such a civil Polity as should exist, such as reason demands, and such as the thinker easily describes, although as yet he nowhere finds it, and such as will necessarily shape itself with the first nation that is truly disenthralled--in such a Polity evil will offer no advantages, but, on the contrary, the most certain disadvantages; and the aberration of self-love into acts of injustice will be suppressed by self-love itself. According to infallible regulations, in such a State, all taking advantage of and oppressing others, every act of self-aggrandizement at another's expense is not only sure to be in vain--labor lost--but it reacts upon the author, and he himself inevitably incurs the evil which he would inflict upon others. Within his own State and outside of it, on the whole face of the earth, he finds no one whom he can injure with impunity. It is not, however, to be expected that any one will resolve upon evil merely for evil's sake, notwithstanding he cannot accomplish it and nothing but his own injury can result from the attempt. The use of liberty for evil ends is done away. Man must either resolve to renounce his liberty entirely--to become, with patience, a passive wheel in the great machine of the whole--or he must apply his liberty to that which is good. And thus, then, in a soil so prepared, the good will easily flourish. When selfish aims no longer divide mankind, and their powers can no longer be exercised in destroying one another in battle, nothing will remain to them but to turn their united force against the common and only adversary which yet remains--resisting, uncultivated Nature. No longer separated by private ends, they will necessarily unite in one common end, and there will grow up a body everywhere animated by one spirit and one love. Every disadvantage of the individual, since it can no longer be a benefit to any one, becomes an injury to the whole and to each particular member of the same, and is felt in each member with equal pain, and with equal activity redressed. Every advance which one man makes, human nature, in its entirety, makes with him. Here, where the petty, narrow self of the person is already annihilated by the Polity, every one loves every other one as truly as himself, as a component part of that great _Self_ which alone remains for him to love, and of which he is nothing but a component part, which only through the Whole can gain or lose. Here the conflict of evil with good is done away, for no evil can any longer spring up. The contest of the good among themselves, even concerning the good, vanishes, now that it has become easy to them to love the good for its own sake, and not for their sakes, as the authors of it--now that the only interest they can have is that it come to pass, that truth be discovered, that the good deed be executed--not by whom it is accomplished. Here every one is always prepared to join his power to that of his neighbor, and to subordinate it to that of his neighbor. Whoever, in the judgment of all, shall accomplish the best, in the best way, him all will support and partake with equal joy in his success. This is the aim of earthly existence which Reason sets before us, and for the sure attainment of which Reason vouches. It is not a goal for which we are to strive merely that our faculties may be exercised on something great, but which we must relinquish all hope of realizing. It shall and must be realized. At some time or other this goal must be attained, as surely as there is a world of the senses, and a race of reasonable beings in time, for whom no serious and rational object can be imagined but this, and whose existence is made intelligible by this alone. Unless the whole life of man is to be considered as the sport of an evil Spirit, who implanted this ineradicable striving after the imperishable in the breasts of poor wretches merely that he might enjoy their ceaseless struggle after that which unceasingly flees from them, their still repeated grasping after that which still eludes their grasp, their restless driving about in an ever-returning circle--and laugh at their earnestness in this senseless sport--unless the wise man, who must soon see through this game and be tired of his own part in it, is to throw away his life, and the moment of awakening reason is to be the moment of earthly death--that goal must be attained. O it is attainable in life and by means of life; for Reason commands me to live. It is attainable, for I am. III But now, when it is attained, when Humanity shall stand at the goal--what then? There is no higher condition on earth than that. The generation which first attains it can do nothing further than to persist in it, maintain it with all their powers, and die and leave descendants who shall do the same that they have done, and who, in their turn, shall leave descendants that shall do the same. Humanity would then stand still in its course. Therefore its earthly goal cannot be its highest goal, for this earthly goal is intelligible, and attainable, and finite. Though we consider the preceding generations as means of developing the last and perfected, still we cannot escape the inquiry of earnest Reason: "Wherefore then these last?" Given a human race on the earth, its existence must indeed be in accordance with Reason, and not contrary to it. It must become all that it can become on earth. But why should it exist at all--this human race? Why might it not as well have remained in the womb of the Nothing? Reason is not for the sake of existence, but existence for the sake of Reason. An existence which does not, in itself, satisfy Reason and solve all her questions, cannot possibly be the true one. Then, too, are the actions commanded by the voice of Conscience, whose dictates I must not speculate about, but obey in silence--are they actually the means, and the only means, of accomplishing the earthly aim of mankind? That I cannot refer them to any other object but this, that I can have no other intent with them, is unquestionable. But is this, my intent, fulfilled in every case? Is nothing more needed but to will the best, in order that it may be accomplished? Alas! most of our good purposes are, for this world, entirely lost, and some of them seem even to have an entirely opposite effect to that which was proposed. On the other hand, the most despicable passions of men, their vices and their misdeeds, seem often to bring about the good more surely than the labors of the just man, who never consents to do evil that good may come. It would seem that the highest good of the world grows and thrives quite independently of all human virtues or vices, according to laws of its own, by some invisible and unknown power, just as the heavenly bodies run through their appointed course, independently of all human effort; and that this power absorbs into its own higher plan all human designs, whether good or ill, and, by its superior strength, appropriates what was intended for other purposes to its own ends. If, therefore, the attainment of that earthly goal could be the design of our existence, and if no further question concerning it remained to Reason, that aim, at least, would not be ours, but the aim of that unknown Power. We know not at any moment what may promote it. Nothing would be left us but to supply to that Power, by our actions, so much material, no matter what, to work up in its own way, for its own ends. Our highest wisdom would be, not to trouble ourselves about things in which we have no concern, but to live, in each case, as the fancy takes us, and quietly leave the consequences to that Power. The moral law within us would be idle and superfluous, and wholly unsuited to a being that had no higher capacity and no higher destination. In order to be at one with ourselves, we should refuse obedience to the voice of that law and suppress it as a perverse and mad enthusiasm. * * * * * If the whole design of our existence were to bring about a purely earthly condition of our race, all that would be required would be some infallible mechanism to direct our action; and we need be nothing more than wheels well fitted to the whole machine. Freedom would then not only be useless, but even contrary to the purpose of existence; and good-will would be quite superfluous. The world, in that case, would be very clumsily contrived--would proceed to its goal with waste of power and by circuitous paths. Rather, mighty World-Spirit, hadst thou taken from us this freedom, which, only with difficulty and by a different arrangement, thou canst fit to thy plans, and compelled us at once to act as those plans required! Thou wouldst then arrive at thy goal by the shortest road, as the meanest of the inhabitants of thy worlds can tell thee. But I am free, and therefore such a concatenation of cause and effect, in which freedom is absolutely superfluous and useless, cannot exhaust my whole destination. I must be free; for not the mechanical act, but the free determination of free-will, for the sake of the command alone and absolutely for no other purpose (so says the inward voice of conscience)--this alone determines our true worth. The band with which the law binds me is a band for living spirits. It scorns to rule over dead mechanism, and applies itself alone to the living and self-acting. Such obedience it demands. This obedience cannot be superfluous. And, herewith, the eternal world rises more brightly before me, and the fundamental law of its order stands clear before the eye of my mind. In that world the _will_, purely and only, as it lies, locked up from all eyes, in the secret dark of my soul, is the first link in a chain of consequences which runs through the whole invisible world of spirits; so in the earthly world the _deed_, a certain movement of matter, becomes the first link in a material chain which extends through the whole system of matter. The will is the working and living principle in the world of Reason, as motion is the working and living principle in the world of the senses. I stand in the centre of two opposite worlds, a visible in which the deed, and an invisible, altogether incomprehensible, in which the will, decides. I am one of the original forces for both these worlds. My will is that which embraces both. This will is in and of itself a constituent portion of the supersensuous world. When I put it in motion by a resolution, I move and change something in that world, and my activity flows on over the whole and produces something new and ever-during which then exists and needs not to be made anew. This will breaks forth into a material act, and this act belongs to the world of the senses, and effects, in that, what it can. I have not to wait until after I am divorced from the connection of the earthly world to gain admission into that which is above the earth. I am and live in it already, far more truly than in the earthly. Even now it is my only firm standing-ground, and the eternal life, which I have long since taken possession of, is the only reason why I am willing still to prolong the earthly. That which they denominate Heaven lies not beyond the grave. It is already here, diffused around our Nature, and its light arises in every pure heart. My will is mine, and it is the only thing that is entirely mine and depends entirely upon myself. By it I am already a citizen of the kingdom of liberty and of self-active Reason. My conscience, the tie by which that world holds me unceasingly and binds me to itself, tells me at every moment what determination of my will (the only thing by which, here in the dust, I can lay hold of that kingdom) is most consonant with its order; and it depends entirely upon myself to give myself the destination enjoined upon me. I cultivate myself then for this world, and, accordingly, work in it and for it, while cultivating one of its members. I pursue in it, and in it alone, without vacillation or doubt, according to fixed rules, my aim--sure of success, since there is no foreign power that opposes my intent. * * * * * That our good-will, in and for and through itself, must have consequences, we know, even in this life; for Reason cannot require anything without a purpose. But what these consequences are--nay, how it is possible that a mere will can effect anything--is a question to which we cannot even imagine a solution, so long as we are entangled with this material world, and it is the part of wisdom not to undertake an inquiry concerning which, we know beforehand, it must be unsuccessful. * * * * * This then is my whole sublime destination, my true essence. I am a member of two systems--a purely spiritual one, in which I rule by pure will alone; and a sensuous one, in which I work by my deed. * * * * * These two systems, the purely spiritual and the sensuous--which last may consist of an immeasurable series of particular lives--exist in me from the moment in which my active reason is developed, and pursue their parallel courses. The latter system is only an appearance, for me and for those who share with me the same life. The former alone gives to the latter meaning, and purpose, and value. I _am_ immortal, imperishable, eternal, so soon as I form the resolution to obey the law of Reason; and do not first have to _become_ so. The supersensuous world is not a future world; it is present. It never can be more present at any one point of finite existence than at any other point. After an existence of myriad lives, it cannot be more present than at this moment. Other conditions of my sensuous existence are to come; but these are no more the true life than the present condition. By means of that resolution I lay hold on eternity, and strip off this life in the dust and all other sensuous lives that may await me, and raise myself far above them. I become to myself the sole fountain of all my being and of all my phenomena; and have henceforth, unconditioned by aught without me, life in myself. My will, which I myself, and no stranger, fit to the order of that world, is this fountain of true life and of eternity. But only my will is this fountain; and only when I acknowledge this will to be the true seat of moral excellence, and actually elevate it to this excellence, do I attain to the certainty and the possession of that supersensuous world. * * * * * The sense by which we lay hold on eternal life we acquire only by renouncing and offering up sense, and the aims of sense, to the law which claims our will alone, and not our acts--by renouncing it with the conviction that to do so is reasonable and alone reasonable. With this renunciation of the earthly, the belief in the eternal first enters our soul and stands isolated there, as the only stay by which we can still sustain ourselves when we have relinquished everything else, as the only animating principle that still uplifts our hearts and still inspires our life. Well was it said, in the metaphors of a sacred doctrine, that man must first die to the world and be born again, in order to enter into the kingdom of God. I see, oh, I see now, clear before mine eyes, the cause of my former heedlessness and blindness concerning spiritual things! Filled with earthly aims, and lost in them with all my scheming and striving; put in motion and impelled only by the idea of a result, which is to be actualized without us, by the desire of such a result and pleasure in it--insensible and dead to the pure impulse of that Reason which gives the law to itself, which sets before us a purely spiritual aim, the immortal Psyche remains chained to the earth; her wings are bound. Our philosophy becomes the history of our own heart and life. As we find ourselves, so we imagine man in general and his destination. Never impelled by any other motive than the desire of that which can be realized in this world, there is no true liberty for us, no liberty which has the reason for its destination absolutely and entirely in itself. Our liberty, at the utmost, is that of the self-forming plant, no higher in its essence, only more curious in its result, not producing a form of matter with roots, leaves and blossoms, but a form of mind with impulses, thoughts, actions. Of the true liberty we are positively unable to comprehend anything, because we are not in possession of it. Whenever we hear it spoken of, we draw the words down to our own meaning, or briefly dismiss it with a sneer, as nonsense. With the knowledge of liberty, the sense of another world is also lost to us. Everything of this sort floats by like words which are not addressed to us; like an ash-gray shadow without color or meaning, which we cannot by any end take hold of and retain. Without the least interest, we let everything go as it is stated. Or if ever a robuster zeal impels us to consider it seriously, we see clearly and can demonstrate that all those ideas are untenable, hollow visions, which a man of sense casts from him. And, according to the premises from which we set out and which are taken from our own innermost experience, we are quite right, and are alike unanswerable and unteachable, so long as we remain what we are. The excellent doctrines which are current among the people, fortified with special authority, concerning freedom, duty and eternal life, change themselves for us into grotesque fables, like those of Tartarus and the Elysian fields, although we do not disclose the true opinion of our hearts, because we think it more advisable to keep the people in outward decency by means of these images. Or if we are less reflective, and ourselves fettered by the bands of authority, then we sink, ourselves, to the true plebeian level, by believing that which, so understood, would be foolish fable; and by finding, in those purely spiritual indications, nothing but the promise of a continuance, to all eternity, of the same miserable existence which we lead here below. To say all in a word: Only through a radical reformation of my will does a new light arise upon my being and destination. Without this, however much I may reflect, and however distinguished my mental endowments, there is nothing but darkness in me and around me. The reformation of the heart alone conducts to true wisdom. So then, let my whole life be directed unrestrainedly toward this one end! IV My lawful will, simply as such, in and through itself, must have consequences, certain and without exception. Every dutiful determination of my will, although no act should flow from it, must operate in another, to me incomprehensible, world; and, except this dutiful determination of the will, nothing can take effect in that world. What do I suppose when I suppose this? What do I take for granted? Evidently, a law, a rule absolutely and without exception valid, according to which the dutiful will must have consequences. Just as in the earthly world which environs me, I assume a law according to which this ball, when impelled by my hand with this given force, in this given direction, must necessarily move in such a direction, with a determinate measure of rapidity, perhaps impel another ball with this given degree of force by which the other ball moves on with a determinate rapidity; and so on indefinitely. As in this case, with the mere direction and movement of my hand, I know and comprehend all the directions and movements which shall follow it, as certainly as if they were already present and perceived by me; even so I comprise, in my dutiful will, a series of necessary and infallible consequences in the spiritual world, as if they were already present, only that I cannot, as in the material world, determine them--i.e., I merely know that they shall be, not how they shall be. I suppose a law of the spiritual world, in which my mere will is one of the moving forces, just as my hand is one of the moving forces in the material world. That firmness of my confidence and the thought of this law of a spiritual world are one and the same thing--not two thoughts of which one is the consequence of the other, but precisely the same thought, just as the certainty with which I count upon a certain motion, and the thought of a mechanical law of Nature, are the same. The idea of _Law_ expresses generally nothing else but the fixed, immovable reliance of Reason on a proposition, and the impossibility of supposing the contrary. I assume such a law of a spiritual world, which my own will did not enact, nor the will of any finite being, nor the will of all finite beings together, but to which my will and the will of all finite beings is subject. * * * * * Agreeably to what has now been advanced, the law of the supersensuous world should be a _Will_. A Will which acts purely and simply as will, by its own agency, entirely without any instrument or sensuous medium of its efficacy; which is absolutely, in itself, at once action and result; which wills and it is done, which commands and it stands fast; in which, accordingly, the demand of Reason to be absolutely free and self-active is represented. A Will which is law in itself; which determines itself, not according to humor and caprice, not after previous deliberation, vacillation and doubt, but which is forever and unchangeably determined, and upon which one may reckon with infallible security, as the mortal reckons securely on the laws of his world. A Will in which the lawful will of finite beings has inevitable consequences, but only their will, which is immovable to everything else, and for which everything else is as though it were not. That sublime Will, therefore, does not pursue its course for itself, apart from the rest of Reason's world. There is between it and all finite, rational beings, a spiritual tie, and that Will itself is this spiritual tie of Reason's world. I will, purely and decidedly, my duty, and it then wills that I shall succeed, at least in the world of spirits. Every lawful resolve of the finite will enters into it, and moves and determines it--to speak after our fashion--not in consequence of a momentary good pleasure, but in consequence of the eternal law of its being. With astounding clearness it now stands before my soul, the thought which hitherto had been wrapped in darkness--the thought that my will, merely as such, and of itself, has consequences. It has consequences because it is infallibly and immediately taken knowledge of by another related Will, which is itself an act and the only life-principle of the spiritual world. In that Will it has its first consequence, and only through that, in the rest of the spiritual world which, in all its parts, is but the product of that infinite Will. Thus I flow--the mortal must use the language of mortals--thus I flow in upon that Will; and the voice of conscience in my inmost being, which, in every situation of my life, instructs me what I have to do in that situation, is that by means of which it, in turn, flows in upon me. That voice is the oracle from the eternal world, made sensible by my environment, and translated, by my reception of it, into my language; which announces to me how I must fit myself to my part in the order of the spiritual world, or to the infinite Will, which itself is the order of that spiritual world. I cannot oversee or see through this spiritual order; nor need I. I am only a link in its chain, and can no more judge of the whole than a single tone in a song can judge of the harmony of the whole. But what I myself should be, in the harmony of Spirits, I must know; for only I myself can make myself that, and it is immediately revealed to me by a voice which sounds over to me from that world. Thus I stand in connection with the only being that _exists_, and partake of its being. There is nothing truly real, permanent, imperishable in me, but these two--the voice of my conscience and my free obedience. By means of the first, the spiritual world bows down to me and embraces me, as one of its members. By means of the second, I raise myself into this world, lay hold of it, and work in it. But that infinite Will is the mediator between it and me; for, of it and me, that Will is the primal fountain. This is the only true and imperishable reality, toward which my soul moves from its inmost depth. All else is only phenomenon, and vanishes and returns again, with new seeming. This Will connects me with itself. The same connects me with all finite beings of my species, and is the universal mediator between us all. That is the great mystery of the invisible world, and its fundamental law, so far as it is a world or system of several individual wills: _Union and direct reciprocal action of several self-subsisting and independent wills among one another_--a mystery which, even in the present life, lies clear before all eyes, without any one's noticing it or thinking it worthy his admiration! The voice of Conscience, which enjoins upon each one his proper duty, is the ray by which we proceed from the Infinite and are set forth as individual particular beings. It defines the boundaries of our personality; it is, therefore, our true original constituent, the foundation and the stuff of all the life which we live. * * * * * That eternal Will, then, is indeed world-creator, as he alone can be--in the finite reason (the only creation which is needed). They who suppose him to build a world out of eternal inert matter, which world, in that case, could be nothing else but inert and lifeless, like implements fashioned by human hands and not an eternal process of self-development, or who think they can imagine the going forth of a material something out of nothing, know neither the world nor him. If matter only is something, then there is nowhere anything, and nowhere, in all eternity, can anything be. Only Reason _is_: the infinite reason in itself, and the finite in and through the infinite. Only in our minds does he create the world, or, at least, that from which we unfold it, and that whereby we unfold it--the call to duty, and the feelings, perceptions and laws of thought agreeing therewith. It is _his_ light whereby we see light and all that appears to us in that light. In our minds he is continually fashioning this world, and interposing in it by interposing in our minds with the call of duty, whenever another free agent effects a change therein. In our minds he maintains this world, and, therewith, our finite existence, of which alone we are capable, in that he causes to arise out of our states new states continually. After he has proved us sufficiently for our next destination, according to his higher aim, and when we shall have cultivated ourselves for the same, he will annihilate this world for us by what we call death, and introduce us into a new one, the product of our dutiful action in this. All our life is his life. We are in his hand, and remain in it, and no one can pluck us out of it. We are eternal because he is eternal. Sublime, living Will, whom no name can name, and whom no conception can grasp!--well may I raise my mind to thee, for thou and I are not divided. Thy voice sounds in me, and mine sounds back in thee; and all my thoughts, if only they are true and good, are thought in thee. In thee, the Incomprehensible, I become comprehensible to myself, and entirely comprehend the world. All the riddles of my existence are solved, and the most perfect harmony arises in my mind. Thou art best apprehended by childlike simplicity, devoted to thee. To it thou art the heart-searcher who lookest through its innermost thoughts; the all-present, faithful witness of its sentiments, who alone knowest that it meaneth well, and who alone understandest it, when misunderstood by all the world. Thou art to it a Father, whose purposes toward it are ever kind, and who will order everything for its best good. It submitteth itself wholly, with body and soul, to thy beneficent decrees. Do with me as thou wilt, it saith, I know that it shall be good, so surely as it is thou that dost it. The speculative understanding, which has only heard of thee but has never seen thee, would teach us to know thy being in itself, and sets before us an inconsistent monster which it gives out for thine image, ridiculous to the merely knowing, hateful and detestable to the wise and good. I veil my face before thee and lay my hand upon my mouth. How thou art in thyself, and how thou appearest to thyself, I can never know, as surely as I can never be thou. After thousand times thousand spirit-lives lived through, I shall no more be able to comprehend thee than now, in this hut of earth. That which I comprehend becomes, by my comprehension of it, finite; and this can never, by an endless process of magnifying and exalting, be changed into infinite. Thou differest from the finite, not only in degree but in kind. By that magnifying process they make thee only a greater and still greater man, but never God, the Infinite, incapable of measure. * * * * * I will not attempt that which is denied to me by my finite nature, and which could avail me nothing. I desire not to know how thou art in thyself. But thy relations and connections with me, the finite, and with all finite beings, lie open to mine eye, when I become what I should be. They encompass me with a more luminous clearness than the consciousness of my own being. Thou workest in me the knowledge of my duty, of my destination in the series of rational beings. How? I know not, and need not to know. Thou knowest and perceivest what I think and will. How thou canst know it--by what act thou bringest this consciousness to pass--on that point I comprehend nothing. Yea, I know very well that the idea of an act, of a special act of consciousness, applies only to me but not to thee, the Infinite. Thou willest, because thou willest, that my free obedience shall have consequences in all eternity. The act of thy will I cannot comprehend; I only know that it is not like to mine. Thou _doest_, and thy will itself is deed. But thy method of action is directly contrary to that of which, alone, I can form a conception. Thou _livest_ and _art_, for thou knowest, and willest, and workest, omnipresent to finite Reason. But thou art not such as through all eternity I shall alone be able to conceive of Being. In the contemplation of these thy relations to me, the finite, I will be calm and blessed. I know immediately, only what I must do. This will I perform undisturbed and joyful, and without philosophizing. For it is thy voice which commands me, it is the ordination of the spiritual world-plan concerning me, and the power by which I perform it is thy power. Whatsoever is commanded me by that voice, whatsoever is accomplished by this power, is surely and truly good in relation to that plan. I am calm in all the events of this world, for they occur in thy world. Nothing can deceive, or surprise, or make me afraid, so surely as thou livest and I behold thy life. For in thee and through thee, O infinite One, I behold even my present world in another light! Nature and natural consequences in the destinies and actions of free beings, in view of thee, are empty, unmeaning words. There is no Nature more. Thou, thou alone, art. It no longer appears to me the aim of the present world that the above-mentioned state of universal peace among men, and of their unconditioned empire over the mechanism of Nature, should be brought about merely that it may exist, but that it should be brought about by man himself, and, since it is calculated for all, then it should be brought about by all, as one great, free, moral community. Nothing new and better for the individual, except through his dutiful will, nothing new and better for the community, except through their united, dutiful will, is the fundamental law of the great moral kingdom of which the present life is a part. The reason why the good-will of the individual is so often lost for this world, is that it is only the will of the individual, and that the will of the majority does not coincide with it; therefore it has no consequences but those which belong to a future world. Hence, even the passions and vices of men appear to cooeperate in the promotion of a better state, _not in and for themselves_--in this sense good can never come out of evil--but by furnishing a counter-poise to opposite vices, and finally annihilating those vices and themselves by their preponderance. Oppression could never have gained the upper hand unless cowardice, and baseness, and mutual distrust had prepared the way for it. It will continue to increase until it eradicates cowardice and the slavish mind; and despair re-awakens the courage that was lost. Then the two antagonistic vices will have destroyed each other, and the noblest in all human relations, permanent freedom, will have come forth from them. The actions of free beings have, strictly speaking, no other consequences than those which affect other free beings. For only in such, and for such, does a world exist; and that, wherein all agree, is the world. But they have consequences in free agents only by means of the infinite Will, by which all individuals exist. A call, a revelation of that Will to us, is always a requirement to perform some particular duty. Hence, even that which we call evil in the world, the consequence of the abuse of freedom, exists only through _him_; and it exists for all, for whom it exists, only so far as it imposes duties upon them. Did it not fall within the eternal plan of our moral education and the education of our whole race that precisely these duties should be laid upon us, they would not have been imposed; and that whereby they are imposed, and which we call evil, would never have been. In this view, everything which takes place is good, and absolutely accordant with the best ends. There is but one world possible--a thoroughly good one. Everything that occurs in this world conduces to the reformation and education of man, and, by means of that, to the furtherance of his earthly destination. It is this higher world-plan that we call Nature, when we say Nature leads men through want to industry, through the evils of general disorder to a righteous polity, through the miseries of their perpetual wars to final, ever-during peace. Thy will, O Infinite, thy providence alone, is this higher Nature! This too is best understood by artless simplicity, which regards this life as a place of discipline and education, as a school for eternity; which, in all the fortunes it experiences, the most trivial as well as the most momentous, beholds thy ordinations designed for good; and which firmly believes that all things will work together for good to those who love their duty and know thee. O truly have I spent the former days of my life in darkness! Truly have I heaped errors upon errors, and thought myself wise! Now only out of thy mouth, wondrous Spirit, I fully understand the doctrine which seemed so strange to me![3] although my understanding had nothing to oppose to it. For now only I overlook it, in its whole extent, in its deepest meaning, and in all its consequences. Man is not a product of the world of the senses; and the end of his existence can never be attained in that world. His destination lies beyond time and space and all that pertains to the senses. He must know what he is and what he is to make himself. As his destination is sublime, so his thought must be able to lift itself above all the bounds of the senses. This must be his calling. Where his being is indigenous, there his thought must be indigenous also; and the most truly human view, that which alone befits him, that in which his whole power of thought is represented, is the view by which he lifts himself above those limits, by which all that is of the senses is changed for him into pure nothing, a mere reflection in mortal eyes of the alone enduring, non-sensuous. Many have been elevated to this view without scientific thought, simply by their great heart and their pure moral instinct; because they lived especially with the heart, and in the sentiments. They denied, by their conduct, the efficacy and reality of the world of the senses; and in the shaping of their purposes and measures, they esteemed as nothing that concerning which they had not yet learned by thinking that it is nothing, even to thought. They who could say, "our citizenship is in heaven; we have here no permanent place, but seek one to come;" they whose first principle was, to die to the world and to be born anew, and, even here, to enter into another life--they, truly, placed not the slightest value upon all the objects of sense, and were, to use the language of the School, practical transcendental Idealists. Others who, in addition to the sensuous activity which is native to us all, have, by their thought, confirmed themselves in the sensuous, become implicated, and, as it were, grown together with it; they can raise themselves permanently and perfectly above the sensuous only by continuing and carrying out their thought. Otherwise, with the purest moral intentions, they will still be drawn down again by their understanding, and their whole being will remain a continued and insoluble contradiction. For such, that philosophy, which I now first entirely understand, is the power by which Psyche first strips off her chrysalis, unfolds the wings on which she then hovers above herself, and casts one glance on the slough she has dropped, thenceforth to live and work in higher spheres. Blessed be the hour in which I resolved to meditate on myself and my destination! All my questions are solved. I know what I can know, and I am without anxiety concerning that which I cannot know. I am satisfied. There is perfect harmony and clearness in my spirit, and a new and more glorious existence for that spirit begins. My whole, complete destination, I do not comprehend. What I am called to be and shall be, surpasses all my thought. A part of this destination is yet hidden to me, visible only to him, the Father of Spirits, to whom it is committed. I know only that it is secured to me, and that it is eternal and glorious as himself. But that portion of it which is committed to me, I know. I know it entirely, and it is the root of all my other knowledge. I know, in every moment of my life, with certainty, what I am to do in that moment. And this is my whole destination, so far as it depends upon me. From this, since my knowledge goes no farther, I must not depart. I must not desire to know anything beyond it. I must stand fast in this one centre, and take root in it. All my scheming and striving, and all my faculty, must be directed to that. My whole existence must inweave itself with it. * * * * * I raise myself to this viewpoint, and am a new creature. My whole relation to the existing world is changed. The threads by which my mind was heretofore bound to this world, and by whose mysterious traction it followed all the movements of this world, are forever severed, and I stand free--myself, my own world, peaceful and unmoved. No longer with the heart, with the eye alone, I seize the objects about me, and, through the eye alone, am connected with them. And this eye itself, made clearer by freedom, looks through error and deformity to the true and the beautiful; as, on the unmoved surface of the water, forms mirror themselves pure and with a softened light. My mind is forever closed against embarrassment and confusion, against doubt and anxiety; my heart is forever closed against sorrow, and remorse, and desire. There is but one thing that I care to know: What I must do; and this I know, infallibly, always. Concerning all besides I know nothing, and I know that I know nothing; and I root myself fast in this my ignorance, and forbear to conjecture, to opine, to quarrel with myself concerning that of which I know nothing. No event in this world can move me to joy, and none to sorrow. Cold and unmoved I look down upon them all; for I know that I cannot interpret one of them, nor discern its connection with that which is my only concern. Everything which takes place belongs to the plan of the eternal world, and is good in relation to that plan; so much I know. But what, in that plan, is pure gain, and what is only meant to remove existing evil, accordingly what I should most or least rejoice in, I know not. In his world everything succeeds. This suffices me, and in this faith I stand firm as a rock. But what in his world is only germ, what blossom, what the fruit itself, I know not. The only thing which can interest me is the progress of reason and morality in the kingdom of rational beings--and that purely for its own sake, for the sake of the progress. Whether _I_ am the instrument of this progress or another, whether it is my act which succeeds or is thwarted, or whether it is the act of another, is altogether indifferent to me. I regard myself in every case but as one of the instruments of a rational design, and I honor and love myself, and am interested in myself, only as such; and I wish the success of my act only so far as it goes to accomplish that end. Therefore I regard all the events of this world in the same manner and only with exclusive reference to this one end--whether they proceed from me or from another, whether they relate to me immediately, or to others. My breast is closed against all vexation on account of personal mortifications and affronts, against all exaltation on account of personal merits; for my entire personality has long since vanished and been swallowed up in the contemplation of the end. * * * * * Bodily sufferings, pain and sickness, should such befal me, I cannot avoid to feel, for they are events of my nature, and I am and remain nature here below. But they shall not trouble me. They affect only the Nature with which I am, in some strange way, connected; not myself, the being which is elevated above all Nature. The sure end of all pain, and of all susceptibility of pain, is death; and of all which the natural man is accustomed to regard as evil, this is the least so to me. Indeed, I shall not die for myself, but only for others, for those that remain behind, from whose connection I am severed. For myself, the hour of death is the hour of birth to a new and more glorious life. Since my heart is thus closed to all desire for the earthly, since, in fact, I have no longer any heart for the perishable, the universe appears to my eye in a transfigured form. The dead inert mass which but choked up space has vanished; and, instead thereof, flows, and waves, and rushes the eternal stream of life, and power, and deed--of the original life, of thy life, O Infinite! For all life is thy life, and only the religious eye pierces to the kingdom of veritable beauty. I am related to thee, and all that I behold around me is related to me. All is quick, all is soul, and gazes upon me with bright spirit-eyes, and speaks in spirit-tones to my heart. Most diversely sundered and severed, I behold, in all the forms without me, myself again, and beam upon myself from them, as the morning sun, in thousand dew-drops diversely refracted, glitters back toward itself. Thy life, as the finite being can apprehend it, is volition which shapes and represents itself by means of itself alone. This life, made sensible in various ways to mortal eyes, flows through me and from me downward, through the immeasurable whole of Nature. Here it streams, as self-creating, self-fashioning matter, through my veins and muscles, and deposits its fulness outside of me, in the tree, in the plant, in the grass. As one connected stream, drop by drop, the forming life flows in all shapes and on all sides, wherever my eye can follow it, and looks upon me, from every point of the universe, with a different aspect, as the same force which fashions my own body in darkness and in secret. Yonder it waves free, and leaps and dances as self-forming motion in the brute; and, in every new body, represents itself as another separate, self-subsisting world--the same power which, invisible to me, stirs and moves in my own members. All that lives follows this universal current, this one principle of all movement, which transmits the harmonious concussion from one end of the universe to the other. The brute follows it without freedom. I, from whom, in the visible world, the movement proceeds (without, therefore, originating in me), follow it freely. But, pure and holy, and near to thine own essence as aught, to mortal apprehension, can be, this thy life flows forth as a band which binds spirits with spirits in one, as air and ether of the one world of Reason, inconceivable and incomprehensible, and yet lying plainly revealed to the spiritual eye. Conducted by this light-stream, thought floats unrestrained and the same from soul to soul, and returns purer and transfigured from the kindred breast. Through this mystery the individual finds, and understands, and loves himself, only in another; and every spirit detaches itself only from other spirits; and there is no man, but only a Humanity; no isolated thinking, and loving, and hating, but only a thinking, and loving, and hating in and through one another. Through this mystery the affinity of spirits, in the invisible world, streams forth into their corporeal nature, and represents itself in two sexes, which, though every spiritual band could be severed, are still constrained, as natural beings, to love each other. It flows forth into the affection of parents and children, of brothers and sisters, as if the souls were sprung from one blood as well as the bodies--as if the minds were branches and blossoms of the same stem; and from thence it embraces, in narrower or wider circles, the whole sentient world. Even the hatred of spirits is grounded in thirst for love; and no enmity springs up, except from friendship denied. Mine eye discerns this eternal life and motion, in all the veins of sensuous and spiritual Nature, through what seems to others a dead mass. And it sees this life forever ascend, and grow, and transfigure itself into a more spiritual expression of its own nature. The universe is no longer, to me, that circle which returns into itself, that game which repeats itself without ceasing, that monster which devours itself in order to reproduce itself as it was before. It is spiritualized to my contemplation, and bears the peculiar impress of the spirit--continual progress toward perfection, in a straight line which stretches into infinity. The sun rises and sets, the stars vanish and return again, and all the spheres hold their cycle-dance. But they never return precisely such as they disappeared; and in the shining fountains of life there is also life and progress. Every hour which they bring, every morning and every evening, sinks down with new blessings on the world. New life and new love drop from the spheres, as dew-drops from the cloud, and embrace Nature, as the cool night embraces the earth. All death in Nature is birth; and precisely in dying the sublimation of life appears most conspicuous. There is no death-bringing principle in Nature, for Nature is only life, throughout. Not death kills, but the more living life, which, hidden behind the old, begins and unfolds itself. Death and birth are only the struggle of life with itself to manifest itself in ever more transfigured form, more like itself. And _my_ death--can that be anything different from this?--I, who am not a mere representation and copy of life, but who bear within myself the original, the alone true and essential life! It is not a possible thought that Nature should annihilate a life which did not spring from her--Nature, which exists only for my sake, not I for hers. But even my natural life, even this mere representation of an inward invisible life to mortal eyes, Nature cannot annihilate; otherwise she must be able to annihilate herself--she who exists only for me and for my sake, and who ceases to exist, if I am not. Even because she puts me to death she must quicken me anew. It can be only my higher life, unfolding itself in her, before which my present life disappears; and that which mortals call death is the visible appearing of a second vivification. Did no rational being, who has once beheld its light, perish from the earth, there would be no reason to expect a new heaven and a new earth. The only possible aim of Nature, that of representing and maintaining Reason, would have been already fulfilled here below, and her circle would be complete. But the act by which she puts to death a free, self-subsisting being, is her solemn--to all Reason apparent--transcending of that act, and of the entire sphere which she thereby closes. The apparition of death is the conductor by which my spiritual eye passes over to the new life of myself, and of a Nature for me. Every one of my kind who passes from earthly connections, and who cannot, to my spirit, seem annihilated, because he is one of my kind, draws my thought over with him. He still is, and to him belongs a place. While we, here below, sorrow for him with such sorrow as would be felt, if possible, in the dull kingdom of unconsciousness, when a human being withdraws himself from thence to the light of earth's sun--while we so mourn, on yonder side there is joy because a man is born into their world; as we citizens of earth receive with joy our own. When I, some time, shall follow them, there will be for me only joy; for sorrow remains behind, in the sphere which I quit. It vanishes and sinks before my gaze--the world which I so lately admired. With all the fulness of life, of order, of increase, which I behold in it, it is but the curtain by which an infinitely more perfect world is concealed from me. It is but the germ out of which that infinitely more perfect shall unfold itself. My faith enters behind this curtain, and warms and quickens this germ. It sees nothing definite, but expects more than it can grasp here below, than it will ever be able to grasp in time. So I live and so I am; and so I am unchangeable, firm and complete for all eternity. For this being is not one which I have received from without; it is my own only true being and essence. ADDRESSES TO THE GERMAN NATION (1807 to 1808) TRANSLATED BY LOUIS H. GRAY, PH.D. ADDRESS EIGHT The Definition of a Nation in the Higher Sense of the Word, and of Patriotism The last four addresses have answered the question, What is the German as contrasted with other nations of Teutonic origin? The argument will be complete if we further add the examination of the question, What is a nation? The latter question is identical with another, and, at the same time, the other question, which has often been propounded and has been answered in very different ways, helps in the solution. This question is, What is patriotism, or, as it would be more correctly expressed, What is the love of the individual for his nation? If we have thus far proceeded aright in the course of our investigation, it must become obvious therefrom that only the German--the primitive man, not he who has become petrified by arbitrary laws and institutions--really has a nation and is entitled to count on one, and that only he is capable of real and rational love for his nation. We smooth our way to a solution of our proposed task by means of the following remark, which appears, at first sight, to lie outside the context of our previous discussion. As we have already observed in our third address, religion is able absolutely to transport us above all time and above the whole of present and perceptual life without doing the least injury to the justice, morality, and holiness of the life influenced by this belief. Even with the certain conviction that all our activity on this earth will not leave the least trace behind it and will not produce the slightest results, and even with the belief that the divine may actually be perverse and may be used as a tool of evil and of still deeper moral corruption, it is, nevertheless, possible to continue in this activity simply in order to maintain the divine life that has come forth within us and that stands in relation to a higher governance of things in a future world where nothing perishes that has been done in God. Thus, for instance, the apostles and the first Christians generally, even while living, were wholly transported above the earth because of their belief in heaven; and affairs terrestrial--state, fatherland, and nation--were so entirely renounced that they no longer deemed such trivial concerns worthy even of their consideration. However possible this may be, however easy, moreover, for faith, and however joyfully we may resign ourselves to the conviction, since it is unalterably the will of God, that we have no more an earthly country but are exiles and slaves here below--nevertheless, this is not the natural condition and the rule governing the course of the world, but is a rare exception. Moreover, it is a very perverse use of religion (and, among others, Christianity has frequently been guilty of it) when, as a question of principle and without regard to the existent circumstances, it proceeds to commend this withdrawal from the affairs of the state and of the nation as a truly religious sentiment. Under such conditions, if they are true and real and not perhaps induced merely by religious fanaticism, temporal life loses all its independence and becomes simply a fore-court of the true life and a hard trial to be borne only by obedience and submission to the will of God; in this view it becomes true that, as has been claimed by many, immortal souls have been plunged into earthly bodies, as into prisons, simply as a punishment. In the regular order of things, however, earthly life should itself truly be life in which we may rejoice and which we may thankfully enjoy, even though in expectation of a higher life; and although it is true that religion is also the comfort of the slave illegally oppressed, yet, above all things, the essence of religion is to oppose slavery and to prevent, so far as possible, its deterioration to a mere consolation of the captive. It is doubtless to the interest of the tyrant to preach religious resignation and to refer to heaven those to whom he will not grant a tiny place on earth; we must, however, be less hasty to adopt the view of religion recommended by the tyrant, for, if we can, we must forestall the making of earth into hell in order to arouse a still greater longing for heaven. The natural impulse of man, to be surrendered only in case of real necessity, is to find heaven already on this earth and to amalgamate into his earthly work day by day that which lasts forever; to plant and to cultivate the imperishable in the temporal itself--not merely in an unconceivable way, connected with the eternal solely by the gulf which mortal eyes may not pass, but in a manner which is visible to the mortal eye itself. That I may begin with this generally intelligible example--what noble-minded man does not wish and aspire to repeat his own life in better wise in his children and, again, in their children, and still to continue to live upon this earth, ennobled and perfected in their lives, long after he is dead; to wrest from mortality the spirit, the mind, and the character with which in his day he perchance put perversity and corruption to flight, established uprightness, aroused sluggishness, and uplifted dejection, and to deposit these, as his best legacy to posterity, in the spirits of his survivors, in order that, in their turn, they may again bequeath them equally adorned and augmented? What noble-minded man does not wish, by act or thought, to sow a seed for the infinite and eternal perfecting of his race; to cast into Time something new and hitherto non-existent, which may abide there and become the unfailing source of new creations; to repay, for his place on this earth and for the short span of life vouchsafed him, something that shall last forever even here on earth--to the end that he as an individual, even though unnamed by history (since thirst for fame is contemptible vanity), may leave behind in his own consciousness and in his own belief manifest tokens that he himself existed? What noble-minded man does not wish this, I asked; yet the world is to be considered as organized only in accordance with the requirements of those who thus view themselves as the norm of how all men should be. It is for their sakes alone that the world exists! They are indeed its kernel; and those who think otherwise must be regarded as merely a part of the transitory world so long as they reason on so low a plane, for they exist merely for the sake of the noble-minded and must accommodate themselves to the latter until they have risen to their height. What, now, could it be that might give solid foundation to this challenge and to this belief of the noble in the eternity and the imperishability of his work? Obviously, only an order of things which he could recognize as eternal in itself and as capable of receiving eternal elements within itself. Such an order is, however, the special, spiritual nature of human surroundings, which can, it is true, be comprised in no concept, but which is, nevertheless, truly present--the surroundings from which he has himself come forth with all his thought and activity and with his faith in their eternity--the nation from which he is descended, amid which he was educated and grew up to what he now is. For however undoubtedly true it may be that his work, if he rightly lays claim to its eternity, is in no wise the mere result of the spiritual, natural law of his nation, simply merging into this result--no, it must be thought of as an element greater than that--a something which flows immediately from the primitive and divine life. Nevertheless, it is equally true that this something more, immediately after its formation as a visible phenomenon, has subordinated itself to that special spiritual law of nature, has acquired a perceptual expression only in accordance with that law. Under this same natural law, so long as this nation endures, all further revelations of the divine will also appear and be formed within it. Yet, through the fact that the man existed and so labored, this law itself is further determined, and his activity has become a permanent component of it; everything subsequent will likewise be compelled to adapt itself accordingly and to conform to the law in question. And thus he is made certain that the culture which he has achieved remains with his nation for all time and becomes a permanent basis of determination for all its further development. In the higher conception of the word considered in general from the viewpoint of an insight into a spiritual world, a nation is this: The totality of human beings living together in society and constantly perpetuating themselves both bodily and spiritually; and this totality stands altogether under a certain specific law through which the divine develops itself. The universality of this specific law is what binds this multitude into a natural totality, inter-penetrated by itself, in the eternal world, and, for that very reason, in the temporal world as well. The law itself, in its essence, can be generally comprehended as we have applied it to the case of the Germans as a primal nation; through consideration of the phenomena of such a nation it may be even more exactly grasped in many of its further determinations; yet it can never be entirely understood by any one who, unknown to himself, personally remains continually under its influence; it may in general, however, be clearly perceived that such a law exists. This law is a surplus of the figurative which amalgamates directly with the surplus of the unfigurative primitiveness in the phenomenon, and thus, precisely in the phenomenon, both are then no longer separable. That law absolutely determines and completes what has been called the national character of a people--the law, namely, of the development of the primitive and of the divine. From the latter it is clear that men who do not in the least believe in a primitive being and in a further development of it, but simply in an eternal circle of visible life, and who, through their belief, become what they believe, are no nation whatsoever in the higher sense; and since they do not, strictly speaking, actually exist, they are equally powerless to possess a national character. The belief of the noble-minded man in the eternal continuance of his activity, even upon this earth, is based, accordingly, on the hope for the eternal continuance of the nation from which he has himself developed, and of its individuality in accordance with that hidden law, without intermixture and corruption by any alien element and by what does not appertain to the totality of this legislation. This individuality is the permanent element to which he intrusts the eternity of himself and of his continued action--the eternal order of things in which he lays his perpetuity. He must desire its continuance, for it is alone the releasing agency whereby the brief span of his life here is extended to a continuous life upon the earth. His belief and his endeavor to plant what shall not pass away, and the concept in which he comprehends his own life as an eternal life, constitute the bond which most intimately associates with himself, first, his own nation and, through that, the entire human race--which brings the needs of them all, to the end of time, into his broadened heart. This is his love for his nation, and through it, first, he respects, trusts, rejoices in it, and takes pride in his descent from it; the Divine has appeared in it, and has deigned to make it his covering and his means of direct communication with the world; the Divine, therefore, will continue to break forth from it. Therefore man is, secondly, active, efficacious, and self-sacrificing for his nation. Life, simply as life, as a continuance of changing existence, has certainly never possessed value for him apart from this--he has desired it merely as the source of the permanent. This permanence, however, alone promises him the independent continuance of the existence of his nation; and to save this he must even be willing to die that it may live, and that in it he may live the only life that has ever been possible to him. Thus it is. Love, to be really love, and not merely a transitory desire, never clings to the perishable, but is awakened and kindled by, and based upon, the eternal only. Man is not even able to love himself unless he consider himself as eternal; moreover, he cannot even esteem and approve himself. Still less can he love anything outside himself, except, that is, that he receive it within the eternity of his belief and of his soul, and connect it with this eternity. He who does not, first of all, regard himself as eternal, has no love whatever, nor can he, moreover, love a fatherland, since nothing of the sort exists for him. It is true that he who, perchance, regards his invisible life as eternal, but who does not, therefore, esteem his visible life as eternal in the same sense, may perhaps have a heaven, and in this his fatherland, but here on earth he has no fatherland; for this also is seen only under the metaphor of eternity and, indeed, of visible eternity, rendered perceptible to the senses; moreover, he cannot, therefore, love his fatherland. If such a man has none, he is to be pitied; but he to whom one has been given, and in whose soul heaven and earth, the invisible and the visible, interpenetrate, and thus for the first time create a true and worthy heaven, fights to the last drop of his blood again to transmit the precious possession undiminished to posterity. Thus has it been from time immemorial, though it has not been expressed from time immemorial with this generality and with this clearness. What inspired the noble spirits among the Romans, whose sentiments and mode of thought still live and breathe among us in their monuments, to struggle and to sacrifice, to endure and be patient, for their fatherland? They themselves state it frequently and clearly. It was their firm belief in the eternal continuance of their Rome, and their confident expectation of themselves continuing to live in this eternity. In so far as this conviction had foundation, and in so far as they themselves would have grasped it if they had been perfectly clear within themselves, it never deceived them. Unto this day what was really eternal in their eternal Rome lives on and they with it in our midst, and it will continue to live, in its results, until the end of time. In this sense--as the vehicle and the pledge of earthly eternity, and the interpretation of the eternal here--nation and fatherland far transcend the State in the ordinary sense of the term social organization, as this is conceived in its simple, clear connotation, and as it is founded and maintained in accordance with this conception--a conception which demands sure justice and internal peace, and requires that every one through his efforts obtain his support and the prolongation of his sentient existence so long as God will grant it to him. All this is only a means, a condition, and a scaffolding of what patriotism really means--the development of the eternal and the divine in the world, which is ever to become purer, more perfect in infinite progression. For that very reason this patriotism must, first of all, rule the State itself as absolutely the highest, ultimate, and independent authority, by limiting it in the choice of means for its immediate purpose--inner peace. To reach this goal, the natural freedom of the individual must be limited in many ways, it is true; and if this were absolutely the only consideration and intention regarding them, it would be well to restrict this liberty as closely as possible, in order to bring all their movements under one uniform rule, and to keep them under constant supervision. Granted that such severity be necessary, it could at least do no harm for this single end; only the higher concept of the human race and of the nations widens this limited view. Even in the manifestations of external life freedom is the soil in which the higher culture germinates; a legislation which keeps this later aim in view will give the broadest possible scope to freedom, even at the risk that a less degree of uniform quiet and calm may result, and that government may become a little more difficult and laborious. To elucidate this by an example--it has been known to happen that nations have been told to their faces that they did not require as much freedom as many other nations do. This statement might, indeed, be dictated by forbearance and a desire to palliate, the true meaning being that they were utterly unable to endure so great freedom and that only a high degree of rigidity could prevent them from destroying one another. If, however, the words are taken as they are spoken, they are true under the presupposition that such a nation is entirely incapable of the natural life and of the impulse toward it. Such a nation--in case such a one, in which some few of the nobler sort did not make an exception to the general rule, were possible--would indeed require no freedom whatever, since this is only for the higher ends which transcend the State; it requires simply taming and training in order that the individuals may live peaceably side by side, and that the whole may be made an efficient means for arbitrary ends which lie outside its proper sphere. We need not decide whether this may truthfully be said of any nation whatever; but this much is clear, that a primitive nation requires freedom, that this freedom is the pledge of its persistence as a primitive people, and that, as it continues, it bears, without any danger, an ever ascending degree of freedom. And this is the first example of the necessity of patriotism governing the state itself. It must, then, be patriotism which governs the state in that it sets for it itself a higher end than the ordinary one of the maintenance of the internal peace, of the property, of the personal freedom, of the life, and of the well-being of all. Solely for this higher end, and with no other intention, the state assembles an armed force. When the problem of the application of this armed force arises, when it is a question of hazarding all the aims of the state in the abstract-property, personal freedom, life, welfare, and the continuance of the state itself--when, answerable to God alone, they are called upon to decide without a clear and rational conception of the sure attainment of the end in view, which in matters of this sort it is never possible to gain--then only the true primitive life holds the rudder of the state, and here for the first time enters the true sovereign right of the government, like God, to imperil the lower life for the sake of the higher. In the maintenance of the traditional organization, of the laws, and of civic welfare, there is absolutely no genuine life and no primitive decision. Circumstances and situations, legislators who have perhaps long been dead, have created those things; succeeding ages go trustingly forward in the road they have entered, and thus, as a matter of fact, they do not live a public life of their own, but merely repeat a former. In such periods there is no need of a real government. If, however, this uniform progress is imperiled, and the problem arises of deciding with reference to new cases, then a life is required which has its roots in itself. What spirit is it, now, which in such cases may take its place at the helm, which is able to decide with individual certainty and without uneasy wavering, and which has an indubitable right authoritatively to lay demands upon every one who may be concerned, whether he will or not, and to compel the recalcitrant to imperil everything, even to his life? Not the spirit of calm civilian love for the constitution and the laws, but the burning flame of the higher patriotism which regards the nation as the veil of the eternal, for which the noble joyfully sacrifices himself, and for which the ignoble, who exists only for the sake of the noble, should also sacrifice himself! It is not that civilian love for the constitution, for this is absolutely incapable of such action if it is founded on reason only. Whatever may be the outcome, since governance is not unrewarded, some one will always be found to take charge of it. Let the new ruler even favor slavery (and in what does slavery consist except in contempt and suppression of the individuality of a primitive people?), since advantage may be derived from the life of slaves, from their number, and even from their welfare, then slavery will be endurable under him provided he is a calculator to any extent. They will at least always find life and support. Why, then, should they thus struggle? According to both of them, it is peace which transcends everything in their opinion, but this is disturbed only by the continuance of the struggle. The slave, therefore, puts forth every effort to end it quickly; he will yield and submit--and why should he not? He never had a higher purpose, and he has never expected anything more from life than the continuance of his existence under endurable conditions. The promise of a life lasting, even here, beyond the duration of earthly life--this alone is what can inspire him to death for the fatherland. Thus it has always been. Wheresoever real government has existed, where serious struggles have been fought out, where victory has been won against mighty resistance, it has been the promise of eternal life that governed and fought and conquered. The German Protestants, formerly mentioned in these addresses, fought with faith in this promise. Did they not perhaps know that nations might also be governed with the old faith and be held in legal order, and that a good livelihood might be found under this faith also? Why, then, did their princes thus determine upon armed resistance, and why did their peoples lend themselves to it with enthusiasm? It was heaven and eternal happiness for which they gladly shed their blood. Yet what earthly power could then have penetrated into the inmost sanctuary of their souls and have been able to eradicate the faith which had now once sprung up within them, and on which alone they based their hope of salvation? It was not, therefore, their own happiness for which they struggled--of that they were already assured; it was the happiness of their children, of their grandchildren still unborn, and of all posterity. These, too, should be brought up in the same doctrine which alone seemed to them to bring salvation; they, too, should share in the salvation which had dawned for them. It was this hope alone that was threatened by the foe; for that hope, for an order of things which should bloom above their graves long after they were dead, they shed their blood thus joyfully. If we grant that they were not entirely clear to themselves, that in their designation of the noblest they verbally mistook what was within them, and with their mouths did injustice to their souls; if we willingly acknowledge that their confession of faith was not the sole and exclusive means of attaining heaven beyond the grave--yet, this, at least, is eternally true that more heaven on this side of the grave, a more courageous and more joyous lifting of the gaze above the earth, and a freer impulse of spirit have come through their sacrifice into all the life of succeeding ages; and the descendants of their opponents, as well as we ourselves, their own descendants, enjoy the fruits of their labors unto this day. In this belief our oldest common ancestors, the parent nation of civilization, the Teutons whom the Romans called Germans, boldly opposed the advancing world-dominion of the Romans. Did they not then see before their eyes the higher bloom of the Roman provinces near them, the more refined enjoyments in them, and, in addition, laws, judgment-seats, rods, and axes in superabundance? Were not the Romans willing enough to allow them to share in all these blessings? Did they not experience, in the case of several of their own princes who had allowed themselves to be persuaded that war against such benefactors of humanity was rebellion, proofs of the lauded Roman clemency, since Rome adorned these submissive lords with kingly titles, with generalships in their armies, and with Roman fillets, and gave them, if, perchance, they had been driven out by their compatriots, maintenance and a place of refuge in their colonies? Had they no feeling for the advantages of Roman culture, as, for example, for the better organization of their armies, in which even an Arminius did not disdain to learn the trade of war? None of all these ignorances or negligences is to be charged against them. Their descendents even adopted the culture of the Romans as soon as they could do it without loss of their freedom and in so far as it was possible without impairment of their individuality. Why did they, then, thus struggle for several generations in sanguinary war, ever renewed with the same virulence? A Roman author makes their leaders ask "whether anything was then left for them except either to assert their freedom or to die before they became slaves?" Freedom meant to them that they remained Germans, that they continued to decide their affairs independently, in conformity with their national genius, and, likewise in conformity with this spirit, that they continued to go forward in their development and transmitted this independence to their posterity; slavery meant to them all the blessings which the Romans offered them, because in that case they must be something else than Germans--they might be half Romans. It is self-evident, they presuppose, that every one would rather die than become thus, and that a true German can wish to live only that he may be and remain forever a German and may train all that belong to him to be Germans also. They have not all died; they have not seen slavery; they have bequeathed liberty to their children. All the modern world owes it to their stubborn resistance that it exists as it does. If the Romans had succeeded in subjugating them also and, as the Roman everywhere did, in eradicating them as a nation, then the entire future development of mankind would have taken a direction that we cannot imagine would have been more pleasant. We, the immediate heirs of their land, their language, and their thought, owe it to them that we be still Germans, that the stream of primitive and independent life still bear us on; to them we owe everything that we have since become as a nation; and, unless we have now perhaps come to an end, and unless the last drop of blood inherited from them is dried up in our veins, we shall owe to them all that we shall be in the future. Even the other Teutonic races, among whom are our brethren, and who have now become foreigners to us, owe to them their existence; when they conquered eternal Rome, no one of all these nations yet existed; at that time the possibility of their future origin was simultaneously won in the struggle. These, and all others in universal history who have been of their type of thought, have conquered because the eternal inspired them, and thus this inspiration ever and of necessity prevails over him who is not inspired. It is not the might of arms nor the fitness of weapons that wins victories, but the power of the soul. He who sets himself a limited goal for his sacrifices, and who can dare no further than a certain point, surrenders resistance as soon as the danger reaches a crisis where he cannot yield or dodge. He who has set himself no limit whatsoever, but who hazards everything, even life--the highest boon that can be lost on earth--never ceases to resist, and, if his opponent has a more limited goal, he indubitably conquers. A people that is capable, though it be only in its highest representatives and leaders, of keeping firmly before its vision independence, the face from the spirit world, and of being inspired with love for it, as were our remotest forefathers, surely conquers a people that, like the Roman armies, is used merely as a tool for foreign dominion and for the subjugation of independent nations; for the former have everything to lose, the latter have merely something to gain. But even a whim can prevail over the mental attitude which regards war as a game of hazard for temporal gain or loss, and which, even before the game starts, has fixed the limit of the stake. Think, for example, of a Mohammed--not the real Mohammed of history, concerning whom I confess that I have no judgment, but the Mohammed of a distinguished French poet--who had once become firmly convinced that he was one of the extraordinary natures who are called to guide the obscure and common folk of earth, and to whom, in consequence of this first presupposition, all his whims, however meagre and limited they may really be, must necessarily appear to be great, exalted and inspiring ideas because they are his own, while everything that opposes them must seem obscure, common folk, enemies of their own weal, evil-minded, and hateful. Such a man, in order to justify this self-conceit to himself as a divine vocation, and entirely absorbed in this thought, must stake everything upon it, nor can he rest until he has trampled under foot all that will not think as highly of him as he does himself, or until his own belief in his divine mission is reflected from the whole contemporary world. I shall not say what would be his fortunes in case a spiritual vision that is true and clear within itself should actually come against him on the field of battle, but he certainly wins from those limited gamblers, for he hazards everything against those who do not so hazard; no spirit inspires them, but he is altogether inspired by a fanatical spirit--that of his mighty and powerful self-conceit. It follows from all this that the state, as mere governance of human life proceeding in its normal peaceable course, is not a primal thing and one existing for itself, but that it is simply the means to the higher end of the eternally uniform development of the purely human in this nation; that it is only the vision and the love of this eternal development which is continually to guide the higher outlook upon the administration of the state, even in periods of calm, and which alone can save the independence of the nation when this is endangered. In the case of the Germans, among whom, as being a primitive people, this love of country was possible and, as we firmly believe, has actually existed hitherto, such patriotism could, up to our own time, count with a high degree of certainty upon the safety of its most important interests. As was the case only among the Greeks in antiquity, among the Germans the State and the nation were actually severed from each other, and each was represented separately; the former in the individual German kingdoms and principalities; the latter visibly in the Federation of the Empire, and invisibly--valid not in consequence of written law but as a sequence of a law living in the hearts of all, and in its results striking the eyes at every turn--in a multitude of customs and institutions. As far as the German language extended, every one who saw the light within its domain could regard himself as a citizen in a two-fold sense, partly of his natal city, to whose immediate protection he was recommended; and partly of the entire common fatherland of the German nation. Throughout the whole extent of this fatherland each man might seek for himself that culture which was most akin to his spirit, or he might search for the sphere of activity most suited for it; and talent did not grow into its place, like a tree, but he was permitted to search for that place. He who became estranged from his immediate surroundings through the direction taken by his culture, easily found welcome reception elsewhere; he found new friends instead of those whom he had lost; he found time and quiet in which to explain himself more accurately and perhaps to win over and to reconcile the wrathful themselves, and thus to unite the whole. No German-born prince could ever bring himself to mark off the fatherland of his subjects within the mountains or rivers where he ruled, and to regard them as bound to the soil. A truth which could not be uttered in one place might be proclaimed in another, where, perhaps, on the contrary, those truths were forbidden which were allowable in the former district; and thus, despite many instances of partiality and narrow-mindedness in the individual states, in Germany, taken as a whole, was found the utmost freedom of investigation and of communication that ever a nation possessed. Higher culture was, and remained on every hand, the result of the reciprocity of the citizens of all German states, and this higher culture then gradually descended in this form to the greater masses, who, consequently, have always, on the whole, continued to educate themselves. As has been said, no German with a German heart, placed at the head of a government, has ever diminished this essential pledge of the continuance of a German nation; and even though, in view of other primitive decisions, what the higher German patriotism must desire was not invariably to be effected, yet at least there was no direct opposition to its interests; no effort was made to undermine that love, to eradicate it, and to replace it by an antagonistic love. But if, now, the original guidance both of that higher culture and of the national power--which should be used only in behalf of that culture and to further its continuance--the employment of German wealth and German blood is to pass from the supremacy of the German spirit to that of another, what would then necessarily result? Here is the place where there is special need of applying the policy which we outlined in our first address, namely, to be unwilling to be deceived in regard to our own interest, and to have the courage willingly to see the truth and acknowledge it. Moreover, it is still permissible, so far as I know, to talk with one another in German about our fatherland, or at least to sigh in German, and, I believe, we should not do well if we ourselves precipitated such an interdiction and wished to lay the fetters of individual timidity on the courage which, no doubt, will already have considered the risk of the venture. Well then, picture to yourself the presupposed new regime to be as kind and as benevolent as you will; make it good as God; will you also be able to invest it with divine understanding? Even though it may, in all earnestness, desire the highest happiness and welfare of all, will the best welfare that it can comprehend also be the welfare of Germany? I accordingly hope that I shall be perfectly understood in reference to the main point that I have presented to you today; I hope that in the course of my remarks many have thought and felt that I merely express clearly in words what has always lain within their hearts; I hope the same will be the case with the other Germans who will some day read this address. Several Germans have said approximately the same things before me, and that sentiment has lain obscurely at the basis of the opposition continually manifested against a merely mechanical establishment and estimate of the State. And now I challenge all who are acquainted with modern foreign literature to prove to me what later sage, poet, or lawgiver among them has ever given birth to a prophetic thought similar to this, which regarded the human race as being in continual progress, and which correlated all its temporal activity only with this progress; whether any one of them, even in the period when they soared most boldly to political creation, demanded from the state more than equality, internal peace, external national fame, and, when their demands reached the extreme limit, domestic happiness? If this is their highest conception, as must be deduced from all that has been said, they can attribute to us likewise no higher needs and no higher demands upon life, and--always presupposing those beneficent sentiments toward us and an absence of all selfishness and of all desire to be more than we--they believe that they have made admirable provision for us when they give us all that they alone recognize as desirable. On the other hand, that for which alone the nobler soul among us can live is then eradicated from public life, and the people, who have always shown themselves receptive toward the impulses of higher things, and the majority of whom, it might be hoped, could even be raised to that nobility, are--in so far as it is treated as they wish it to be treated--abased beneath its rank, dishonored, and blotted out, since it coalesces with the populace of the baser sort. If, now, those higher claims upon life, together with the sense of their divine right, still remain living and potent in any one, he, with deep indignation, feels himself crushed back into those first ages of Christianity in which it was said: "Resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man will take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also." And rightly so, for as long as he still sees a cloak upon thee, he seeks an opportunity to quarrel with thee in order to take this also from thee; not until thou art utterly naked dost thou escape his attention and art unmolested by him. Even his higher feelings, which do him honor, make earth a hell and an abomination to him; he wishes that he had not been born; he wishes that his eyes may close to the light of day, the sooner the better; unceasing sorrow lays hold upon his days until the grave claims him; he can wish for those dear to him no better gift than a quiet and contented spirit, that with less pain they may live on in expectation of an eternal life beyond the grave. These addresses lay upon you the task of preventing, by the sole means which still remains after the others have been tried in vain, the destruction of every nobler impulse that may in the future possibly arise among us and this debasement of our entire nation. They present to you a true and omnipotent patriotism, which, in the conception of our nation as of one that is eternal, and as citizens of our own eternity, is to be deeply and ineradicably founded in the minds of all, by means of education. What this education may be, and in what way it may be achieved, we shall see in the following addresses. [Illustration: VOLUNTEERS OF 1813 BEFORE KING FRIEDRICH WILHELM III IN BRESLAU _From the Painting by F.W. Scholtz_] * * * * * ADDRESS FOURTEEN Conclusion of the Whole The addresses which I here conclude have, indeed, been directed primarily to you,[4] but they had in view the entire German nation; and, in intention, they have gathered about them, in the space wherein you visibly breathe, all that would be capable of understanding them as far as the German tongue extends. Should I have succeeded in casting into any bosom throbbing before my eyes some sparks which may glimmer on and take life, it is not in my thought that they remain solitary and alone, but, traversing the whole ground in common, I would gather about them similar sentiments and purposes and weld them so unitedly that a continuous and coherent flame of patriotic thought might spread and be enkindled from this centre over the soil of the fatherland and to its furthest bounds. My addresses have not been directed to this generation for the pastime of idle ears and eyes, but I desire at last to know--even as every one who is like-minded should know--whether there is anything outside us that is akin to our type of thought. Every German who still believes that he is a member of a nation, who thinks of it in grand and noble fashion, who hopes in it, and who dares, suffers, and endures for it, should at last be torn from the uncertainty of his belief; he should clearly discern whether he is right or whether he is only a fool and a fanatic; henceforth he should either continue his path with sure and joyous consciousness, or, with healthy resolution, should renounce a fatherland here below and comfort himself solely with that which is in heaven. To you, therefore, not as such-and-such persons in our daily and circumscribed life, but as representatives of the nation, and, through your ears, to the nation as a whole, these addresses appeal. Centuries have passed since you have been convened as you are today--in such numbers, in so great, so insistent, so mutual an interest, so absolutely as a nation and as Germans. Never again will you be so bidden. If you do not listen now and examine yourselves, if you again let these addresses pass you by as an empty tickling of the ears or as a strange prodigy, no human being will longer take account of you. Hear at last for once; for once at last reflect! Only do not go this time from the spot without having made a firm resolve; let every one who hears this voice make this resolution within himself and for himself, even as though he were alone and must do everything alone. If very many individuals think thus, there will soon be a great whole uniting into a single, close-knit power. If, on the contrary, each one, excluding himself, relies on the rest and relinquishes the affair to others, then there are no others at all, for, even though combined, all remain just as they were before. Make it on the spot--this resolution! Do not say, "Yet a little more sleep, a little more slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep," until, perchance, improvement shall come of itself. It will never come of itself. He who has once missed the opportunity of yesterday, when clear perception would have been easier, will not be able to make up his mind today, and will certainly be even less able to do so tomorrow. Every delay only makes us still more inert and but lulls us more and more into gentle acquiescence to our wretched plight. Neither could the external stimulations to reflection ever be stronger and more insistent, for surely he whom these present conditions do not arouse has lost all feeling. You have been called together to make a last, determined resolution and decision--not by any means to give commands and mandates to others, or to depute others to do the work for you. No, my purpose is to urge you to do the work yourself. In this connection that idle passing of resolutions, the will to will, some time or other, are not sufficient, nor is it enough to remain sluggishly satisfied until self-improvement sets in of its own accord. On the contrary, from you is demanded a determination which is identical with action and with life itself, and which will continue and control, unwavering and unchilled, until it gains its goal. Or is perchance the root, from which alone can grow a tenacity of purpose which takes hold upon life, utterly eradicated and vanished within you? Or is your whole being actually rarefied into a hollow shade, devoid of sap and blood and of individual power of movement, or dissolved to a dream in which, indeed, a motley array of faces arise and busily cross one another, but the body lies stiff and dead? Long since it has been openly proclaimed to our generation and repeated under every guise, that this is very nearly its condition. Its spokesmen have believed that this was declared merely in insult, and have regarded themselves as challenged to return the insults, thinking that thus the affair would resume its natural course. As for the rest, there was not the slightest trace of change or of improvement. If you have heard this, and if it was capable of rousing your indignation--well then, through your very actions, give the lie to those who thus think and speak of you. Once show yourselves to be different before the eyes of all the world, and before the eyes of all the world they will be convicted of their falsehood. It may be that they have spoken thus harshly of you with the precise intention of forcing this refutation from you, and because they despaired of any other means of arousing you. How much better, then, would have been their intentions toward you than were the purposes of those who flattered you that you might be kept in sluggish calm and in careless thoughtlessness! However weak and powerless you may be, during this period clear and calm reflection has been vouchsafed you as never before. What really plunged us into confusion regarding our position, into thoughtlessness, into a blind way of letting things go, was our sweet complacency with ourselves and our mode of existence. Things had thus gone on hitherto, and so they continued and would continue to go. If any one challenged us to reflect, we triumphantly showed him, instead of any other refutation, our continued existence which went on without any thought or effort on our part; yet things flowed along simply because we were not put to the test. Since that time we have passed through the ordeal and it might be supposed that the deceptions, the delusions, and the false consolations with which we all misguided one another would have collapsed! The innate prejudices which, without proceeding from this point or from that, spread over all like a natural cloud and wrapped all in the same mist, ought surely, by this time, to have utterly vanished! That twilight no longer obscures our eyes, and can therefore no longer serve for an excuse. Now we stand, naked and bare, stripped of all alien coverings and draperies, simply as ourselves. Now it must appear what each self is, or is not. Some one among you might come forward and ask me "What gives you in particular, the only one among all German men and authors, the special task, vocation, and prerogative of convening us and inveighing against us? Would not any one among the thousands of the writers of Germany have exactly the same right to do this as you have? None of them does it; you alone push yourself forward." I answer that each one would, indeed, have had the same right as I, and that I do it for the very reason that no one among them has done it before me; that I would be silent if any one else had spoken previous to me. This was the first step toward the goal of a radical amelioration, and some one must take it. I seemed to be the first vividly to perceive this--accordingly, it was I who first took it. After this, a second step will be taken, and thereto every one has now the same right; but, as a matter of fact, it, in its turn, will be taken by but one individual. One man must always be the first, and let him be he who can! Without anxiety regarding this circumstance, let your attention rest for an instant on the consideration to which we have previously led you--in how enviable a position Germany and the world would be if the former had known how to utilize the good fortune of her position and to recognize her advantage. Let your eyes rest upon what they both are now, and let your minds be penetrated by the pain and indignation which, in this reflection, must lay hold upon every noble soul. Then examine yourselves and see that it is you who can release the age from the errors of ancient times, and that, if only you will permit it, your own eyes can be cleared of the mist that covers them; learn, too, that it has been vouchsafed to you, as to no generation before you, to undo what has been done and to efface the dishonorable interval from the annals of the German nation. Let the various conditions among which you must choose pass before you. If you drift along in your torpor and your heedlessness, all the evils of slavery await you--deprivations, humiliations, the scorn and arrogance of the conqueror; you will be pushed about from pillar to post, because you have never found your proper niche, until, through the sacrifice of your nationality and of your language, you slip into some subordinate place where your nation shall sink its identity. If, on the other hand, you rouse yourselves, you will find, first of all, an enduring and honorable existence, and will behold a flourishing generation which promises to you and to the Germans the most glorious and lasting memory. Through the instrumentality of this new generation you will see in spirit the German name exalted to the most glorious among all nations; you will discern in this nation the regenerator and restorer of the world. It depends upon you whether you will be the last of a dishonorable race, even more surely despised by posterity than it deserves, and in whose history--if there can be any history in the barbarism which will then begin--succeeding generations will rejoice when it perishes and will praise fate that it is just; or whether you will be the beginning and the point of development of a new age which will be glorious beyond all your expectations, and become those from whom posterity will date the year of their salvation. Bethink yourselves that you are the last in whose power this great change lies. You have heard the Germans called a unit; you have still a visible sign of their unity--an Empire and an Imperial League--or you have heard of it; among you even yet, from time to time, voices have been audible which were inspired by this higher patriotism. After you become accustomed to other concepts and will accept alien forms and a different course of occupation and of life--how long will it then be before no one longer lives who has seen Germans or who has heard of them? What is demanded of you is not much. You should only keep before you the necessity of pulling yourselves together for a little time and of reflecting upon what lies immediately and obviously before your eyes. You should merely form for yourselves a fixed opinion regarding this situation, remain true to it, and utter and express it in your immediate surroundings. It is the presupposition, yea, it is our firm conviction, that this reflection will lead to the same result in all of you; that, if you only seriously consider, and do not continue in your previous heedlessness, you will think in harmony; and that, if you can bring your intelligence to bear, and if only you do not continue to vegetate, unanimity and unity of spirit will come of themselves. If, however, matters once reach this point, all else that we need will result automatically. This reflection is, moreover, demanded from each one of you who can still consider for himself something lying obviously before his eyes. You have time for this; events will not take you unawares; the records of the negotiations conducted with you will remain before your eyes. Lay them not from your hands until you are in unity with your selves. Neither let, oh, let not yourselves be made supine by reliance upon others or upon anything whatsoever that lies outside yourselves, nor yet through the unintelligent belief of our time that the epochs of history are made by the agency of some unknown power without any aid from man. These addresses have never wearied in impressing upon you that absolutely nothing can help you but yourselves, and they find it necessary to repeat this to the last moment. Rain and dew, fruitful or unfruitful years, may indeed be made by a power which is unknown to us and is not under our control; but only men themselves--and absolutely no power outside them--give to each epoch its particular stamp. Only when they are all equally blind and ignorant do they fall the victims of this hidden power, though it is within their own control not to be blind and ignorant. It is true that to whatever degree, greater or less, things may go ill with us, in part depends upon that unknown power; but far more is it dependent upon the intelligence and the good will of those to whom we are subjected. Whether, on the other hand, it will ever again be well with us depends wholly upon ourselves; and surely nevermore will any welfare whatsoever come to us unless we ourselves acquire it for ourselves--especially unless each individual among us toils and labors in his own way as though he were alone and as though the salvation of future generations depended solely upon him. This is what you have to do; and these addresses adjure you to do this without delay. They adjure you, young men! I, who have long since ceased to belong to you, maintain--and I have also expressed my conviction in these addresses--that you are yet more capable of every thought transcending the commonplace, and are more easily aroused to all that is good and great, because your time of life still lies closer to the years of childish innocence and of nature. Very differently does the majority of the older generation regard this fundamental trait in you. It accuses you of arrogance, of a rash, presumptuous judgment which soars beyond your strength, of obstinacy, and of desire of innovation; yet it merely smiles good-naturedly at these, your errors. All this, it thinks, is based simply on your lack of knowledge of the world, that is, of universal human corruption, since it has eyes for nothing else on earth. You are now supposed to have courage only because you hope to find help-mates like-minded with yourselves and because you do not know the grim and stubborn resistance which will be opposed to your projects of improvement. When the youthful fire of your imagination shall once have vanished, when you shall have perceived the universal selfishness, idleness, and horror of work, when you yourselves shall once rightly have tasted the sweetness of plodding on in the customary rut--then the desire to be better and wiser than all others will soon fade away. They do not by any chance entertain these good expectations of you in imagination alone; they have found them confirmed in their own persons. They must confess that in the days of their foolish youth they dreamed of improving the world, exactly as you dream today; yet with increasing maturity they have become tame and quiet as you see them now. I believe them; in my own experience, which has not been very protracted, I have seen that young men who at first roused different hopes nevertheless, later, exactly fulfilled the kind expectations of mature age. Do this no longer, young men, for how else could a better generation ever begin? The bloom of youth will indeed fall from you, and the flame of imagination will cease to be nourished from itself; but feed this flame and brighten it through clear thought, make this way of thinking your own, and as an additional gift you will gain character, the fairest adornment of man. Through this clear thinking you will preserve the fountain of eternal youth; however your bodies grow old or your knees become feeble, your spirit will be reborn in freshness ever renewed, and your character will stand firm and unchangeable. Seize at once the opportunity here offered you; reflect clearly upon the theme presented for your deliberation; and the clarity which has dawned for you in one point will gradually spread over all others as well. These addresses adjure you, old men! You are regarded as you have just heard, and you are told so to your faces; and for his own past the speaker frankly adds that--excluding the exceptions which, it must be admitted, not infrequently occur, and which are all the more admirable--the world is perfectly right with regard to the great majority among you. Go through the history of the last two or three decades; everything except yourselves agrees--and even you yourselves agree, each one in the specialty that does not immediately concern him--that (always excluding the exceptions, and regarding only the majority) the greatest uselessness and selfishness are found in advanced years in all branches, in science as well as in practical occupations. The whole world has witnessed that every one who desired the better and the more perfect still had to wage the bitterest battle with you in addition to the battle with his own uncertainty and with his other surroundings; that you were firmly resolved that nothing must thrive which you had not done and known in the same way; that you regarded every impulse of thought as an insult to your intelligence; and that you left no power unutilized to conquer in this battle against improvement--and in fact you generally did prevail. Thus you were the impeding power against all the improvements which kindly nature offered us from her ever--youthful womb until you were gathered to the dust which you were before, and until the succeeding generations, which were at war with you, had become like unto you and had adopted your attitude. Now, also, you need only conduct yourselves as you have previously acted in case of all propositions for amelioration; you need only again prefer to the general weal your empty honor in order that there may be nothing between heaven and earth that you have not already fathomed; then, through this last battle, you are relieved from all further battle; no improvement will accrue, but deterioration will follow in the footsteps of deterioration, and thus there will be much satisfaction in reserve for you. No one will suppose that I despise and depreciate old age as old age. If only the source of primitive life and of its continuance is absorbed into life through freedom, then clarity--and strength with it--increases so long as life endures. Such a life is easier to live; the dross of earthly origin falls away more and ever more; it is ennobled to the life eternal and strives toward it. The experience of such an old age is irreconcilable with evil, and it only makes the means clearer and the skill more adroit victoriously to battle against wickedness. Deterioration through increasing age is simply the fault of our time, and it necessarily results in every place where society is much corrupted. It is not nature which corrupts us--she produces us in innocence; it is society. He who has once surrendered to the influence of society must naturally become ever worse and worse the longer he is exposed to this influence. It would be worth the trouble to investigate the history of other extremely corrupt generations in this regard, and to see whether--for example, under the rule of the Roman emperors--what was once bad did not continually become worse with increasing age. First of all, therefore, these addresses adjure you, old men and experienced--you who form the exception! Confirm, strengthen, counsel in this matter the younger generation, which reverently looks up to you. And the rest of you also, who are average souls, they adjure! If you are not to help, at least do not interfere, this time; do not again--as always hitherto--put yourselves in the way with your wisdom and with your thousand hesitations. This thing, like every rational thing in the world, is not complicated, but simple; and it also belongs among the thousand matters which you know not. If your wisdom could save, it would surely have saved us before; for it is you who have counseled us thus far. Now, like everything else, all this is forgiven you, and you should no longer be reproached with it. Only learn at last once to know yourselves, and be silent. These addresses adjure you men of affairs! With few exceptions you have thus far been cordially hostile to abstract thought and to all learning which desired to be something for itself, even though you demeaned yourselves as if you merely haughtily despised all this. As far as you possibly could, you held from you the men who did such things as well as their propositions; the reproach of lunacy, or the advice that they be sent to the mad-house, was the thanks from you on which they might usually count. They, in their turn, did not venture to express themselves regarding you with the same frankness, since they were dependent upon you; but their innermost thought was this, that, with a few exceptions, you were shallow babblers and inflated braggarts, dilettante who have only passed through school, blind gropers and creepers in the old rut who had neither wish nor ability for aught else. Give them the lie through your deeds, and to this end grasp the opportunity now offered you; lay aside that contempt for profound thought and learning; let yourselves be advised and hear and learn what you do not know, or else your accusers win their case. These addresses adjure you, thinkers, scholars, and authors who are still worthy of this name! In a certain sense that reproach of the men of affairs was not unjust. You often proceeded too unconcerned in the realm of abstract thought, without troubling yourselves about the actual world and without considering how the one might be connected with the other; you circumscribed your own world for yourselves, and let the real world lie to one side, disdained and despised. Every regulation and every formation of actual life must, it is true, proceed from the higher regulating concept, and progress in the customary rut is insufficient for it; this is an eternal truth, and, in God's name, it crushes with undisguised contempt every one who is so bold as to busy himself with affairs without knowing this. Yet between the concept and the introduction of it into any individual life there is a great gulf fixed. The filling of this gulf is the task both of the men of affairs--who, however, must already first have learned enough to understand you--and also of yourselves, who should not forget life on account of the world of thought. Here you both meet. Instead of regarding each other askance and depreciating each other across the gulf, endeavor rather to fill it, each on his own side, and thus seek to construct the road to union. At last, I beg you, realize that you both are as mutually necessary to each other as head and arm are indispensable the one to the other. In other respects as well, these addresses adjure you, thinkers, scholars, and authors who are still worthy of this name! Your laments over the general shallowness, thoughtlessness, and superficiality, over self-conceit and inexhaustible babble, over the contempt for seriousness and profundity in all classes, may be true, even as they actually are. Yet what class is it, pray, that has educated all these classes, that has transformed everything pertaining to science into a jest for them, and that has trained them from their earliest youth in that self-conceit and that babble? Who is it, pray, who still continues to educate the generations that have outgrown the schools? The most obvious source of the torpor of the age is that it has read itself torpid in the writings which you have written. Why are you, nevertheless, so continually solicitous to amuse this idle people, despite the fact that you know that they have learned nothing and wish to learn nothing? Why do you call them "the Public," flatter them as your judge, stir them up against your rivals, and seek by every means to win this blind and confused mob over to your side? Finally, in your literary reviews and in your magazines, why do you yourselves furnish them with material and example for rash judgments by yourselves judging as unconnectedly, as carelessly, as recklessly, and, for the most part, as tastelessly as even the least of your readers could? If you do not all think thus, and if among you there are still some animated by better sentiments, why, then, do not these latter unite to put an end to the evil? As to those men of affairs, in particular they have passed through your schools--you say so yourselves. Why, then, did you not at least make use of this transit of theirs to inspire in them some silent respect for learning, and especially to break betimes the self-conceit of the young aristocrat and to show him that birth and station are of no assistance in the realm of thought? If, perchance, even at that time you flattered him and exalted him unduly, now endure that for which you yourselves are responsible. These addresses desire to excuse you on the supposition that you had not grasped the importance of your occupation; they adjure you that, from this hour, you make yourselves acquainted with this importance, and that you no longer ply your occupation as a mere trade. Learn to respect yourselves, and by your actions show that you do so, and the world will respect you. You will give the first proof of this through the amount of influence which you assume in regard to the resolution that is proposed, and through the manner in which you conduct yourselves regarding it. These addresses adjure you, princes of Germany! Those who act toward you as though no man dared say aught to you, or had aught to say, are despicable flatterers, are base slanderers of you yourselves. Drive them far from you! The truth is that you were born exactly as ignorant as all the rest of us, and that, exactly like ourselves, you must hear and learn if you are to escape from this natural ignorance. Your share in bringing about the fate which has befallen you simultaneously with your peoples is here set forth in the mildest way and, as we believe, in the way which is alone right and just; and in case you wish to hear only flattery, and never the truth, you cannot complain regarding these addresses. Let all this be forgotten, even as all the rest of us also desire that our share in the guilt may be forgotten. Now begins a new life as well for yourselves as for all of us. May this voice penetrate to you through all the surroundings which normally make you inaccessible! With proud self-reliance it dares to say to you: You rule nations, faithful, plastic, and worthy of good fortune, such as princes of no time and of no nation have ruled. They have a feeling for freedom and are capable of it; but, because you so willed, they have followed you into sanguinary war against that which to them seemed freedom. Some among you have later willed otherwise, and, again because you so willed, they have followed you into that which to them must seem a war of annihilation against one of the last remnants of German independence. Since that time they have endured and have borne the oppressive burden of common woes; yet they do not cease to be faithful to you, to cling to you with inward devotion, and to love you as their divinely appointed guardians. Yet may you notice them, unobserved by them; set free from surroundings which do not invariably present to you the fairest aspect of humanity, may you be able to descend into the house of the citizen, into the peasant's cottage, and may you be able attentively to follow the still and hidden life of these classes, in which the fidelity and the probity which have become more rare in the higher classes seem to have sought refuge! Surely, oh, surely, you will resolve to reflect more seriously than ever how they may be helped! These addresses have proposed to you a means of assistance which they believe to be sure, thorough, and decisive. Let your councillors deliberate whether they also find it so or whether they know a better means, provided only that it be equally decisive. But the conviction that something must be done and must be done immediately, that this something must be radical and final, and that the time for half-measures and procrastination is past--this conviction these addresses would fain produce, if they could, in you personally, as they still cherish the utmost confidence in your integrity. These addresses adjure you, Germans as a whole, whatever position you may take in society, that each one among you who can think, think first of all upon the theme that has been suggested, and that each one do for it exactly what in his own place lies nearest to him. Your forefathers unite with these addresses and adjure you. Imagine that in my voice are mingled the voices of your ancestors from dim antiquity, who with their bodies opposed the on-rushing dominion of the world-power of Rome, who with their blood won the independence of the mountains, plains, and streams which, under your governance, have become the booty of the stranger. They call to you: Represent us; transmit to posterity our memory honorable and blameless as it came to you, and as you have boasted of it and of descent from us. Thus far our resistance has been held to be noble and great and wise; we seemed to be initiated into the secrets of the divine plan of the universe. If our race terminates with you, our honor is turned to shame and our wisdom to folly. For if the German stock was some time to be merged into that of Rome, it was better that this had been into the old Rome than into a new. We faced the former and conquered it; before the latter you have been scattered like the dust. Now, however, since affairs are as they are, you are not to conquer them with physical weapons; only your spirit is to rise and stand upright over against them. To you has been vouchsafed the greater destiny of establishing generally the empire of the spirit and of reason, and of wholly annihilating rude physical power as that which dominates the world. If you shall do this, then are you worthy of descent from us. In these voices also mingle the spirits of your later ancestors, of those who fell in the holy struggle for freedom of religion and of faith. Save our honor, likewise, they cry to you. It was not wholly clear to us for what we fought. Besides the legitimate resolve not to allow ourselves to be dominated in matters of conscience by a foreign power, we were also impelled by a higher spirit who never revealed himself entirely unto us. To you this spirit is revealed, if you have the power to look into the spirit world, and he gazes upon you with clear and lofty eyes. The motley and confused intermingling of sensuous and of spiritual impulses is wholly to be deposed from its world-dominion; and spirit alone, absolute, and stripped of all sensuous impulses, is to take the helm of human affairs. Our blood was shed that this spirit might have freedom to develop and to grow to an independent existence. Upon you it depends to give to this sacrifice its signification and its justification by installing this spirit into the world-dominion destined for him. If this is not the final goal toward which all the development of our nation has thus far aimed, our struggles, too, become a passing, empty farce, and the freedom of spirit and of conscience that we won is an empty word, if henceforth there is to be no longer any spirit or any conscience whatsoever. Your descendants, still unborn, adjure you. You boast of your forefathers, they cry to you, and proudly you connect yourselves with a noble lineage. Take care that the chain may not be broken in you; so do that we also may boast of you, and that through you, as through a faultless link, we may connect ourselves with the same glorious lineage. Cause us not to be compelled to be ashamed of our descent from you as a descent that is low, barbarous, and slavish, so that we must conceal our ancestry or must feign an alien name and an alien lineage, lest we be immediately rejected or trodden under foot without further test. On the next generation that will proceed from you, will depend your fame in history: honorable, if this honorably witnesses for you; but ignominious, even beyond desert, if you have no offspring to speak for you, and if it is left to the victor to write your history. Never yet has a victor had sufficient inclination or sufficient knowledge rightly to judge the conquered. The more he abases them, the more justified does he appear. Who can know what mighty deeds, what magnificent institutions, and what noble customs of many a people of antiquity have been forgotten because their posterity was subjugated, and because, ungainsaid, the conqueror made his report upon them in accordance with his interests? Even foreign lands adjure you so far as they still understand themselves in the very least, and still have an eye for their true advantage. Indeed, there are spirits among all peoples who still cannot believe that the great promises made to the human race of a reign of justice, of reason, and of truth can be a vain and an empty phantom, and who assume, therefore, that the present iron age is but a transit to a better state. They--and all modern humanity in them--count on you. A great part of this humanity is descended from us; the rest have received from us religion and culture. The former adjure us by the soil of our common fatherland, which is also their cradle, and which they have bequeathed free to us; the latter adjure us by the culture which they have acquired from us as a pledge of a higher happiness--they adjure us to maintain ourselves as we have ever been, for their sake; and not to suffer this member, which is of so much importance, to be torn from the continuity of the race that is newly budded, lest they may painfully miss us if they some time need our counsel, our example, our cooperation toward the true goal of earthly life. All generations, all the wise and good who have ever breathed upon this earth, all their thoughts and aspirations for something higher mingle in these voices and surround you and lift to you imploring hands. Even Providence, if we may so say, and the divine plan of the universe in the creation of a human race--a plan which, indeed, exists only to be thought out by man and to be realized by man--adjures you to save its honor and its existence. Whether those are justified who have believed that mankind must always grow better, and that the conception of a certain order and dignity among them is no empty dream, but the prophecy and the pledge of an ultimate actuality, or whether those are to prevail who slumber on in their animal and vegetative life, and who mock every flight to higher worlds-upon these alternatives it is left to you to pass a final and decisive judgment. The ancient world with its magnificence and with its grandeur, and also with its faults, has sunk through its own unworthiness and through your fathers' prowess. If there is truth in what has been presented in these addresses, then, among all modern peoples, it is you in whom the germ of the perfecting of humanity most decidedly lies, and on whom progress in the development of this humanity is enjoined. If you perish as a nation, all the hope of the entire human race for rescue from the depths of its woe perishes together with you. Do not hope and console yourselves with the imaginary idea, counting on mere repetition of events that have already happened, that once more, after the fall of the old civilization, a new one, proceeding from a half-barbarous nation, will arise upon the ruins of the first. In antiquity such a nation, equipped with all the requisites for this destiny, was at hand, and was very well known to the nation of culture, and was described by them; had they been able to imagine their destruction, they themselves might have found in that half-barbarous nation the means of their restoration. To us, also, the entire surface of the earth is very well known, and all the peoples that live upon it. Do we, then, now know any such people, like to the aborigines of the New World, of whom similar expectations may be entertained? I believe that every one who has not merely a fanatical opinion and hope, but who thinks after profound investigation, will be compelled to answer this question in the negative. There is, therefore, no escape; if you sink, all humanity sinks with you, devoid of hope of restoration at any future time. This it was, gentlemen, that at the close of these addresses I felt compelled to impress upon you as representatives of the nation and, through you, upon the nation as a whole. _FRIEDRICH WILHELM JOSEPH VON SCHELLING_ * * * * * ON THE RELATION OF THE PLASTIC ARTS TO NATURE (1807) A Speech on the Celebration of the 12th October, 1807, as the Name-Day of His Majesty the King of Bavaria Delivered before the Public Assembly of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Munich TRANSLATED BY J. ELLIOT CABOT Plastic Art, according to the most ancient expression, is silent Poetry. The inventor of this definition no doubt meant thereby that the former, like the latter, is to express spiritual thoughts--conceptions whose source is the soul; only not by speech, but, like silent Nature, by shape, by form, by corporeal, independent works. Plastic Art, therefore, evidently stands as a uniting link between the soul and Nature, and can be apprehended only in the living centre of both. Indeed, since Plastic Art has its relation to the soul in common with every other art, and particularly with Poetry, that by which it is connected with Nature, and, like Nature, a productive force, remains as its sole peculiarity; so that to this alone can a theory relate which shall be satisfactory to the understanding, and helpful and profitable to Art itself. We hope, therefore, in considering Plastic Art in relation to its true prototype and original source, Nature, to be able to contribute something new to its theory--to give some additional exactness or clearness to the conceptions of it; but, above all, to set forth the coherence of the whole structure of Art in the light of a higher necessity. [Illustration: FRIEDRICH WILHELM JOSEPH VON SCHELLING Carl Begas] But has not Science always recognized this relation? Has not indeed every theory of modern times taken its departure from this very position, that Art should be the imitator of Nature? Such has indeed been the case. But what should this broad general proposition profit the artist, when the notion of Nature is of such various interpretation, and when there are almost as many differing views of it as there are various modes of life? Thus, to one, Nature is nothing more than the lifeless aggregate of an indeterminable crowd of objects, or the space in which, as in a vessel, he imagines things placed; to another, only the soil from which he draws his nourishment and support; to the inspired seeker alone, the holy, ever-creative original energy of the world, which generates and busily evolves all things out of itself. The proposition would indeed have a high significance, if it taught Art to emulate this creative force; but the sense in which it was meant can scarcely be doubtful to one acquainted with the universal condition of Science at the time when it was first brought forward. Singular enough that the very persons who denied all life to Nature should set it up for imitation in Art! To them might be applied the words of a profound writer:[5] "Your lying philosophy has put Nature out of the way; and why do you call upon us to imitate her? Is it that you may renew the pleasure by perpetrating the same violence on the disciples of Nature?" Nature was to them not merely a dumb, but an altogether lifeless image, in whose inmost being even no living word dwelt; a hollow scaffolding of forms, of which as hollow an image was to be transferred to the canvas, or hewn out of stone. This was the proper doctrine of those more ancient and savage nations, who, as they saw in Nature nothing divine, fetched idols out of her; whilst, to the susceptive Greeks, who everywhere felt the presence of a vitally efficient principle, genuine gods arose out of Nature. But is, then, the disciple of Nature to copy everything in Nature without distinction?--and, of everything, every part? Only beautiful objects should be represented; and, even in these, only the Beautiful and Perfect. Thus is the proposition further determined, but, at the same time, this asserted, that, in Nature, the perfect is mingled with the imperfect, the beautiful with the unbeautiful. Now, how should he who stands in no other relation to Nature than that of servile imitation, distinguish the one from the other? It is the way of imitators to appropriate the faults of their model sooner and easier than its excellences, since the former offer handles and tokens more easily grasped; and thus we see that imitators of Nature in this sense have imitated oftener, and even more affectionately, the ugly than the beautiful. If we regard in things, not their principle, but the empty abstract form, neither will they say anything to our soul; our own heart, our own spirit we must put to it, that they answer us. But what is the perfection of a thing? Nothing else than the creative life in it, its power to exist. Never, therefore, will he, who fancies that Nature is altogether dead, be successful in that profound process (analogous to the chemical) whence proceeds, purified as by fire, the pure gold of Beauty and Truth. Nor was there any change in the main view of the relation of Art to Nature, even when the unsatisfactoriness of the principle began to be more generally felt; no change, even by the new views and new knowledge so nobly established by John Winckelmann. He indeed restored to the soul its full efficiency in Art, and raised it from its unworthy dependence into the realm of spiritual freedom. Powerfully moved by the beauty of form in the works of antiquity, he taught that the production of ideal Nature, of Nature elevated above the Actual, together with the expression of spiritual conceptions, is the highest aim of Art. But if we examine in what sense this surpassing of the Actual by Art has been understood by the most, it turns out that, with this view also, the notion of Nature as mere product, of things as a lifeless result, still continued; and the idea of a living creative Nature was in no wise awakened by it. Thus these ideal forms also could be animated by no positive insight into their nature; and if the forms of the Actual were dead for the dead beholder, these were not less so. Were no independent production of the Actual possible, neither would there be of the Ideal. The object of the imitation was changed; the imitation remained. In the place of Nature were substituted the sublime works of Antiquity, whose outward forms the pupils busied themselves in imitating, but without the spirit that fills them. These forms, however, are as unapproachable, nay, more so, than the works of Nature, and leave us yet colder if we bring not to them the spiritual eye to penetrate through the veil and feel the stirring energy within. On the other hand, artists, since that time, have indeed received a certain ideal impetus, and notions of a beauty superior to matter; but these notions were like fair words, to which the deeds do not correspond. While the previous method in Art produced bodies without soul, this view taught only the secret of the soul, but not that of the body. The theory had, as usual, passed with one hasty stride to the opposite extreme; but the vital mean it had not yet found. Who can say that Winckelmann had not penetrated into the highest beauty? But with him it appeared in its dissevered elements only: on the one side as beauty in idea, and flowing out from the soul; on the other, as beauty of forms. But what is the efficient link that connects the two? Or by what power is the soul created together with the body, at once and as if with one breath? If this lies not within the power of Art, as of Nature, then it can create nothing whatever. This vital connecting link, Winckelmann did not determine; he did not teach how, from the idea, forms can be produced. Thus Art went over to that method which we would call the retrograde, since it strives from the form to come at the essence. But not thus is the Unlimited reached; it is not attainable by mere enhancement of the Limited. Hence, such works as have had their beginning in form, with all elaborateness on that side, show, in token of their origin, an incurable want at the very point where we expect the consummate, the essential, the final. The miracle by which the Limited should be raised to the Unlimited, the human become divine, is wanting; the magic circle is drawn, but the spirit that it should inclose, appears not, being disobedient to the call of him who thought a creation possible through mere form. * * * * * Nature meets us everywhere, at first with reserve, and in form more or less severe. She is like that quiet and serious beauty, that excites not attention by noisy advertisement, nor attracts the vulgar gaze. How can we, as it were, spiritually melt this apparently rigid form, so that the pure energy of things may flow together with the force of our spirit and both become one united mold? We must transcend Form, in order to gain it again as intelligible, living, and truly felt. Consider the most beautiful forms; what remains behind after you have abstracted from them the creative principle within? Nothing but mere unessential qualities, such as extension and the relations of space. Does the fact that one portion of matter exists near another, and distinct from it, contribute anything to its inner essence? or does it not rather contribute nothing? Evidently the latter. It is not mere contiguous existence, but the manner of it, that makes form; and this can be determined only by a positive force, which is even opposed to separateness, and subordinates the manifoldness of the parts to the unity of one idea--from the force that works in the crystal to the force which, comparable to a gentle magnetic current, gives to the particles of matter in the human form that position and arrangement among themselves, through which the idea, the essential unity and beauty, can become visible. Not only, however, as active principle, but as spirit and effective science, must the essence appear to us in the form, in order that we may truly apprehend it. For all unity must be spiritual in nature and origin; and what is the aim of all investigation of Nature but to find science therein? For that wherein there is no Understanding cannot be the object of Understanding; the Unknowing cannot be known. The science by which Nature works is not, however, like human science, connected with reflection upon itself; in it, the conception is not separate from the act, nor the design from the execution. Therefore, rude matter strives, as it were, blindly, after regular shape, and unknowingly assumes pure stereometric forms, which belong, nevertheless, to the realm of ideas, and are something spiritual in the material. The sublimest arithmetic and geometry are innate in the stars, and unconsciously displayed by them in their motions. More distinctly, but still beyond their grasp, the living cognition appears in animals; and thus we see them, though wandering about without reflection, bring about innumerable results far more excellent than themselves: the bird that, intoxicated with music, transcends itself in soul-like tones; the little artistic creature, that, without practise or instruction, accomplishes light works of architecture; but all directed by an overpowering spirit, that lightens in them already with single flashes of knowledge, but as yet appears nowhere as the full sun, as in Man. This formative science in Nature and Art is the link that connects idea and form, body and soul. Before everything stands an eternal idea, formed in the Infinite Understanding; but by what means does this idea pass into actuality and embodiment? Only through the creative science that is as necessarily connected with the Infinite Understanding, as in the artist the principle that seizes the idea of unsensuous Beauty is linked with that which sets it forth to the senses. If that artist be called happy and praiseworthy before all to whom the gods have granted this creative spirit, then that work of art will appear excellent which shows to us, as in outline, this unadulterated energy of creation and activity of Nature. It was long ago perceived that, in Art, not everything is performed with consciousness; that, with the conscious activity, an unconscious action must combine; and that it is of the perfect unity and mutual interpenetration of the two that the highest in Art is born. Works that want this seal of unconscious science are recognized by the evident absence of life self-supported and independent of the producer; as, on the contrary, where this acts, Art imparts to its work, together with the utmost clearness to the understanding, that unfathomable reality wherein it resembles a work of Nature. It has often been attempted to make clear the position of the artist in regard to Nature, by saying that Art, in order to be such, must first withdraw itself from Nature, and return to it only in the final perfection. The true sense of this saying, it seems to us, can be no other than this--that in all things in Nature, the living idea shows itself only blindly active; were it so also in the artist, he would be in nothing distinct from Nature. But, should he attempt consciously to subordinate himself altogether to the Actual, and render with servile fidelity the already existing, he would produce _larvae_, but no works of Art. He must therefore withdraw himself from the product, from the creature, but only in order to raise himself to the creative energy, spiritually seizing the same. Thus he ascends into the realm of pure ideas; he forsakes the creature, to regain it with thousandfold interest, and in this sense certainly to return to Nature. This spirit of Nature working at the core of things, and speaking through form and shape as by symbols only, the artist must certainly follow with emulation; and only so far as he seizes this with genial imitation has he himself produced anything genuine. For works produced by aggregation, even of forms beautiful in themselves, would still be destitute of all beauty, since that, through which the work on the whole is truly beautiful, cannot be mere form. It is above form--it is Essence, the Universal, the look and expression of the indwelling spirit of Nature. Now it can scarcely be doubtful what is to be thought of the so-called idealizing of Nature in Art, so universally demanded. This demand seems to arise from a way of thinking, according to which not Truth, Beauty, Goodness, but the contrary of all these, is the Actual. Were the Actual indeed opposed to Truth and Beauty, it would be necessary for the artist, not to elevate or idealize it, but to get rid of and destroy it, in order to create something true and beautiful. But how should it be possible for anything to be actual except the True; and what is Beauty, if not full, complete Being? What higher aim, therefore, could Art have, than to represent that which in Nature actually _is_? Or how should it undertake to excel so-called actual Nature, since it must always fall short of it? For does Art impart to its works actual, sensuous life? This statue breathes not, is stirred by no pulsation, warmed by no blood. But both the pretended excelling and the apparent falling short show themselves as the consequences of one and the same principle, as soon as we place the aim of Art in the exhibiting of that which truly is. Only on the surface have its works the appearance of life; in Nature, life seems to reach deeper, and to be wedded entirely with matter. But does not the continual mutation of matter and the universal lot of final dissolution teach us the unessential character of this union, and that it is no intimate fusion? Art, accordingly, in the merely superficial animation of its works, but represents Nothingness as non-existing. How comes it that, to every tolerably cultivated taste, imitations of the so-called Actual, even though carried to deception, appear in the last degree untrue--nay, produce the impression of spectres; whilst a work in which the idea is predominant strikes us with the full force of truth, conveying us then only to the genuinely actual world? Whence comes it, if not from the more or less obscure feeling which tells us that the idea alone is the living principle in things, but all else unessential and vain shadow? On the same ground may be explained all the opposite cases which are brought up as instances of the surpassing of Nature by Art. In arresting the rapid course of human years; in uniting the energy of developed manhood with the soft charm of early youth; or exhibiting a mother of grown-up sons and daughters in the full possession of vigorous beauty--what does Art except to annul what is unessential, Time? If, according to the remark of a discerning critic, every growth in Nature has but an instant of truly complete beauty, we may also say that it has, too, only an instant of full existence. In this instant it is what it is in all eternity; besides this, it has only a coming into and a passing out of existence. Art, in representing the thing at that instant, removes it out of Time, and sets it forth in its pure Being, in the eternity of its life. After everything positive and essential had once been abstracted from Form, it necessarily appeared restrictive, and, as it were, hostile, to the Essence; and the same theory that had reproduced the false and powerless Ideal, necessarily tended to the formless in Art. Form would indeed be a limitation of the Essence if it existed independent of it. But if it exists with and by means of the Essence, how could this feel itself limited by that which it has itself created? Violence would indeed be done it by a form forced upon it, but never by one proceeding from itself. In this, on the contrary, it must rest contented, and feel its own existence to be perfect and complete. Determinateness of form is in Nature never a negation, but ever an affirmation. Commonly, indeed, the shape of a body seems a confinement; but could we behold the creative energy it would reveal itself as the measure that this energy imposes upon itself, and in which it shows itself a truly intelligent force; for in everything is the power of self-rule allowed to be an excellence, and one of the highest. In like manner most persons consider the particular in a negative manner--i.e., as that which is not the whole or all. Yet no particular exists by means of its limitation, but through the indwelling force with which it maintains itself as a particular Whole, in distinction from the Universe. This force of particularity, and thus also of individuality, showing itself as vital character, the negative conception of it is necessarily followed by an unsatisfying and false view of the characteristic in Art. Lifeless and of intolerable hardness would be the Art that should aim to exhibit the empty shell or limitation of the Individual. Certainly we desire to see not merely the individual, but, more than this, its vital Idea. But if the artist has seized the inward creative spirit and essence of the Idea, and sets this forth, he makes the individual a world in itself, a class, an eternal prototype; and he who has grasped the essential character needs not to fear hardness and severity, for these are the conditions of life. Nature, that in her completeness appears as the utmost benignity, we see, in each particular, aiming even primarily and principally at severity, seclusion and reserve. As the whole creation is the work of the utmost externization and renunciation [Entaeusserung], so the artist must first deny himself and descend into the Particular, without shunning isolation, nor the pain, the anguish of Form. Nature, from her first works, is throughout characteristic; the energy of fire, the splendor of light, she shuts up in hard stone, the tender soul of melody in severe metal; even on the threshold of Life, and already meditating organic shape, she sinks back overpowered by the might of Form, into petrifaction. The life of the plant consists in still receptivity, but in what exact and severe outline is this passive life inclosed! In the animal kingdom the strife between Life and Form seems first properly to begin; her first works Nature hides in hard shells, and, where these are laid aside, the animated world attaches itself again through its constructive impulse to the realm of crystallization. Finally she comes forward more boldly and freely, and vital, important characteristics show themselves, being the same through whole classes. Art, however, cannot begin so far down as Nature. Though Beauty is spread everywhere, yet there are various grades in the appearance and unfolding of the Essence, and thus of Beauty. But Art demands a certain fulness, and desires not to strike a single note or tone, nor even a detached accord, but at once the full symphony of Beauty. Art, therefore, prefers to grasp immediately at the highest and most developed, the human form. For since it is not given it to embrace the immeasurable whole, and as in all other creatures only single fulgurations, in Man alone full entire Being appears without abatement, Art is not only permitted but required to see the sum of Nature in Man alone. But precisely on this account--that she here assembles all in one point--Nature repeats her whole multiformity, and pursues again in a narrower compass the same course that she had gone through in her wide circuit. Here, therefore, arises the demand upon the artist first to be true and faithful in detail, in order to come forth complete and beautiful in the whole. Here he must wrestle with the creative spirit of Nature (which in the human world also deals out character and stamp in endless variety), not in weak and effeminate, but stout and courageous conflict. Persevering exercise in the study of that by virtue of which the characteristic in things is a positive principle, must preserve him from emptiness, weakness, inward inanity, before he can venture to aim, by ever higher combination and final melting together of manifold forms, to reach the extremest beauty in works uniting the highest simplicity with infinite meaning. Only through the perfection of form can Form be made to disappear; and this is certainly the final aim of Art in the Characteristic. But as the apparent harmony that is even more easily reached by the empty and frivolous than by others, is yet inwardly vain; so in Art the quickly attained harmony of the exterior, without inward fulness. And if it is the part of theory and instruction to oppose the spiritless copying of beautiful forms, especially must they oppose the tendency toward an effeminate characterless Art, which gives itself, indeed, higher names, but therewith only seeks to hide its incapacity to fulfil the fundamental conditions. That lofty Beauty in which the fulness of form causes Form itself to disappear, was adopted by the modern theory of Art, after Winckelmann, not only as the highest, but as the only standard. But as the deep foundation upon which it rests was overlooked, it resulted that a negative conception was formed even of that which is the sum of all affirmation. Winckelmann compares Beauty with water drawn from the bosom of the spring, which, the less taste it has, the wholesomer it is esteemed. It is true that the highest Beauty is characterless, but so we say of the Universe that it has no determinate dimension, neither length, breadth nor depth, since it has all in equal infinity; or that the Art of creative Nature is formless, because she herself is subjected to no form. In this and in no other sense can we say that Grecian art in its highest development rises into the characterless; but it did not aim immediately at this. It was from the bonds of Nature that it struggled upward to divine freedom. From no lightly scattered seed, but only from a deeply infolded kernel, could this heroic growth spring up. Only mighty emotions, only a deep stirring of the fancy through the impression of all-enlivening, all-commanding energies of Nature, could stamp upon Art that invincible vigor with which from the rigid, secluded earnestness of earlier productions up to the period of works overflowing with sensuous grace, it ever remained faithful to truth, and produced the highest spiritual Reality which it is given to mortals to behold. In like manner, as their Tragedy commences with the grandest characteristicness in morals, so the beginning of their Plastic Art was the earnestness of Nature, and the stern goddess of Athens its first and only Muse. This epoch is marked by that style which Winckelmann describes as the still harsh and severe, from which the next or lofty style was able to develop itself by the mere enhancement of the Characteristic into the Sublime and the Simple. For in the statues of the most perfect or divine natures not only all the complexity of form of which human nature is capable had to be united, but moreover the union must be such as may be conceived to exist in the system of the Universe itself--the lower forms, or those relating to inferior attributes, being comprehended under higher, and all at last under one supreme form, in which they indeed extinguish one another as separately existing, but still continue in Essence and efficiency. Thus, though we cannot call this high and self-sufficing Beauty characteristic, so far as herewith is connected the notion of limitation or conditionality in the manifestation, yet still the characteristic continues efficient, though indistinguishable, within; as in the crystal, although transparent, the texture nevertheless remains; each characteristic element has its weight, however slight, and helps to bring about the sublime equipoise of Beauty. The outer side or basis of all Beauty is beauty of form. But as Form cannot exist without Essence, wherever Form is, there also is Character, whether in visible presence or only perceptible in its effects. Characteristic Beauty, therefore, is Beauty in the root, from which alone Beauty can arise as the fruit. Essence may, indeed, outgrow Form, but even then the Characteristic remains as the still efficient groundwork of the Beautiful. That most excellent critic,[6] to whom the gods have given sway over Nature as well as Art, compares the Characteristic in its relation to Beauty, with the skeleton in its relation to the living form. Were we to interpret this striking simile in our sense, we should say that the skeleton, in Nature, is not, as in our thought, detached from the living whole; that the firm and the yielding, the determining and the determined, mutually presuppose each other, and can exist only together; thus that the vitally Characteristic is already the whole form, the result of the action and reaction of bone and flesh, of Active and Passive. And although Art, like Nature, in its higher developments, thrusts inward the previously visible skeleton, yet the latter can never be opposed to Shape and Beauty, since it has always a determining share in the production of the one as well as of the other. But whether that high and independent Beauty should be the only standard in Art, as it is the highest, seems to depend on the degree of fulness and extent that belongs to the particular Art. Nature, in her wide circumference, ever exhibits the higher with the lower; creating in Man the godlike, she elaborates in all her other productions only its material and foundation, which must exist in order that in contrast with it the Essence as such may appear. And even in the higher world of Man the great mass serves again as the basis upon which the godlike that is preserved pure in the few, manifests itself in legislation, government, and the establishment of Religion. So that wherever Art works with more of the complexity of Nature, it may and must display, together with the highest measure of Beauty, also its groundwork and raw material, as it were, in distinct appropriate forms. Here first prominently unfolds itself the difference in Nature of the forms of Art. Plastic Art, in the more exact sense of the term, disdains to give Space outwardly to the object, but bears it within itself. This, however, narrows its field; it is compelled, indeed, to display the beauty of the Universe almost in a single point. It must therefore aim immediately at the highest, and can attain complexity only separately and in the strictest exclusion of all conflicting elements. By isolating the purely animal in human nature it succeeds in forming inferior creations too, harmonious and even beautiful, as we are taught by the beauty of numerous Fauns preserved from antiquity; yea, it can, parodying itself like the merry spirit of Nature, reverse its own Ideal, and, for instance, in the extravagance of the Silenic figures, by light and sportive treatment appear freed again from the pressure of matter. But in all cases it is compelled strictly to isolate the work, in order to make it self-consistent and a world in itself; since for this form of Art there is no higher unity, in which the dissonance of particulars should be melted into harmony. Painting, on the contrary, in the very extent of its sphere, can better measure itself with the Universe, and create with epic profusion. In an Iliad there is room even for a Thersites; and what does not find a place in the great epic of Nature and History! Here the Particular scarcely counts anything by itself; the Universe takes its place, and that, which by itself would not be beautiful, becomes so in the harmony of the whole. If in an extensive painting, uniting forms by the allotted space, by light, by shade, by reflection, the highest measure of Beauty were everywhere employed, the result would be the most unnatural monotony; for, as Winckelmann says, the highest idea of Beauty is everywhere one and the same, and scarcely admits of variation. The detail would be preferred to the whole, where, as in every case in which the whole is formed by multiplicity, the detail must be subordinate to it. [Illustration: THE JUNGFRAU _From the Painting by Moritz von Schwind_] In such a work, therefore, a gradation of Beauty must be observed, by which alone the full Beauty concentrated in the focus becomes visible; and from an exaggeration of particulars proceeds an equipoise of the whole. Here, then, the limited and characteristic finds its place; and theory at least should direct the painter, not so much to the narrow space in which the entire Beauty is concentrically collected, as to the characteristic complexity of Nature, through which alone he can impart to an extensive work the full measure of living significance. Thus thought, among the founders of modern art, the noble Leonardo; thus Raphael, the master of high Beauty, who shunned not to exhibit it in smaller measure, rather than to appear monotonous, lifeless, and unreal--though he understood not only how to produce it, but also how to break up uniformity by variety of expression. For, although Character can show itself also in rest and equilibrium of form, it is only in action that it becomes truly alive. By character we understand a unity of several forces, operating constantly to produce among them a certain equipoise and determinate proportion, to which, if undisturbed, a like equipoise in the symmetry of the forms corresponds. But if this vital Unity is to display itself in act and operation, this can only be when the forces, excited by some cause to rebellion, forsake their equilibrium. Every one sees that this is the case in the Passions. Here we are met by the well-known maxim of the theorists, which demands that Passion should be moderated as far as possible, in its actual outburst, that beauty of Form may not be injured. But we think this maxim should rather be reversed, and read thus--that Passion should be moderated by Beauty itself. For it is much to be feared that this desired moderation too may be taken in a negative sense--whereas, what is really requisite is to oppose to Passion a positive force. For as Virtue consists, not in the absence of passions, but in the mastery of the spirit over them, so Beauty is preserved, not by their removal or abatement, but by the mastery of Beauty over them. The forces of Passion must actually show themselves--it must be seen that they are prepared to rise in mutiny, but are kept down by the power of Character, and break against the forms of firmly-founded Beauty, as the waves of a stream that just fills, but cannot overflow its banks. Otherwise, this striving after moderation would resemble only the method of those shallow moralists, who, the more readily to dispose of Man, prefer to mutilate his nature; and who have so entirely removed every positive element from actions that the people gloat over the spectacle of great crimes, in order to refresh themselves at last with the view of something positive. In Nature and Art the Essence strives first after actualization, or exhibition of itself in the Particular. Thus in each the utmost severity is manifested at the commencement; for without bound, the boundless could not appear; without severity, gentleness could not exist; and if unity is to be perceptible, it can only be through particularity, detachment, and opposition. In the beginning, therefore, the creative spirit shows itself entirely lost in the Form, inaccessibly shut up, and even in its grandeur still harsh. But the more it succeeds in uniting its entire fulness in one product, the more it gradually relaxes from its severity; and where it has fully developed the form, so as to rest contented and self-collected in it, it seems to become cheerful and begins to move in gentle lines. This is the period of its fairest maturity and blossom, in which the pure vessel has arrived at perfection; the spirit of Nature becomes free from its bonds, and feels its relationship to the soul. By a gentle morning blush stealing over the whole form, the coming soul announces itself; it is not yet present, but everything prepares for its reception by the delicate play of gentle movements; the rigid outlines melt and temper themselves into flexibility; a lovely essence, neither sensuous nor spiritual, but which cannot be grasped, diffuses itself over the form, and intwines itself with every outline, every vibration of the frame. This essence, not to be seized, as we have already remarked, but yet perceptible to all, is what the language of the Greeks designated by the name _Charis_, ours as Grace. Wherever, in a fully developed form, Grace appears, the work is complete on the side of Nature; nothing more is wanting; all demands are satisfied. Here, already, soul and body are in complete harmony; Body is Form, Grace is Soul, although not Soul in itself, but the Soul of Form, or the Soul of Nature. Art may linger, and remain stationary at this point; for already, on one side at least, its whole task is finished. The pure image of Beauty arrested at this point is the Goddess of Love. But the beauty of the Soul in itself, joined to sensuous Grace, is the highest apotheosis of Nature. The spirit of Nature is only in appearance opposed to the Soul; essentially, it is the instrument of its revelation; it brings about indeed the antagonism that exists in all things, but only that the one essence may come forth, as the utmost benignity, and the reconciliation of all the forces. All other creatures are driven by the mere force of Nature, and through it maintain their individuality; in Man alone, as the central point, arises the soul, without which the world would be like the natural universe without the sun. The Soul in Man, therefore, is not the principle of individuality, but that whereby he raises himself above all egoism, whereby he becomes capable of self-sacrifice, of disinterested love, and (which is the highest) of the contemplation and knowledge of the Essence of things, and thus of Art. In him it is no longer concerned about Matter nor has it immediate concern with it, but with the spirit only as the life of things. Even while appearing in the body, it is yet free from the body, the consciousness of which hovers in the soul in the most beauteous shapes only as a light, undisturbing dream. It is no quality, no faculty, nor anything special of the sort; it knows not, but is Science; it is not good, but Goodness; it is not beautiful, as body even may be, but Beauty itself. In the first instance, it is true, in a work of art, the soul of the artist is seen as invention in the detail, and in the total result as the unity that hovers over the work in serene stillness. But the Soul must be visible in objective representation, as the primeval energy of thought, in portraitures of human beings, altogether filled by an idea, by a noble contemplation; or as indwelling, essential Goodness. Each of these finds its distinct expression even in the completest repose, but a more living one where the Soul can reveal itself in activity and antagonism; and since it is by the passions mainly that the peace of life is interrupted, it is the generally received opinion that the beauty of the Soul shows itself especially in its quiet supremacy amid the storm of the passions. But here an important distinction is to be made. For the Soul must not be called upon to moderate those passions which are only an outbreak of the lower spirits of Nature, nor can it be displayed in antithesis with these; for where calm considerateness is still in contention with them, the Soul has not yet appeared; they must be moderated by unassisted Nature in Man, by the might of the Spirit. But there are cases of a higher sort, in which not a single force alone, but the intelligent Spirit itself breaks down all barriers--cases, indeed, where even the Soul is subjected by the bond that connects it with sensuous existence, to pain, which should be foreign to its divine nature; where Man feels himself hard fought and attacked in the root of his existence, not by mere powers of Nature, but by moral forces; where innocent error hurries him into crime, and thus into misery; where deep-felt injustice excites to rebellion the holiest feelings of humanity. This is the case in all situations, truly, and, in a high sense, tragic, such as the Tragedy of the ancients brings before our eyes. Where blindly passionate forces are aroused, the collected Spirit is present as the guardian of Beauty; but if the Spirit itself be carried away, as by an irresistible might, what power shall watch over and protect sacred beauty? Or, if even the soul participate in the struggle, how shall it save itself from pain and from desecration? Arbitrarily to restrain the power of pain, of feeling in revolt, would be to sin against the very meaning and aim of Art, and would betray a want of feeling and soul in the artist himself. Already therein, that Beauty, based on grand and firmly established forms, has become Character, Art has provided the means of displaying without injury to symmetry the whole intensity of Feeling. For where Beauty rests on mighty forms, as upon immovable pillars, even a slight change in its relations, scarcely touching the form, causes us to infer the great force that was necessary in order to provide it. Still more does Grace sanctify pain. It is the essential nature of Grace that it does not know itself; but not being wilfully acquired, it also cannot be wilfully lost. When intolerable anguish, when even madness, sent by avenging gods, takes away consciousness and reason, Grace stands as a protecting demon by the suffering person, and prevents it from manifesting anything unseemly, anything discordant to Humanity, but sees to it that, if the person falls, it falls at least a pure and unspotted victim. Although not yet the Soul itself, but its forebodings only, Grace accomplishes by natural means what the Soul does by a divine power, in transforming pain, torpor, even death itself, into Beauty. Yet Grace, which thus maintained itself in the extremest adversity, would be dead, without its transfiguration by the Soul. But what expression can belong to the Soul in this situation? It delivers itself from pain, and comes forth conquering, not conquered, by relinquishing its connection with sensuous existence. It is for the natural Spirit to exert its energies for the preservation of sensuous existence; the Soul enters not into this contest, but its presence moderates even the storms of painfully-struggling life. Outward force can take away only outward goods, but not reach the Soul; it can tear asunder a temporal bond, not dissolve the eternal one of a truly divine love. Not hard and unfeeling, nor giving up love itself, on the contrary the Soul displays in pain this love alone, as the sentiment that outlasts sensuous existence, and thus raises itself above the ruins of outward life or fortune in divine glory. It is this expression of the Soul that the creator of the Niobe has presented to us. All the means by which Art tempers even the Terrible, are here made use of. Mightiness of form, sensuous Grace, nay, even the nature of the subject-matter itself, soften the expression, through this, that Pain, transcending all expression, annihilates itself, and Beauty, which it seemed impossible to preserve from destruction when alive, is protected from injury by the commencing torpor. But what would it all be without the Soul, and how does this manifest itself? We see on the countenance of the mother, not grief alone for the already prostrated flower of her children; not alone deadly anxiety for the preservation of those yet remaining, and of the youngest daughter, who has fled for safety to her bosom; nor resentment against the cruel deities; least of all, as is pretended, cool defiance-all these we see, indeed, but not these alone; for, through grief, anxiety, and resentment streams, like a divine light, eternal love, as that which alone remains; and in this is preserved the mother, as one who was not, but now is a mother, and who remains united with the beloved ones by an eternal bond. Every one acknowledges that greatness, purity, and goodness of Soul have also their sensuous expressions. But how is this conceivable, unless the principle that acts in Matter be itself cognate and similar to Soul? For the representation of the Soul there are again gradations in Art, according as it is joined with the merely Characteristic, or in visible union with the Charming and Graceful. Who perceives not already, in the tragedies of AEschylus, the presence of that lofty morality which is predominant in the works of Sophocles? But in the former it is enveloped in a bitter rind, and passes less into the whole work, since the bond of sensuous Grace is still wanting. But out of this severity, and the still rude charms of earlier Art, could proceed the grace of Sophocles, and with it the complete fusion of the two elements, which leaves us doubtful whether it is more moral or sensuous Grace that enchants us in the works of this poet. The same is true of the plastic productions of the early and severe style, in comparison with the gentleness of the later. If Grace, besides being the transfiguration of the spirit of Nature, is also the medium of connection between moral Goodness and sensuous Appearance, it is evident how Art must tend from all points toward it as its centre. This Beauty, which results from the perfect interpenetration of moral Goodness and sensuous Grace, seizes and enchants us when we meet it, with the force of a miracle. For, whilst the spirit of Nature shows itself everywhere else independent of the Soul, and, indeed, in a measure opposed to it, here, it seems, as if by voluntary accord, and the inward fire of divine love, to melt into union with it; the remembrance of the fundamental unity of the essence of Nature and the essence of the Soul comes over the beholder with sudden clearness--the conviction that all antagonism is only apparent, that Love is the bond of all things, and pure Goodness the foundation and substance of the whole Creation. Here Art, as it were, transcends itself, and again becomes means only. On this summit sensuous Grace becomes in turn only the husk and body of a higher life; what was before a whole is treated as a part, and the highest relation of Art and Nature is reached in this--that it makes Nature the medium of manifesting the soul which it contains. But though in this blossoming of Art, as in the blossoming of the vegetable kingdom, all the previous stages are repeated, yet, on the other hand, we may see in what various directions Art can proceed from this centre. Especially does the difference in nature of the two forms of Plastic Art here show itself most strongly. For Sculpture, representing its ideas by corporeal things, seems to reach its highest point in the complete equilibrium of Soul and Matter--if it give a preponderance to the latter it sinks below its own idea--but it seems altogether impossible for it to elevate the Soul at the expense of Matter, since it must thereby transcend itself. The perfect sculptor indeed, as Winckelmann remarks apropos of the Belvedere Apollo, will use no more material than is needful to accomplish his spiritual purpose; but also, on the other hand, he will put into the Soul no more energy than is at the same time expressed in the material; for precisely upon this, fully to embody the spiritual, depends his art. Sculpture, therefore, can reach its true summit only in the representation of those natures in whose constitution it is implied that they actually embody all that is contained in their Idea or Soul; thus only in divine natures. So that Sculpture, even if no Mythology had preceded it, would of itself have come upon gods, and have invented such if it found none. Moreover as the Spirit, on this lower platform, has again the same relation to Matter that we have ascribed to the Soul (being the principle of activity and motion, as Matter is that of rest and inaction), the law that regulates Expression and Passion must be a fundamental principle of its nature. But this law must be applicable not only to the lower passions, but also equally to those higher and godlike passions, if it is permitted so to call them, by which the Soul is affected in rapture, in devotion, in adoration. Hence, since from these passions the gods alone are exempt, Sculpture is inclined from this side also to the imaging of divine natures. The nature of Painting, however, seems to differ entirely from that of Sculpture. For the former represents objects, not like the latter, by corporeal things, but by light and color, through a medium therefore itself incorporeal and in a measure spiritual. Painting, moreover, gives out its productions nowise as the things themselves, but expressly as pictures. From its very nature therefore it does not lay as much stress on the material as Sculpture, and seems indeed for this reason, while exalting the material above the spirit, to degrade itself more than Sculpture in a like case; on the other hand to be so much more justified in giving a clear preponderance to the Soul. Where it aims at the highest it will indeed ennoble the passions by Character, or moderate them by Grace, or manifest in them the power of the Soul: but on the other hand it is precisely those higher passions, depending on the relationship of the Soul with a Supreme Being, that are entirely suited to the nature of Painting. Indeed, while Sculpture maintains an exact balance between the force whereby a thing exists outwardly and acts in Nature and that by virtue of which it lives inwardly and as Soul, and excludes mere suffering even from Matter, Painting may soften in favor of the Soul the characteristicness of the force and activity in Matter, and transform it into resignation and endurance, making it apparent that Man becomes more generally susceptible to the inspirations of the Soul, and to higher influences in general. This diametrical difference explains of itself not only the necessary predominance of Sculpture in the ancient, and of Painting in the modern world (since in the former the tone of mind was thoroughly plastic, whereas the latter makes even the Soul the passive instrument of higher revelations); but this also is evident--that it is not enough to strive after the Plastic in form and manner of representation, but that it is requisite, before all, to think and to feel plastically, that is, antiquely. And as the deviation of Sculpture into the picturesque is destructive to Art, so the narrowing down of Painting to the conditions and forms belonging to Sculpture is an arbitrarily imposed limitation. For while Sculpture, like gravitation, acts toward one point, it is permitted to Painting, as to light, to fill all space with its creative energy. This unlimited universality of Painting is demonstrated by History itself, and by the examples of the greatest masters, who, without injury to the essential character of their art, have developed to perfection each particular stage by itself, so that we can find also in the history of Art the same sequence that may be pointed out in its nature--not indeed in exact order of time, but yet substantially. For thus is represented in Michelangelo the oldest and mightiest epoch of liberated Art, that in which it displays its yet uncontrolled strength in gigantic progeny; as in the fables of the symbolic Fore-world, the Earth, after the embrace of Uranus, brought forth at first Titans and heaven-storming giants before the mild reign of the serene gods began. Thus the painting of the Last Judgment, with which, as the sum of his art, that giant spirit filled the Sistine Chapel, seems to remind us more of the first ages of the Earth and its products, than of its last. Attracted toward the most hidden abysses of organic, particularly of the human form, he shuns not the Terrible; nay, he seeks it purposely, and startles it from its repose in the dark workshops of Nature. Want of delicacy, grace, pleasingness, he balances by the extremest energy; and if he excites horror by his representations, it is the terror that, according to fable, the ancient god Pan spreads around him when he suddenly appears in the assemblies of men. It is the method of Nature to produce the extraordinary by isolation and the exclusion of opposed qualities. Thus, it was necessary that, in Michelangelo, earnestness and the deep significant energy of Nature should prevail, rather than a sense of the grace and sensibility that belong to the Soul, in order to display the extreme of pure plastic force in the painting of modern times. After the earlier violence and the vehement impulse of birth is assuaged, the spirit of Nature is transfigured into Soul, and Grace is born. This point Art reached, after Leonardo da Vinci, in Correggio, in whose works the sensuous Soul is the active principle of Beauty. * * * * * As the modern fable of Psyche closes the circle of the old mythology; so Painting, by giving a preponderance to the Soul, attained a new, though not a higher step of Art. This Guido Reni strove after, and became the proper painter of the Soul. Such seems to us to be the necessary interpretation of his whole endeavor, often uncertain, and, in many of his works, losing itself in the vague. This is shown, as, perhaps, in few of his other pictures, in the masterpiece that is offered to the admiration of all in the great collection of our king. In the figure of the heavenward-ascending Virgin, all harshness and sternness are effaced, even to the last trace; and, indeed, does not Painting itself seem in it to soar upward, transfigured on its own pinions, as the liberated Psyche delivered from the severity of Form? Here nothing outward remains, with separate natural force; everything expresses receptivity and still endurance, even the perishable flesh, the character of which the Italian language designates by the term _morbidezza_, altogether unlike that with which Raphael invests the descending Queen of Heaven, as she appears to the adoring pope and a saint. Though the remark be well-founded, that the original of Guido's female heads is the Niobe of antiquity, yet the ground of this similarity is surely no mere intentional imitation; perhaps a like aim led to like means. As the Florentine Niobe is an extreme in Sculpture, and the representation in it of the Soul, so this well-known picture is an extreme in Painting, which here ventures to lay aside even the requisite of shade and the obscure, and to work almost with pure Light. Even though it might be permitted to Painting, from its peculiar nature, to give a distinct preponderance to the Soul, yet theory and instruction will do best constantly to aim at that original Centre, whence alone Art may be produced ever anew; whereas, at the stage last mentioned, it must necessarily stand still, or degenerate into cramped mannerism. For even that higher passion is opposed to the idea of having reached the acme of energy, whose image and reflex Art is called upon to display. A right intelligence will ever enjoy seeing a creature worthily, and, as far as possible, also individually, represented; yea, Deity itself would look down with pleasure on a being that, gifted with a pure soul, should stoutly assert the dignity of its nature outwardly also, and by its sensually efficient existence. We have seen how the work of Art, springing up out of the depths of Nature, begins with determinateness and limitation, unfolds its inward plenitude and infinity, is finally transfigured in Grace, and at last attains to Soul. But we can conceive only in detail what, in the creative act of mature Art, is but one operation. No theory and no rules can give this spiritual, creative power. It is the pure gift of Nature, which here, for the second time, makes a close; for, having fully actualized herself, she invests the creature with her creative energy. But as, in the grand progress of Art, these different stages appeared successively, until, at the highest, all joined in one; so also, in particulars, sound culture can spring up only where it has unfolded itself regularly from the germ and root to the blossom. The requirement that Art, like everything living, should commence from the first rudiments, and, to renew its youth, constantly return to them, may seem a hard doctrine to an age that has so often been assured that it has only to take from works of Art already in existence the most consummate Beauty, and thus, as at a step, to reach the final goal. Have we not already the Excellent, the Perfect? How then should we return to the rudimentary and unformed? Had the great founders of modern Art thought thus, we should never have seen their miracles. Before them also stood the creations of the ancients, round statues and works in relief, which they might have transferred immediately to their canvas. But such an appropriation of a Beauty not self-won, and therefore unintelligible, would not satisfy an artistic instinct that aimed throughout at the fundamental, and from which the Beautiful was again to create itself with free original energy. They were not afraid, therefore, to appear simple, artless, dry, beside those exalted ancients; nor to cherish Art for a long time in the undistinguished bud, until the period of Grace had arrived. Whence comes it that we still look upon these works of the older masters, from Giotto to the teacher of Raphael, with a sort of reverence, indeed with a certain predilection, if not that the faithfulness of their endeavor, and the grand earnestness of their serene voluntary limitation, compel our respect and admiration. The same relation that they held to the ancients, the present generation holds to them. Their time and ours are joined by no living transmission, no link of continuous, organic growth; we must reproduce Art in the way they did, but with energy of our own, in order to be like them. Even that Indian-summer of Art, at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries, could call forth only a few new blossoms on the old stem, but no productive germs, still less plant a new tree of Art. But to set aside the works of perfected Art, and to seek out its scanty and simple beginnings, as some have desired, would be a new and perhaps greater mistake; it would be no real return to the fundamental; simplicity would be affectation, and grow into hypocritical show. But what prospect does the present time offer for an Art springing from a vigorous germ, and growing up from the root? For it is in a great measure dependent on the character of its time; and who would promise the approbation of the present time to such earnest beginnings, when Art, on the one hand, scarcely obtains equal consideration with other instruments of prodigal luxury, and, on the other, artists and amateurs, with entire want of ability to grasp Nature, praise and demand the Ideal? Art springs only from that powerful striving of the inmost powers of the heart and the spirit, which we call Inspiration. Everything that from difficult or small beginnings has grown up to great power and height, owes its growth to Inspiration. Thus spring empires and states, thus arts and sciences. But it is not the power of the individual that accomplishes this, but the Spirit alone, that diffuses itself over all. For Art especially is dependent on the tone of the public mind, as the more delicate plants on atmosphere and weather; it needs a general enthusiasm for Sublimity and Beauty, like that which, in the time of the Medici, as a warm breath of spring, called forth at once and together all those great spirits. * * * * * It is only when the public life is actuated by the same forces through whose energy Art is elevated, that the latter can derive any advantage from it; for Art cannot, without giving up the nobility of its nature, aim at anything outward. Art and Science can move only on their own axes; the artist, like every spiritual laborer, can follow only the law that God and Nature have written in his heart. None can help him--he must help himself; nor can he be outwardly rewarded, since anything that he should produce for the sake of aught out of itself, would thereby become a nullity; hence, too, no one can direct him, nor prescribe the path he is to tread. Is he to be pitied if he have to contend against his time, he is deserving of contempt if he truckle to it. But how should it be even possible for him to do this? Without great general enthusiasm there are only sects--no public opinion; not an established taste, not the great ideas of a whole people, but the voices of a few arbitrarily-appointed judges, determine as to merit; and Art, which in its elevation is self-sufficing, courts favor, and serves where it should rule. To different ages are given different inspirations. Can we expect none for this age, since the new world now forming itself, as it exists in part already outwardly, in part inwardly and in the hearts of men, can no longer be measured by any standard of previous opinion, and since everything, on the contrary, loudly demands higher standards and an entire renovation? Should not the sense to which Nature and History have more livingly unfolded themselves, restore to Art also its great arguments? The attempt to draw sparks from the ashes of the Past, and fan them again into universal flame, is a vain endeavor. Only a revolution in the ideas themselves is able to raise Art from its exhaustion; only new Knowledge, new Faith, can inspire it for the work by which it can display, in a renewed life, a splendor like the past. An Art in all respects the same as that of foregoing centuries, will never return; for Nature never repeats herself. Such a Raphael will never be again, but another, who shall have reached in an equally original manner the summit of Art. Only let the fundamental conditions be fulfilled, and renewed Art will show, like that which preceded it, in its first works, its aim and intent. In the production of the distinctly characteristic, if it proceed from a fresh original energy, Grace is already present, even though hidden, and in both the advent of the Soul already determined. Works produced in this manner, even in their rudimentary imperfection, are necessary and eternal. * * * LATER GERMAN ROMANTICISM By George H. Danton, PH.D Professor of German, Butler College The group of later Romanticists is distinguished from the earlier pioneers by less emphasis on speculative philosophy, by greater spontaneity, and by more creative ability. The later school was less interested in questions primarily esthetic and was more democratic. Both groups were enemies of the aristocratic Enlightenment of the eighteenth century; but where the earlier group worked with the Kantian understanding and with a supersensuous philosophy, the younger men lived in the world and were of it; they used the people to carry on their propaganda. Thus, though later Romanticism contains nearly all the ideas of earlier Romanticism, it displays in addition also, political, national, and social tendencies which were in the main foreign to the earlier writers. There was in the later group a deeper sense of religion and a firmer belief in the spiritual foundations of experience than is shown by their predecessors, though all Romanticism tried to penetrate the mysteries of life and all Romanticists were seers as well as prophets. In the later school, too, there appears a development of the nature-sense far beyond anything shown in the first group. Indeed, the Schlegels may be said to have been without a sense for nature; in Tieck there is a great discrepancy between the man, his beliefs, and his practise, and Novalis' nature-feeling is not attached to any specific place. But Brentano loves the Rhine, and Eichendorff's landscape is genuinely Silesian. Caroline and Dorothea know nothing of the mood which makes Bettina throw herself prone in the grass to watch an insect crawl over her hand. A keener appreciation of natural beauty led to a study of natural science; thence it was but a step to the "night-sides" of nature; and spiritism, mesmerism, occultism, and abnormal psychology fill the minds of such men as the Romantic philosopher Schubert, and of the physicians Carus and Passavant. Justinus Kerner wrote of the Seeress of Prevorst, and Clemens Brentano watched for years at the bedside of a stigmatized nun. On the other hand, from nature comes a love for home and country, and this love serves as a bridge to the patriotism which was the vital force in the Wars of Liberation and which, by well-marked gradations, destroyed the cosmopolitanism engendered by the French Revolution. Art went hand in hand with nature; the wild, weird landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, fascinating and specifically German, express the Romantic spirit fully as well as the delicate, spiritual, and thoroughly sane fancies of Philip Otto Runge, the artist of early Romanticism. As the earlier men centred in Jena, so the later Romanticists flourished in Heidelberg, that city which Eichendorff called "itself a magnificent Romanticism." The earlier group was largely North German and brought with it clear perception and a certain power of analysis, an ability to dissect and to reason. With the Heidelberg group the South begins to play a larger part, though there were a number of North Germans in it. The richer fancy, the longer literary tradition, now add color to their productions. It is significant, too, that though "castle Romanticism" does not die out, a new note is struck with the celebration of the Rhine in song, story, and legend. The river begins with Romantic tradition and in a Romantic _milieu_, but rises to political significance as "Germany's stream and not Germany's boundary." The southward tendency of the movement reached its climax when its centre shifted to Munich, with a culture-loving king, an Academy of Sciences and a new University. Munich was fortunately not destined to become like Vienna, that other South German city, "a Capua of the spirit." Though certain members of the later Romantic group were closely associated with each other in a way that was unknown to the older set, Arnim and Savigny having each married a sister of Brentano, there was less real solidarity among them than in their forerunners. By no means all the men treated within the confines of the present article had the close personal association which, when combined with intellectual or literary activity, goes by the rather loose name of a "school." The first Romanticists were held together by a common effort to formulate or to attain a speculative philosophy. In the second group, there was a decentralizing, catholicizing tendency, and, above all, a greater individual creative ability. It was not merely the chance difference of external fortunes that kept them apart, though they never held together after the death of Brentano's wife in 1806, but that each projected his individuality into his literary work rather than into a common polemic ideal. The path-finding and discovery had already been done; in the quieter backwater it was possible to develop well-rounded works of real esthetic value. Very significant of the differences between the schools is their journalistic activity. The ideal of the first Romanticists was to work without collaboration; but the very prospectus of Arnim's _Journal for Hermits_ is signed by a company of editors. The early journals were turned to the study of German literature through a renunciation of the present; the later Germanic studies arose from a high idealism and from a sincere desire to awaken the present to new national activity. When, later in life, Goerres remarked of these journals that their collaborators felt as if they were accompanying the Holy Roman Empire to its grave, he was thinking of the year in which the most important of them flourished, 1808. In this, Germany's darkest period, Kleist's Phoebus, so cordially hated by many, and Arnim's _Journal for Hermits_ had their brief but influential career. Such a journal as the _Athenaeum_, with its over-emphasis on the esthetic, with its fighting spirit, its excoriating, inexorable wit, its constructive and destructive criticism, its complete and total silence on Schiller, would have been an impossibility in the later period. The feeling for and thinking in Fragments, as practised by Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, was foreign to the new school. They had no illusions that such thinking would become the daily custom of the people; they kept their eyes open to that which went on about them, and though they no more dared than the earlier group to work directly upon the political conditions of the day as did Goerres later (1814) in his _Rheinischer Merkur_, they attempted indirectly to react on the broad mass by branching out into religion and other folk-interests as the earlier school never cared to do. Perhaps this is an excuse for the shallowness of some of the product, especially of the fiction; at any rate, the attempt at dissemination was not without its success. The external link connecting the two schools as well as the Romantic groups in general and the object of their star-worship, Goethe, was Clemens Maria Brentano (1778-1842), in many ways the most typical Romantic figure of either school. Brentano's grandmother, Sophie La Roche, had been the friend of Wieland; his mother, Maximiliane, played a not unimportant role in the life of the young Goethe and is immortalized in the latter part of _Werther_. Maximiliane married Brentano, an Italian from the Como region, and Clemens was the third child of this loveless union. Brentano's early life was not happy; he was destined for a business career but was a failure in it, and then studied at various universities but with no great application or success. From 1797-1800 he was at Jena, where he succeeded in making himself hated by the Schlegels in spite of his defense of them in his satirical play, _Gustav Wasa_ (1800). This play, in the manner of Tieck's _Puss in Boots_, attempts to ridicule Kotzebue. The method is the same as Tieck's: there is the play within the play, the gagged officer (to take the place of the critic Boettger), the puns, of which, perhaps, the one on Lucinde _(Lux inde)_ is the best, and which, as often in Brentano, go beyond and surpass Tieck. Romantic irony flourishes: the whole world of the theatre, the author, the very lights, the building, the working day and the musical instruments in the orchestra are dramatized in turn. The dialogue of the latter far more intimately suggests their quality than does the speech of the flutes in Tieck, where their spirit is cerulean blue. _Wasa_, unfortunately, runs off into dull allegory, and this work is not to be compared with August von Schlegel's _Gate of Honor_ as a satire on the same subject. Brentano's _Godwi_ (1801), the sub-title of which, "An Unmanageable Novel by Maria," shows its character, is a far better production. It has the strong, full-blooded, passionate love of life characteristic of its author, "the many-souled" Brentano, whose Romantic irony resulted from his being ashamed of his sentimentality, and whose hatred of philistinism was caused by his fear of his own latent tendency toward that point of view. The plot of _Godwi_ runs wild, but the satire and the interspersed lyrics make it interesting reading. Romantic irony can go no farther than in this book, in which the author's own death-bed scene is portrayed and in which the preceding parts of the work are referred to by page and line--"This is the pond into which I fall on page so and so." If Brentano's _Rosary_ cycle (1809) is somewhat unpleasantly superhuman, and if, at times, he mixes sex and religion like a mystic of the Middle Ages or a Spaniard of the Counter Reformation, he rises to wonderful lyric heights when he touches his own experiences, or when he expresses the note of the people. His use of the supernatural, of the subconscious mood, gives rise to such poems as _The Lore-Lay_, the legend of which was actually invented by Brentano. Like all Romanticists, Brentano was a poet of incomplete works, of moods which abandoned him before the artistic perfection of his effort was reached; but his suggestive touches, and, above all, his constant use of the refrain in all phases and _genres_, especially to emphasize and summarize his musical consciousness, are a striking proof of the French adage, "Quand le coeur chante, c'est toujours un refrain." Brentano surrenders himself passionately to his mood. His surrender and his distorting irony, like Heine's, arise from his desire to assimilate all of the outside world; it explains, in part, the Romantic desire to mediate, to translate, to bridge the cleft between oneself and the world. In part, too, it explains the desire for musical imitation so apparent in both Tieck and Brentano. It is an attempt to express in terms of one sense the ideas or apperceptions of another. But where Tieck falls into meaningless jingle, Brentano succeeds, not merely in suggesting but in producing the effect, as in his _Merry Musicians_ (1803), or in bringing about its latent mood, as in his _Spinner's Song_ or in his version of the old folk-epithalamium, "Come out, come out, thou lovely, lovely bride." Brentano's prose tales vary in quality from the over-allegorized latter part of _The Fairy Tale of the Rhine and the Miller Radlauf_ (1816) to the simple and homely _Kasper and Annie_ (1817), with its elemental clash of soldiers and citizens. Through many of the tales there runs a note of satire and of symbolism, but the fancy is exuberant and the interest well maintained. Brentano's discovery of the Rhine as an object of poetry and veneration is completely summarized in _Radlauf_, where the Rhine lyrics are often of wonderful beauty and definiteness and the river becomes a benevolent _deus ex machina_, who--significantly--in dreams, guides and aids the simple, honest miller in his search for a bride. Later in life, Brentano returned to the Roman Church into which he had been baptized as a child, and gradually withdrew from literary activity. Long before his death in 1842, he had renounced his earlier life as wicked and abhorrent, and had given himself over entirely to the Church. But his career with its constant wanderings, its lack of permanency of occupation, of family ties, and of a real home, his inability to grow old, his inner unreality, his excessive productivity-in short, all that is incomplete, over-stimulated, destructive of self, make him the most typical figure of the later Romantic group. Ludwig Achim von Arnim (1781-1831) is by no means so bizarre a figure. Born in Berlin of a noble family, he inherited a peculiar patriotism and his love of culture, and developed these without the eccentricities which characterized his brother-in-law. The main influences of his early years were Goethe and Jena, but, as a direct inspiration, Tieck must also be mentioned. Arnim's early works lie largely in the field of natural science, especially in physics. He had little of Brentano's lyric gift; indeed, his poems, where not wooden, are often merely reminiscent. They show, too, in an unusual degree, the ability to adapt himself to another's mood and assimilate it--that which the Germans call "Nachempfinden," a quality which stood him in excellent stead in his work on _The Boy's Magic Horn_. The drama _Halle and Jerusalem_ (1810) is an amalgamation of the story of Cardenio and Celinde used by Gryphius and Immermann, with the story of the Wandering Jew. The first four acts take place in Halle where Cardenio is a teacher and where he is living in incestuous relation with Olympia. He is a Faust-nature and his father is Ahasuerus. The fifth act is taken up with a pilgrimage to Jerusalem where the romantic fates of the characters are decided. The play abounds in contemporary satire and, as in all of Arnim's work, there is distinct emphasis on action, the goal of human endeavor. Arnim's prose is better than his verse. Soon, in _The Guardians of the Crown_ (1817; volume 2 unfinished and published in his literary remains, 1854), he strikes an individual note. This novel is one of the best products of German Romanticism. The Guardians are a mysterious secret organization who guard the imperial crown in a fairy castle and are favorable to the ancient house of Hohenstaufen but inimical to the ruling Habsburgs. The basis is the newly awakening ideal of German unity but Arnim fails to express this clearly, and the concluding motif, that Germany's crown is to be spiritually won, resolves the whole into a frosty allegory. The progress of the story is, however, extremely interesting; the whole spacious and varied scene of medieval life is there, and as Tieck and Wackenroder discovered Nuremberg, and Brentano the Rhine, so Arnim may be said to have shown in its full activity the Ghibelline city of Waiblingen. It is, to be sure, a Romantic Waiblingen, and not the real city, as Arnim himself was afterward forced to admit with some disappointment when he actually saw it. But as Arnim portrays it, it rises to typical value without losing any of its poetic individuality. It is the city of the Hohenstaufens, the last stand of medievalism against the encroachment of a new civilization. The echoes from Gotz von Berlichingen are at once apparent to the reader. But Arnim's city of the sixteenth century does not look backward only; the conflicts in it point forward also. Its abbess is not the traditional pious, fat old lady, but a tall, thin, practical and active woman. Its Faust is a figure of aggressive naturalism, a charlatan and quack who practises blood-transfusion on the hero and who lies drunk in a pig-sty--a scene which shows Arnim's power of drastic contrast at its best. The hero, Berthold, does not sit back and wait for the crown to come to him, but with money mysteriously given him builds a cloth-mill on the site of his ancestral palace and becomes the mayor of the city. How different a picture from the hazy cities of Novalis' _Heinrich von Ofterdingen_! It is a part of the new spirit in Romanticism to point the way for the people of Germany to go forward--to leave mysticism and dreams, and to grapple with the life around them. A similar impulse toward popularization actuated Arnim and Brentano in their joint work, _The Boy's Magic Horn_ (1806-8). This is the achievement upon which their greatest fame will always rest. It is one of the best collections of folk-songs and popular ballads in any language, and has been of the greatest influence upon Germany. There was no desire on the part of the editors to write a learned treatise; they simply wished to gather together and record the folk-songs of the Fatherland before they were lost forever. In Arnim's own words: "The richness of this our national song cannot fail to attract universal attention; it will surprise many; it will supplement many an effort of our own times, or will render such effort needless. We expect a great deal from the joyous happy life in these songs--a manifold, full tone in poetry, an echo of very definite ideas, or an impulse to arouse many a half-forgotten youthful memory. These poems will not only be read, they will be remembered and sung. They embrace in their content, perhaps the greatest portion of German poetry. They will thus set free many an indefinite longing--a something which is not satisfied by much re-reading." Goethe greeted the new undertaking with enthusiasm and urged the editors to "keep their poetic archives clean, strict, and in good order." He, too, urged that "this book should be in every house where joyful humans dwell, by the window, under the mirror, or where song book and cook book lie. There it should remain, ready to be opened, and there something should be found for every varying mood." While this fate has not been granted the work, it has grown deservedly popular. Philological criticism has caviled at the free hand which Arnim, especially, used in remolding the songs, but the editors are freed of any possible charge of intellectual dishonesty toward reader and source in that their object was to present artistic unities and not material for further study and dissection. A folk-song is a song which has become a part of the lyric consciousness of the people; often the singers do not know that what they are singing has a literary origin--they have thoroughly assimilated it. In the best sense of the term, the songs of _The Boy's Magic Horn_ are folk-songs. They are both narrative and dramatic as well as pure lyric in form, and are simple, powerful, and direct in expression. They treat all phases of German life of the past, from a crude version of the _Lay of Hildebrant_ to the riddles, lullabies, and counting-out rhymes of children. Pictures of the moral and social life of peasant Germany are followed by poems of nature and of the supernatural. Tragedies vary with humorous skits, extravagant and mocking, and the collection is enlivened with many flyting poems about tailors--a favorite butt of the peasant past. Ballads of popular origin and ballads with an added sentimental touch, such as the famous Strassburg poem with the added Alpine horn motif, are found here. Delicate, haunting rhymes alternate with crude assonances, and occasionally one meets with banalities; but, as a whole, the collection is of surprising merit. It is a product of the Romantic return to the past, but is filled with a poetic outlook toward the future. Of the work as a whole Heine says, "I cannot praise the book enough. It contains the most graceful flowers of the German spirit, and he who wishes to know the German people at their best, let him read these folk-songs. * * * In these songs one feels the heart-beat of the German folk. It is a revelation of all melancholy cheerfulness, all their foolish reason. Here German anger beats its drum, here is the pipe of German scorn, the kiss of German love." The part which the Romantic mood played in the Wars of Liberation is definite and well-recognized. The soldier, Gneisenau, felt that the politics of the future lay in the poetry of the day, and Adam Muller proudly proclaimed poetry to be a war-power: The Romantic longing for the distance, for love, when directed to the remote past of the Fatherland, not only yielded a new life in art and religion but induced a tremendous patriotism as well. The cosmopolitan temper which caused Lessing to say that love of country was an unknown feeling to him, gave way before an intenser nationalism. The earlier Romanticists began it; in the later group it took more specific form and became a propaganda. It was also precipitated in verse and prose. The spark came from Fichte, who was gradually led to see in the destiny of the German people a large cultural fact. Fichte, like a true German, emphasized education as the means of progress: Arnim grasped the problem from another side; he felt himself autochthonous, and consciously set out to make his connection with the soil react on those sprung from the soil. In him, as well as in Fichte, dawns the ideal of the German people as an entity, as a nation. There are three poets whose main value lies in the appeal they made to the belligerent spirit of the day. They represent three phases of the German character. Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769-1860), the eldest of the group, is the pamphleteer, the politician, and the teacher, as well as the poet. He is the hard-headed, earnest intellectual whose lyric poetry, whatever its esthetic weaknesses, arouses to action by its deadly insistence on an idea, on hatred of the French, on salvation by the sword. Arndt is all virility and fire. The life of Theodor Koerner (1791-1813), the son of Schiller's intimate friend, shows that mixture of idealism and practicality for which the Germans are becoming more and more noted. Koerner was aroused from his poetic diletantism by the alarms of war. He enlisted in the famous Luetzow corps and died a soldier's death, thus becoming the symbol of all that was ideal for the patriotic youth of his day, the hero and the poet, the man of "Lyre and Sword." His patriotic poems, often composed on the very field of battle, were sung by the soldiers to the roll of cannon and the beat of drum. The trace of Schiller's rhetoric in Koerner's poems adds to their effectiveness, spurring to action and firing young minds to patriotic emulation of high ideals. Like Arndt's lyrics, Koerner's poems are actual documents in the struggle for liberty-verses which affected men. The German mystic trait, the touch of the religious, marks the poetry of Max Schenkendorf (1783-1817). His was a quieter nature, which loved the Fatherland, its language, its romantic scenes and past. Characteristic also is his veneration for Queen Luise, whose beauty, tenderness, and fortitude had endeared her to the people as well as to the poets. Though every Romantic poet took some stand on the questions of the day, the most distinctly lyric of them, Joseph von Eichendorff (1788-1857), was not of a military temperament. Even he, however, followed the King of Prussia's call to arms but, significantly enough for "the last Knight of Romanticism," as he was called, arrived a day too late on the field of Waterloo. The somewhat fanciful title by no means indicates a jouster at windmills; it implies, rather, that in Eichendorff there were gathered for the last time with all their poetic brilliancy, the declining rays of the Romantic movement. After him, the enthusiasm is in its decline or changes to forms which lie outside the confines of the Romantic spirit. Eichendorff is a thorough _pleinairiste_, filled with the atmosphere of his native Silesia and, in some measure, hardly intelligible apart from its landscape. His birth-place, the castle of Lubowitz, near Ratibor, rising high on a hill in full sight of the Oder, is the ultimate background of all his nature-poetry. Here must be localized the ever-recurring hill and valley, wood, nightingale, and castle. Here, too, he heard the rustling of the forest leaves and the splashing of the fountain; here he was grounded in the strong and pious, if somewhat narrow, Catholicism of his race. It was a Catholicism, however, which was genuinely Romantic in that it sought comfort in sorrow directly from nature, a tendency which gives rise to some of the best and most heartfelt religious poetry in German literature. A fine example of this is to be found in Eichendorff's beautiful poems on the death of his child. It is interesting to see how, in this spiritual poetry, there is a constant melting of nature into religion, a dissolving of the Romantic atmosphere, of that youthful fervor which Eichendorff never really outgrew but continued to draw upon for inspiration for all his later work, into a broad, deep, manly piety. Eichendorff's poetry began with Tieckian notes; it was influenced by Brentano, and, unfortunately, was colored by the productions of Count Otto von Loeben (1786-1825), a pseudo-Romanticist of less than mediocre ability. But Eichendorff's individuality, with its constant accentuation of the acoustic, soon made itself felt and brought into German poetry what Tieck had tried for and failed in--an effect of perfect musical synthesis. The melody of the verse receives a peculiar lilt by frequent changes in metre between stanzas or in the midst of the stanza, and is thus saved from monotony. Were its metrical harmony tiring in any way, it could not have been set to music with such surprising success. As it is, Eichendorff's poetry has become a permanent part of the musical life of the nation. _The Broken Ring_ has passed into a folk-song, and _"O valleys wide!"_ with Mendelssohn's music is a popular choral of deep religious import. Yet Eichendorff does not attract either by the variety of his themes or of his rhymes. It is his very repetitions which so endear him to the popular heart. His is not passionate poetry, nor does it subjectively portray the soul-life of its author. In fact, it is saved from monotony of content at times only by its extreme honesty and its lovable simplicity. There is none of Goethe's power of suggesting landscape in a few touches, none of Goethe's logic of description, none of Goethe's clear inner objectivity, but a certain haze lies over Eichendorff's landscapes--the haze of a lyric Corot; at the same time, this landscape has the power of suggestion to the German mind. Paul Heyse, himself a poet, makes one of his characters say, "I have always carried Eichendorff Is book of songs with me on my travels. Whenever a feeling of strangeness comes over me in the variegated days, or I feel a longing for home, I turn its leaves and am at home again. None of our poets has the same magic reminiscence of home which captures our hearts with such touching monotony, with so few pictures and notes. * * * He is always new, as the voices of Nature itself, and never oppresses, but rather lulls one to sweet dreams as if a mother were singing her child to sleep." The one novel of Eichendorff which has lived, _From the Life of a Good-for-nothing_ (1826), is a last Romantic shoot of Friedrich Schlegel's doctrine of divine laziness--a delightful story, abounding in those elements which perennially endear Romanticism to the young heart, for it is full of nature and love and fortunate happenings. What could be more charming than the spirit in which the hero throws away the vegetables in his garden and puts in flowers? What more naive than his spyings, his fiddlings? The strength of the story lies in the fact that while its head is in the clouds, its feet are on the ground. There is no sentimentalizing, no breaking down of class distinctions; the good-for-nothing marries his lady-love, but she is of his own rank. The pseudo-Romanticism of modern novels is avoided; the hero neither wins a kingdom nor is he the long-lost heir of some potentate--he remains just what he was, a lovable good-for-nothing. The weather-eye on probability is what in later times has helped the Romanticists to slip so easily into Realism--and to reactionary views. Of all the great mass of material left by Friedrich de la Motte Fouque (1777-1843), only a lyric or two and the fairy tale _Undine_ have any value for the present day. Fouque represents the talent which develops in the glare of the world, is popular for a decade, but soon withers when the sun is set. His relations to Romanticism are largely external; he frequented the salons of Rachel Levin and Henrietta Herz in Berlin, was aided by August von Schlegel, and was praised by Jean Paul; but in his heart he was not inspired by any of the deeper longings that characterize the true Romantic spirit. Even though he is to be credited with the first modern dramatization of the Nibelungen story, _The Hero of the North_ (1810), and though he took subjects from the Germanic past and from the chivalric days, he brought no new life to his rehabilitations. Fouque was too productive, too facile, too external, too indifferent to psychological motivation to be real. He diluted Romanticism and sentimentalized it. In him patriotism becomes chauvinism; love, philandering; and his age of chivalry, a thinly veiled and sentimental picture of his own times. The strength and the indigenousness of Arnim are gone, and that power to throw a Romantic glamor over life which Tieck and Hoffmann had, is lacking. Only in his charming fairy-tale, _Undine_ (1811), does Fouque rise above his _milieu. Undine_, the source of which, according to Fouque himself, is to be found in a work of Paracelsus on supernatural beings, remains one of the best creations of the Romantic school and, like Eichendorff's novel, has become international, not only in its original form but in the opera by Lortzing (first performance, Hamburg, 1845). The value of the story lies in the author's power to make the reader believe in Undine, the water sprite, and in the presentation of a new nature-mythology. All Romanticists have consciously or unconsciously attempted to satisfy Friedrich Schlegel's demand for anew mythology: Fouque's earth, air, and water spirits people the elements with graceful forms from the world of nature; the nymph Undine in the form of a flowing stream embraces even in death the grave of her lover. Ludwig Uhland (1787-1862) was not fundamentally a Romantic personality. He is called "the classicist of Romanticism," and with justice. The term shows that he is felt to have something of completion, of inner perfection, of harmony of form and content which was lacking in the truer Romanticists. Uhland was without their early cosmopolitanism. Political life as manifested in him was, first of all, Suabian--for Uhland was a Suabian and most intimately associated with that section of Germany. He was actively and practically interested in the politics of his native land as a member of its legislative bodies and as delegate to the national parliament at Frankfurt in 1848. Uhland had a conservative love for the "good old Suabian law." He felt the doubtful position of the South German states in the struggle against Napoleon, and it was only when Wuertemberg took its stand with the allies in the final conflict that the embarrassment of his position was relieved, and Uhland's patriotic verse assumed its full tone. But his poetry never became a spur to national achievement like the verse of Arndt, that other German poet-professor. As a member of the national parliament, Uhland was opposed to the exclusion of Austria from the hegemony, and to the two-chamber system of legislation. But Uhland's conservatism is unalterably honest without any reactionary traits; he resigned his professorship rather than be hindered in his political activities, and refused, with the peasant's dourness, all the orders and distinctions that were offered him. Indeed, there is something of the peasant nature in all of Uhland's verse. Sturdy reserve characterizes it--that reserve which forbids the peasant to show his feelings under the stress of the greatest emotion. Uhland does not carry his feelings to market; like Schiller, he is not a love poet. There is no display, no self-analysis, no self-exaltation, no amalgamation of self with nature. Uhland as a poet is not interested in his own psychology, but in the impinging world and in the tender past. When Goethe said that Uhland was primarily a balladist, he was right, for the ballad presupposes just that permeation of the object by the emotion that satisfies the unquestionable lyric gift possessed by Uhland, without in any way destroying the essentially narrative objectivity of his style. Uhland's greatest fame rests, then, on his ballads. The difference between these and those of Goethe and Schiller is not merely in the so-called "castle-Romanticism" of Uhland, not in a lingering sentimentality in some of the poorer ones, but in Uhland's ability at will to catch the folk-tone. Sometimes this folk-tone is a question of certain technical tricks, such as the abrupt shift of scene, repetition, varying series of scenes or words, archaized language; but it is just as often in the mood which Uhland throws over the whole. He thus can catch the inner form and essential mood of the popular ballad in a way that not even Goethe does in his _Erlking_. Uhland's ballads and romances vary greatly in quality; none, perhaps, has the grandiose dramatic and ethical note of Schiller's _The Cranes of Ibycus_ and none the power of revealing the hidden forces of nature in anthropomorphic and demoniac form as Goethe does in his _Erlking_ and _The Fisher_. But Uhland's poems are more varied in treatment, even though he cannot be said to have brought any new forms and themes into German verse. There is much talk of poets and poetry in his verse and much of the tender melancholy of parting lovers, of separation and death. There are also some very healthy bacchic notes. Often the ballads are a mere presentation of a scene, with neither plot nor moral; once in a while, too, Uhland shows a humorous touch. But various as are his themes and treatments, the treatment is always nicely adapted to the theme. It is difficult to imagine a better suiting of form and content than in _The Singer's Curse_. The management of the vowel sequences is truly wonderful and the rhymes carry the emotional words with a fine virtuosity. _The Luck of Edenhall_, a variation of a Scottish theme and also of the Biblical "_Mene tekel_," displays without sermonizing the greatest ethical vigor. It has far more dramatic energy than either Byron's or Heine's "Belshazzar" poems, with fully as much dismal foreboding. _Taillefer_, which has been called "the sparkling queen" of Uhland's ballads, has fresh vigor but lacks the power of handling the moral forces of the universe with as much dramatic vividness. It has a naive joy of life not elsewhere found in Uhland's ballads. Uhland was the greatest poet of the "Suabian School," a group of young men who objected to being denominated a school. Among them was William Hauff (1802-27), who is known for several lyrics, a number of excellent short stories, and a historical novel, _Lichtenstein_ (1826), in the manner of Scott. His _Trooper's Song_ is a variation of an old theme and is of great metrical interest in that here, as in Uhland, one may observe how the subtle handling of rhythm, the lengthening or shortening of a line, or the shift of stress, brings with it a corresponding shift of emotion. _Lichtenstein_ is the story of the struggle of Ulrich of Wuertemberg against the Suabian League and gives us a Romantic picture of the Duke which is not justified by the facts. It was, however, an attempt to vitalize history and owes its origin to the Romantic longing for fatherland. Its immediate impulse among Scott's novels was _Quentin Durward_ and, like _Quentin Durward_, it has a double plot--the sentimental young lovers and the romantic ruler. It also shows all the pageantry of Romanticism and the naive technique of the beginning of an art-form in the early stages of a new literary movement. Friedrich Rueckert (1788-1866) was prevented from taking part in the Wars of Liberation by poor health, but added his _Sonnets in Harness_ to the poetry of the period. These sonnets had no such stirring effect as the poems of Koerner, not only because of their literary form, but because, in spite of their unquestioned belligerency, they had not the tone of religious conviction against the enemy which characterized the verses of Arndt and the rest. Other poems, like _Koerner's Spirit_, show how deeply Rueckert felt himself in sympathy with his times; his reward has been to have added a very large number of poems to the every-day repertory of Germany. His _Barbarossa_ is found in almost every reading book. The cycle _Love's Spring_ is an imperishable monument to his love for Louisa Wiethaus. But too many of the poems are dedicated to her and too many inconsequential moods relating to her are recorded. In spite of this, Rueckert has resolved the discord between every-day life and poetry with the simplest poetic apparatus. Rueckert has also enriched the German language with a mass of gnomic poetry, to the writing of which he was led by his Oriental studies. This gnomic poetry (_The Wisdom of the Brahman_) has been aptly said to recall at times the ripeness of the mature Goethe and at other times--Polonius. Rueckert was one of the first to introduce the Orient and its verse-forms into German literature. Here the influence of Friedrich Schlegel is unmistakable. He was also a master in the reproduction of the complicated metres of the East and South. Though many of these verse-forms have refused to become indigenous in Germany, a large number of new words invented by Rueckert have had poetical vogue, and even where the new formations were too bold or too _recherche_, they accustomed German ears to a new idea-presentation through sound. Rueckert, like the average Romanticist, lacked moderation in his production, and was utterly without critical faculty in respect to his own verse. Much that he has written has perished, but some of his work--both original and translation--is a permanent part of the best of German lyric verse. More individual than Rueckert is Adalbert von Chamisso (1781-1838). Though he was born in the Champagne in France, and was therefore a fellow-countryman of Joinville and La Fontaine, he became a German by education and preference, and his name is inseparably linked with German scholarship and letters. It is remarkable that Chamisso began to write German only after 1801 and is reported never to have spoken it perfectly; yet his verse ranks with the best products of Germany in fluency and in form. Much of it, especially that with woman's love as its theme, is extremely German in thought and feeling, though perhaps French in its keenness of analysis. So German is Chamisso felt to be that at his best he is ranked with Goethe and Heine. When the boy Chamisso was nine years old, the family was driven from France but was later allowed to return, though Adalbert never went back permanently. Thus it was that during the years 1806-13, the young expatriate led a life of the greatest mental torment; France no longer meant anything to him, and in Germany he felt himself a stranger and an outcast. Always awkward personally, and of a nervous temperament, he found it difficult to adjust himself to surrounding conditions. His scholarly zeal, however, and his ability to sit for hours in close study, show how completely his mentality was adjustable to the German manner. In Berlin he was accepted by the younger Romantic group and was a member of the famous North Star Club with Arnim and his set. In 1815-18 he made a trip around the world, and in later years devoted himself especially to the study of botany. Only the poetry of Chamisso's later period is of supreme consequence. As a man in the fifties, he wrote some of his most beautiful verse. He was a naive poet, but a poet of many moods. His love poetry is the poetry of longing, and ranks with that of Brentano in its ability to suggest states of feeling. Among his best poems are his verse-tales, such as _The Women of Weinsberg_, where his narrative genius ranks with that of his fellow-countryman, La Fontaine. Especially good are his poems in terzines. These mark the real introduction of this metre into Germany. The best of these, _Salas y Gomez_, has the additional advantage of real experience, for the material observation at the basis of it is derived from his tour of circumnavigation. His poems in this metre are often genre poems, pure prose in part, but frequently of a drastic humor that ranks with that of the best of the old French fabliaux. His realism is, however, never common, and, in such poems as _The Old Washerwoman_, to quote Goethe's _Tasso_, "he often ennobles what seems vulgar to us." Chamisso is Romantic in his interest in translations, in early reminiscences of Uhland's "castle-Romanticism," and in his poetry of indefinite longing, but his admiration for Napoleon and his tendency toward realism point the way which all Romanticism naturally took--the way leading through Heine to Young Germany on the one hand and through Tieck's novelettes to realistic prose on the other. As a matter of fact, the work for which Chamisso is best known, a work which has become international in popularity, _Peter Schlemihl_ (1813), is an early bit of such realistic prose. The tale of the man who sells his shadow to the devil for the sake of the sack of Fortunatus has become in Chamisso's hands a genuine folk-fairy-tale in key-note and style. At the same time it is thoroughly Romantic in subject-matter and treatment. The word Schlemihl is a Hebrew word variously interpreted as "Lover of God," or as "awkward fellow." If it mean the former, Schlemihl then becomes a Theophilus, that medieval Faust who also made a compact with the devil; if the latter, one who breaks his finger when sticking it into a custard pie; then Schlemihl is Chamisso himself, "that dean of Schlemihls," feeling himself at a loss in any environment. He may be the man without a country, he may be the man who draws attention to himself by selling what seems of little value to him, but which afterward proves indispensable for the right conduct of life. The story in this way brings forward a bit of popular ethics, or, rather, it examines an ethical note from the popular point of view. Like Hoffmann, Chamisso takes his reader into the midst of current life, but, unlike Hoffmann, his moods are not the dissolving views which leave the reader in doubt as to whether the whole is a phantasmagoria and a hallucination. _Schlemihl_ is genuinely and consistently realistic. It is a story in the first person and has a rigidly logical arrangement of episodes leading up to its climax. It does not make mood--it has mood. The brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm are the products of Romantic scholarship; they represent the highest type of scholarly attainment and of scholarly personality. They are always thought of together, for they shared all possessions alike and were not drawn apart by the fact that William married and Jacob remained a bachelor. Their fidelity to each other is touching, and no more lovable story is told than that of Jacob's breaking down in a lecture and crying, "My brother is so sick!" Jacob (1785-1863) was the philologist, the inductive gatherer of scientific material, the close logical deducer of facts. He "presented Germany with its mythology, with its history of legal antiquities, with its grammar and its history of language." He is the author of Grimm's law of consonant permutation which laid the foundations of modern philological science and is the founder of philological science in general. Wilhelm (1786-1859), no less exact a scientist, was more a Romantic nature, with a greater power of synthesis under poetic stress. The two brothers began their collecting activities under the influence of Arnim, and their work with folk-tales in prose corresponds to _The Boy's Magic Horn_ in verse. It was Wilhelm who gave Grimms' _Fairy Tales_ their artistic form. He remolded, joined, separated--in fact, wrought the crude materials into such shape that this work has penetrated into every land and has become a household word for young and old. The various early editions show the progress in the method of Wilhelm. The first edition (1812) reproduces more exactly what the brothers heard; the later ones show that Wilhelm consciously attempted to give artistic form to the tales. That his method was justified the history of the stories proves; they are not only material for ethnological study, but are dear to all hearts. The stories have the genuine folk-tone; they are true products of the folk-imagination, with all the logic of that imagination. All phases of life are touched and the interest never flags. The spirit of nature has been kept. The Romanticists were not successful in the drama. Kleist, the greatest dramatist of the period, was not primarily a Romantic poet. The Schlegels wrote frosty plays and Tieck attempted dramatic production. It was left for the most bizarre of the Romantic group to write the play of greatest power in it and to set a dramatic fashion which for more than a decade carried all before it. Zacharias Werner (1768-1823), after a life of wild sensual excesses, finally found refuge in the Roman Church and as a popular and sensational preacher aroused Vienna with drastic sermons and clownish antics. Of his various plays, _The Sons of the Valley_ (1803) and the _Cross on the Baltic_ (1806) deserve mention for their religious and mystic subject-matter, for which Werner himself has attempted an explanation, though without adding to their understanding. _Martin Luther, or the Consecration of Power_ (1807) is a pageant play of great interest. Its recantation, _The Power of Weakness_, was written after Werner's conversion. More important than these is his so-called "fate tragedy," _The 24th of February_ (1810 per formed in Weimar; published 1815). This day was a day of terror to Werner, for on it he lost in the same year his mother and his most intimate friend. He therefore in the play invests the day with a fatal significance, and on it a malignant fate has especial power over the fortunes of the persons of the drama; there is also a fatal requisite and a general atmosphere of fatalism. The play started a whole series; some of these were crude and weak imitations, others, like Grillparzer's _The Ancestress_, were of great power. These plays were conditioned by something in the air. Perhaps Napoleon, the man of fate, ruling the minds and destinies of a whole continent, had something to do with the philosophical background. Werner caught the fatalistic spirit, gave it concise and logical form, and succeeded in producing a play which has both atmosphere and logic of development. In all of these plays, in so far as they are good, the effect is produced by the recognition scenes which hold the reader rapt to the end. But the weak and vulgar imitations of the category outnumbered the powerful plays in the _genre_, and the well-merited death-blow was given them by Platen's _The Fateful Fork_ (1826). E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) was a thoroughly Romantic person. Like his fellow-Koenigsberger, Werner, he went through a period of wildest dissipation, and all his life was easily influenced by alcohol. He was a painter, a writer, and a musician. His ability in the pictorial arts was mainly in caricature and his career as a composer is typically Romantic; though he never but once completed a composition, that he started, he was thoroughly at home in the theory of the art. Like all Romanticists, Hoffmann was interested in and tried all phases of life and refused to recognize the boundaries between the various parts of existence, between the arts, and between reality and unreality. Hoffmann, with all his North German power of reasoning and his zeal and conscientiousness in public office, was emphatically _that_ Romanticist associated with the night-sides of literature and life. There is something uncanny both in the man and his writings. His power of putting the scene of his most unreal stories in the midst of well-known places, his ability to shift the reader from the real to the unreal and _vice versa_, make some of his stories seem like phantasmagorias. In all of Hoffmann's stories there is some unpleasant, bizarre character; this is the author's satire on his own strange personality. There is none of Poe's objectivity in Hoffmann, but he uses his subjectivity in a peculiarly Romantic fashion. It is his idea to raise the reader above the every-day point of view, to flee from this to a magic world where the unusual shall take the place of the real and where wonder shall rule. So there are in Hoffmann's stories a series of characters who are really doubles. To the uninitiated they seem every-day creatures; to those who know, they are fairies or beings from the supernatural world. Such characters are found at their best in _The Golden Pot_. Hoffmann has influenced both French and English literatures more than any other Romantic poet. Hawthorne and Poe read him, and he was felt by the French to be one of the first Germans whom they understood. It was not merely that his clear reason appealed to the French, but that they saw in him one endowed as with a sixth sense. He has a fineness of observation, especially for the ridiculous sides of humanity, together with a tenderness of spirit, that was new in German literature as such men as Sainte-Beuve and Gautier saw it. The soul at war with itself, uncovering its most secret thoughts, the _"malheur d'etre poete,"_ coupled with wit, taste, gaiety, and the comedy spirit--all these the French found in Hoffmann as in no other German. Poe was also influenced by Hoffmann, but Poe's whole world is the supernatural, and where Hoffmann slips with fantastic but logical changes from the real to the unreal, Poe's metempsychosis is the real in his world and he has a deeper insight into the world of terror. The difference between Hawthorne and Hoffmann is even more striking, for in the American the supernatural is the embodiment of the Puritan New England conscience. In Hoffmann there is no such elevation of the moral world to the rank of an atmosphere. In Hoffmann there is no out-of-doors, no lyric love; some of his characters are frankly insane. The musical takes on a supreme significance among the sensations, and music seemed the only art which was able to draw the soul of the man from his earth-bound habitation. Only in music did Hoffmann find the ability to make the Romantic escape from the homelessness of this existence to the all-embracing world of the unreal. But too often in his works does the unreal fail to satisfy the reader. There is an effort felt, an effect sought for, and, while the amalgamation of the two worlds is perfect, the world to which Hoffmann is able to take us proves to be without the cogency which our imaginations expect. Here Hoffmann fails. His world of the imagination cannot always be taken seriously. Count August von Platen-Hallermund (1796-1835) is characterized by the eternal Romantic homelessness; at every turn of his career this impresses one. Of ancient noble Franconian stock, he felt himself a foreigner in Bavaria which had acquired Franconia in the Napoleonic period. In his early life in the military academy at Munich he was never thoroughly at home, for his was not a military spirit and he was unable to follow his literary tastes. When finally he was enabled to study at Wuerzburg and Erlangen, even the friendship of Schelling could not compensate for the late beginning of a university career which was filled with the study of modern European and Oriental languages but which had the bitterest personal disappointments. Even in Italy, the land of every German poet's dreams, Platen never felt himself at home, and the pictures of him from his Italian life are of a tragic, lonesome figure. The discord between body and soul, that homelessness in one's own physical body which characterized Hoffmann and made him seem diabolical to so many, is also to be noted in Platen. Carried over to the moral world, it accounts for his ardent cultivation of friendship rather than love, and frees him from the bitter accusations of Heine, whose attack in _The Baths of Lucca_ is one of the most scurrilous and venomous pasquils in all literary history. Finally, in the esthetic world, Platen seems largely un-German. His esthetics were of the Classical and Renaissance times; in an age of the breaking down of conventions and of literary revolutions, Platen held himself rigidly aristocratic; he clung to a canon of beauty in an age which was giving birth to realism. Platen's poetry falls into two periods--the early German tentative period and the later or foreign period, the poems of which were mostly written in Italy and in imitation of, or adapted from, foreign metres. Platen is always represented as a master of form, and, since Jacob Grimm's characterization of him, has been accused of "marble coldness." That Platen handled difficult metres with virtuosity is not to be laid against him; it is to the advantage of German verse that such poems as his _ghasels_ made indigenous, in part, the feeling for mere beauty in verse. German poets have too often gone the road of mere formlessness. Platen cultivated style, polished and revised his lines with as great care as did his arch-enemy Heine, and it is only a confession of lack of ear to refuse him the name of poet. No one who reads his Polish Songs can help feeling that they are the products of fire and inspiration. It must be confessed, however, that there is in Platen a remarkable lack of inner experience. He went through life without ever having been shaken to the depths of his nature and was, unfortunately, not of so Olympian a calmness that, like Goethe, he could present the world in plastic repose and sublimity. With all his refinement and fervor he has left but few poems of lasting interest, and of these _The Grave in the Busento_ is perhaps the best. [Illustration: THE MAGIC HORN] _LUDWIG ACHIM VON ARNIM AND CLEMENS BRENTANO_ * * * * * THE BOY'S MAGIC HORN[7] (1806) WERE I A LITTLE BIRD Were I a little bird, And had two little wings, I'd fly to thee; But I must stay, because That cannot be. Though I be far from thee, In sleep I dwell with thee, Thy voice I hear. But when I wake again, Then all is drear. Each nightly hour my heart With thoughts of thee will start When I'm alone; For thou 'st a thousand times Pledged me thine own. * * * * * THE MOUNTAINEER Oh, would I were a falcon wild, I should spread my wings and soar; Then I should come a-swooping down By a wealthy burgher's door. In his house there dwells a maiden, She is called fair Magdalene, And a fairer brown-eyed damsel All my days I have not seen. On a Monday morning early, Monday morning, they relate, Magdalene was seen a-walking Through the city's northern gate. Then the maidens said: "Thy pardon-- Magdalene, where wouldst thou go?" "Oh, into my father's garden, Where I went the night, you know." And when she to the garden came, And straight into the garden ran, There lay beneath the linden-tree Asleep, a young and comely man. "Wake up, young man, be stirring, Oh rise, for time is dear, I hear the keys a-rattling, And mother will be here." "Hearst thou her keys a-rattling, And thy mother must be nigh, Then o'er the heath this minute Oh come with me, and fly!" And as they wandered o'er the heath, There for these twain was spread, A shady linden-tree beneath, A silken bridal-bed. And three half hours together, They lay upon the bed. "Turn round, turn round, brown maiden; Give me thy lips so red!" "Thou sayst so much of turning round, But naught of wedded troth, I fear me I have slept away My faith and honor both." "And fearest thou, thou hast slept away Thy faith and honor too, I say I'll wed thee yet, my dear, So thou shalt never rue." Who was it sang this little lay, And sang it o'er with cheer? On St. Annenberg by the town, It was the mountaineer. He sang it there right gaily, Drank mead and cool red wine, Beside him sat and listened Three dainty damsels fine. As many as sand-grains in the sea, As many as stars in heaven be, As many as beasts that dwell in fields, As many as pence which money yields, As much as blood in veins will flow, As much as heat in fire will glow, As much as leaves in woods are seen And little grasses in the green, As many as thorns that prick on hedges, As grains of wheat that harvest pledges, As much as clover in meadows fair, As dust a-flying in the air, As many as fish in streams are found, And shells upon the ocean's ground, And drops that in the sea must go, As many as flakes that shine in snow-- As much, as manifold as life abounds both far and nigh, So much, so many times, for e'er, oh thank the Lord on high! [Illustration: LUDWIG ACHIM VON ARNIM Stroehling] [Illustration: CLEMENS BRENTANO E. Linder] * * * * * THE SWISS DESERTER At Strassburg in the fort All woe began for me The Alpine bugle's call enticed me o'er, I had to swim to my dear country's shore; That should not be. One hour 'twas in the night, They took me in my plight, And led me straightway to the captain's door. O God, they caught me in the stream--what more? Now all is o'er. Tomorrow morn at ten The regiment I'll have to face; They'll lead me there to beg for grace. I'll have my just reward, I know. It must be so. Ye brothers, all ye men, Ye'll never see me here again; The shepherd boy, I say, began it all, And I accuse the Alpine bugle-call Of this my fall. I pray ye, brothers three, Come on and shoot at me; Fear not my tender life to hurt, Shoot on and let the red blood spurt-- Come on, I say! O Lord of heaven, on high! Take my poor erring soul Unto its heavenly goal; There let it stay forever-- Forget me never! * * * * * THE TAILOR IN HELL A tailor 'gan to wander One Monday morning fair, And then he met the devil, Whose feet and legs were bare: Hallo, thou tailor-fellow, Come now with me to hell--oh, And measure clothes for us to wear, For what we will, is well, oh! The tailor measured, then he took His scissors long, and clipped The devils' little tails all off, And to and fro they skipped. Hallo, thou tailor-fellow, Now hie thee out of hell--oh, We do not need this clipping, sir, For what we will, is well, oh! The tailor took his iron out, And tossed it in the fire; The devils' wrinkles then he pressed; Their screams were something dire. Hallo, thou tailor-fellow, Begone now from our hell--oh, We do not need this pressing, For what we will, is well, oh! "Keep still!" he said and pierced their heads With a bodkin from his sack. "This way we put the buttons on, For that's our tailor's knack! Hallo, thou tailor-fellow, Now get thee out of hell--oh, We do not need this dressing, For what we will, is well, oh! With thimble and with needle then His stitching he began, And closed the devils' nostrils up As tight as e'er one can. Hallo, thou tailor-fellow, Now his thee out of hell--oh, We cannot use our noses, Do what we will for smell, oh! Then he began to cut away-- It must have made them smart; With all his might the tailor ripped The devils' ears apart. Hallo, thou tailor-fellow, Now march away from hell--oh, We else should need a doctor, If what we will were well--oh! And last of all came Lucifer And cried: "What horror fell! No devil has his little tail; So drive him out of hell." Hallo, thou tailor-fellow, Now his thee out of hell--oh, We need to wear no clothes at all-- For what we will, is well, oh! And when the tailor's sack was packed, He felt so very well--oh! He hopped and skipped without dismay And had a laughing spell, oh! And hurried out of hell--oh, And stayed a tailor-fellow; And the devil will catch no tailor now, Let him steal, as he will--it is well, though! [Illustration: THE REAPER Walter Crane] * * * * * THE REAPER There is a reaper, Death his name; His might from God the highest came. Today his knife he'll whet, 'Twill cut far better yet; Soon he will come and mow, And we must bear the woe-- Beware, fair flower! The flowers fresh and green today, Tomorrow will be mowed away Narcissus so white, The meadows' delight, The hyacinthias pale And morning-glories frail-- Beware, fair flower! Full many thousand blossoms blithe Must fall beneath his deadly scythe: Roses and lilies pure, Your end is all too sure! Imperial lilies rare He will not spare-- Beware, fair flower! The bluet wee, of heaven's hue, The tulips white and yellow too, The dainty silver bell, The golden phlox as well-- All sink upon the earth. Oh, what a sorry dearth! Beware, fair flower! Sweet lavender of lovely scent, And rosemary, dear ornament, Sword-lilies proud, unfurled, And basil, quaintly curled, And fragile violet blue-- He soon will seize you too! Beware, fair flower! Death, I defy thee! Hasten near With one great sweep--I have no fear! Though hurt, I'll stay undaunted, For I shall be transplanted Into the garden by heaven's gate, The heavenly garden we all await. Rejoice, fair flower! _JACOB AND WILHELM GRIMM_ * * * * * FAIRY TALES[8] (1812) TRANSLATED AND EDITED BY MARGARET HUNT THE FROG-KING, OR IRON HENRY In old times, when wishing still helped one, there lived a king whose daughters were all beautiful, but the youngest was so beautiful that the sun itself, which has seen so much, was astonished whenever it shone in her face. Close by the King's castle lay a great dark forest, and under an old lime-tree in the forest was a well, and when the day was warm the King's child went out into the forest and sat down by the side of the cool fountain, and when she was dull she took a golden ball and threw it up high and caught it, and this ball was her favorite plaything. Now it so happened that, on one occasion, the princess' golden ball did not fall into the little hand which she was holding up for it, but onto the ground beyond, and rolled straight into the water. The King's daughter followed it with her eyes, but it vanished, and the well was deep so deep that the bottom could not be seen. On this she began to cry, and cried louder and louder, and could not be comforted. And as she thus lamented, some one said to her: "What ails thee, King's daughter? Thou weepest so that even a stone would show pity." She looked around to the side from whence the voice came, and saw a frog stretching forth its thick, ugly head from the water. "Ah! old water-splasher, is it thou?" asked she; "I am weeping for my golden ball, which has fallen into the well." [Illustration: JACOB GRIMM E. Hader] [Illustration: WILLIAM GRIMM E. Hader] "Be quiet, and do not weep," answered the frog; "I can help thee; but what wilt thou give me if I bring thy plaything up again?" "Whatever thou wilt have, dear frog," said she--"my clothes, my pearls and jewels, and even the golden crown which I am wearing." The frog answered, "I do not care for thy clothes, thy pearls and jewels, or thy golden crown, but if thou wilt love me and let me be thy companion and play-fellow, and sit by thee at thy little table, and eat off thy little golden plate, and drink out of thy little cup, and sleep in thy little bed--if thou wilt promise me this I will go down below and bring thee thy golden ball again." "Oh, yes," said she, "I promise thee all thou wishest, if thou wilt but bring me my ball back again." She, how ever, thought, "How the silly frog does talk! He lives in the water with the other frogs and croaks, and can be no companion to any human being!" But the frog, when he had received this promise, put his head into the water and sank down, and in a short time came swimming up again with the ball in his mouth, and threw it on the grass. The King's daughter was delighted to see her pretty plaything once more, and picked it up, and ran away with it. "Wait, wait," said the frog; "take me with thee; I can't run as thou canst." But what did it avail him to scream his croak, croak, after her, as loudly as he could? She did not listen to it, but ran home and soon forgot the poor frog, who was forced to go back into his well again. The next day, when she had seated herself at the table with the King and all the courtiers and was eating from her little golden plate, something came creeping splish splash, splish splash, up the marble staircase, and when it had got to the top, it knocked at the door and cried, "Princess, youngest princess, open the door for me." She ran to see who was outside, but when she opened the door, there sat the frog in front of it. Then she slammed the door to, in great haste, sat down to dinner again, and was quite frightened. The King saw plainly that her heart was beating violently, and said, "My child, what art thou so afraid of? Is there perchance a giant outside who wants to carry thee away?" "Ah, no," replied she, "it is no giant, but a disgusting frog." "What does the frog want with thee?" "Ah, dear father, yesterday when I was in the forest sitting by the well, playing, my golden ball fell into the water. And because I cried so the frog brought it out again for me, and because he insisted so on it, I promised him he should be my companion; but I never thought he would be able to come out of his water! And now he is outside there, and wants to come in to me." In the meantime it knocked a second time, and cried "Princess! youngest princess! Open the door for me! Dost thou not know what thou saidst to me Yesterday by the cool waters of the fountain! Princess, youngest princess! Open the door for me!" Then said the King, "That which thou has promised must thou perform. Go and let him in." She went and opened the door, and the frog hopped in and followed her, step by step, to her chair. There he sat still and cried, "Lift me up beside thee." She delayed, until at last the King commanded her to do it. When the frog was once on the chair he wanted to be on the table, and when he was on the table he said, "Now, push thy little golden plate nearer to me that we may eat together." She did this, but it was easy to see that she did not do it willingly. The frog enjoyed what he ate, but almost every mouthful she took choked her. At length he said, "I have eaten and am satisfied; now I am tired, carry me into thy little room and make thy little silken bed ready, and we will both lie down and go to sleep." The King's daughter began to cry, for she was afraid of the cold frog which she did not like to touch, and which was now to sleep in her pretty, clean little bed. But the King grew angry and said, "He who helped thee when thou wert in trouble ought not afterward to be despised by thee." So she took hold of the frog with two fingers, carried him upstairs, and put him in a corner. But when she was in bed he crept to her and said, "I am tired, I want to sleep as well as thou; lift me up or I will tell thy father." Then she was terribly angry, and took him up and threw him with all her might against the wall. "Now thou wilt be quiet, odious frog," said she. But when he fell down he was no frog but a king's son with beautiful kind eyes. He by her father's will was now her dear companion and husband. Then he told her how he had been bewitched by a wicked witch, and how no one could have delivered him from the well but herself, and that tomorrow they would go together into his kingdom. Then they went to sleep, and next morning when the sun awoke them, a carriage came driving up with eight white horses, which had white ostrich feathers on their heads, and were harnessed with golden chains, and behind stood the young King's servant, faithful Henry. Faithful Henry had been so unhappy when his master was changed into a frog that he had caused three iron bands to be laid round his heart, lest it should burst with grief and sadness. The carriage was to conduct the young King into his kingdom. Faithful Henry helped them both in, and placed himself behind again, and was full of joy because of this deliverance. And when they had driven a part of the way, the King's son heard a crackling behind him as if something had broken. So he turned round and cried, "Henry, the carriage is breaking." "No, master, it is not the carriage. It is a band from my heart, which was put there in my great pain when you were a frog and imprisoned in the well." Again and once again while they were on their way something cracked, and each time the King's son thought the carriage was breaking; but it was only the bands which were springing from the heart of faithful Henry because his master was set free and was happy. * * * * * THE WOLF AND THE SEVEN LITTLE KIDS There was once on a time an old goat who had seven little kids, and she loved them with all the love of a mother for her children. One day she wanted to go into the forest and fetch some food. So she called all seven to her and said, "Dear children, I have to go into the forest; be on your guard against the wolf; if he comes in, he will devour you all--skin, hair, and everything. The wretch often disguises himself, but you will know him at once by his rough voice and his black feet." The kids said, "Dear mother, we will take good care of ourselves; you may go away without any anxiety." Then the old one bleated and went on her way with an easy mind. It was not long before some one knocked at the house door, and cried, "Open the door, dear children; your mother is here, and has brought something back with her for each of you." But the little kids knew that it was the wolf, by the rough voice. "We will not open the door," cried they; "thou art not our mother. She has a soft, pleasant voice, but thy voice is rough; thou art the wolf!" Then the wolf went away to a shopkeeper and bought himself a great lump of chalk, ate this, and made his voice soft with it. Then he came back, knocked at the door of the house, and cried, "Open the door, dear children; your mother is here and has brought something back with her for each of you." But the wolf had laid his black paws against the window, and the children saw them and cried, "We will not open the door; our mother has not black feet like thee; thou art the wolf!" Then the wolf ran to a baker and said, "I have hurt my feet, rub some dough over them for me." And when the baker had rubbed his feet over, he ran to the miller and said, "Strew some white meal over my feet for me." The miller thought to himself, "The wolf wants to deceive some one," and refused; but the wolf said, "If thou wilt not do it, I will devour thee." Then the miller was afraid, and made his paws white for him. Truly men are like that. So now the wretch went for the third time to the house door, knocked at it, and said, "Open the door for me, children; your dear little mother has come home, and has brought every one of you something back from the forest with her." The little kids cried, "First show us thy paws that we may know if thou art our dear little mother." Then he put his paws in through the window, and when the kids saw that they were white, they believed that all he said was true, and opened the door. But who should come in but the wolf! They were terrified and wanted to hide themselves. One sprang under the table, the second into the bed, the third into the stove, the fourth into the kitchen, the fifth into the cupboard, the sixth under the washing-bowl, and the seventh into the clock-case. But the wolf found them all, and used no great ceremony; one after the other he swallowed them down his throat. The youngest in the clock-case was the only one he did not find. When the wolf had satisfied his appetite he took himself off, laid himself down under a tree in the green meadow outside, and went to sleep. Soon afterward the old goat came home again from the forest. Ah! what a sight she saw there! The house door stood wide open. The table, chairs, and benches were thrown down, the washing-bowl lay broken to pieces, and the quilts and pillows were pulled off the bed. She sought her children, but they were nowhere to be found. She called them one after another by name, but no one answered. At last, when she came to the youngest, a soft voice cried, "Dear mother, I am in the clock-case." She took the kid out, and it told her that the wolf had come and had eaten all the others. Then you may imagine how she wept over her poor children. At length in her grief she went out, and the youngest kid ran with her. When they came to the meadow, there lay the wolf by the tree snoring so loud that the branches shook. She looked at him on every side and saw that something was moving and struggling in his gorged body. "Ah, heavens!" said she, "is it possible that my poor children, whom he has swallowed down for his supper, can be still alive?" Then the kid had to run home and fetch scissors, and a needle and thread, and the goat cut open the monster's stomach. Hardly had she made one cut than one little kid thrust its head out; and, when she had cut further, all six sprang out one after another. They were all still alive and had suffered no injury whatever, for in his greediness the monster had swallowed them down whole. What rejoicing there was! Then they embraced their dear mother, and jumped like a tailor at his wedding. The mother, however, said, "Now go and look for some big stones, and we will fill the wicked beast's stomach with them while he is still asleep." Then the seven kids dragged the stones thither with all speed, and put as many of them into his stomach as they could get in; and the mother sewed him up again in the greatest haste, so that he was not aware of anything, and never once stirred. When the wolf at length had had his sleep out, he got on his legs, and, as the stones in his stomach made him very thirsty, he wanted to go to a well to drink. But when he began to walk and to move about, the stones in his stomach knocked against one another and rattled. Then cried he-- "What rumbles and tumbles Against my poor bones? I thought 'twas six kids, But it's naught but big stones." And when he got to the well and stooped over the water and was just about to drink, the heavy stones made him fall in and there was no help, but he had to drown miserably. When the seven kids saw that, they came running to the spot, and cried aloud, "The wolf is dead! The wolf is dead!" and danced for joy round about the well with their mother. * * * * * RAPUNZEL There were once a man and a woman who had long in vain wished for a child. At length the woman hoped that God was about to grant her desire. These people had a little window at the back of their house from which a splendid garden could be seen, which was full of the most beautiful flowers and herbs. It was, however, surrounded by a high wall, and no one dared to go into it because it belonged to an enchantress, who had great power and was dreaded by all the world. One day the woman was standing by this window and looking down into the garden, when she saw a bed which was planted with the most beautiful rampion (rapunzel), and it looked so fresh and green that she longed for it, and had the greatest desire to eat some. This desire increased every day, and as she knew that she could not get any of it, she quite pined away and looked pale and miserable. Then her husband was alarmed, and asked, "What aileth thee, dear wife?" "Ah," she replied, "if I can't get some of the rampion, which is in the garden behind our house, to eat, I shall die." The man, who loved her, thought, "Sooner than let my wife die, I will bring her some of the rampion myself, let it cost me what it will." In the twilight of evening, he clambered down over the wall into the garden of the enchantress, hastily clutched a handful of rampion, and took it to his wife. She at once made herself a salad of it and ate it with much relish. She, however, liked it so much, so very much, that the next day she longed for it three times as much as before, and, if he was to have any rest, her husband must once more descend into the garden. In the gloom of evening, therefore, he let himself down again; but when he had clambered down the wall he was terribly afraid, for he saw the enchantress standing before him. "How can't thou dare," said she with angry look, "to descend into my garden and steal my rampion like a thief? Thou shalt suffer for it!" "Ah," answered he, "let mercy take the place of justice; I only made up my mind to do it out of necessity. My wife saw your rampion from the window, and felt such a longing for it that she would have died if she had not got some to eat." Then the enchantress allowed her anger to be softened, and said to him, "If the case be as thou sayest, I will allow thee to take away with thee as much rampion as thou wilt, only I make one condition--thou must give me the child which thy wife will bring into the world; it shall be well treated and I will care for it like a mother." The man in his terror consented to everything, and when the woman was brought to bed, the enchantress appeared at once, gave the child the name of Rapunzel, and took it away with her. Rapunzel grew into the most beautiful child beneath the sun. When she was twelve years old, the enchantress shut her into a tower which lay in a forest and had neither stairs nor door, but quite at the top was a little window. When the enchantress wanted to go in, she placed herself beneath this, and cried cried-- "Rapunzel, Rapunzel, Let down thy hair to me." Rapunzel had magnificent long hair, fine as spun gold, and when she heard the voice of the enchantress she unfastened her braided tresses, wound them round one of the hooks of the window above, and then the hair fell twenty ells down, and the enchantress climbed up by it. After a year or two, it came to pass that the King's son rode through the forest and went by the tower; there he heard a song, which was so charming that he stood still and listened. This was Rapunzel, who in her solitude passed her time in letting her sweet voice resound. The King's son wanted to climb up to her, and looked for the door of the tower, but none was to be found. He rode home, but the singing had so deeply touched his heart that every day he went out into the forest and listened to it. Once, when he was thus standing behind a tree, he saw that an enchantress came there, and he heard how she cried-- "Rapunzel, Rapunzel, Let down thy hair." Then Rapunzel let down the braids of her hair, and the enchantress climbed up to her. "If that is the ladder by which one mounts, I will for once try my fortune," said he; and the next day when it began to grow dark, he went to the tower and cried-- "Rapunzel, Rapunzel, Let down thy hair." Immediately the hair fell down and the King's son climbed up. At first Rapunzel was terribly frightened when a man such as her eyes had never yet beheld came to her; but the King's son began to talk to her quite like a friend, and told her that his heart had been so stirred that it had let him have no rest, and he had been forced to see her. Then Rapunzel lost her fear, and when he asked her if she would take him for her husband, and she saw that he was young and handsome, she thought, "He will love me more than old Dame Gothel does;" and she said yes, and laid her hand in his. She said, "I will willingly go away with thee, but I do not know how to get down. Bring with thee a skein of silk every time that thou comest, and I will weave a ladder with it, and when that is ready I will descend, and thou wilt take me on thy horse." They agreed that, until that time, he should always come to see her in the evening, for the old woman came by day. The enchantress remarked nothing of this, until once Rapunzel said to her, "Tell me, Dame Gothel, how it happens that you are so much heavier for me to draw up than the young King's son--he is with me in a moment." "Ah! thou wicked child," cried the enchantress, "what do I hear thee say? I thought I had separated thee from all the world, and yet thou hast deceived me!" In her anger she clutched Rapunzel's beautiful tresses, wrapped them twice round her left hand, seized a pair of scissors with the right, and, snip, snap, they were cut off, and the lovely braids lay on the ground. And she was so pitiless that she took poor Rapunzel into a desert where she had to live in great grief and misery. On the same day, however, that she cast out Rapunzel, the enchantress in the evening fastened the braids of hair which she had cut off to the hook of the window, and when the King's son came and cried cried-- "Rapunzel, Rapunzel, Let down thy hair," she let the hair down. The King's son ascended, but he did not find his dearest Rapunzel above-only the enchantress, who gazed at him with wicked and venomous looks. "Aha!" she cried mockingly, "thou wouldst fetch thy dearest, but the beautiful bird sits no longer singing in the nest; the cat has got it, and will scratch out thy eyes as well. Rapunzel is lost to thee; thou wilt never see her more." The King's son was beside himself with pain, and in his despair leapt down from the tower. He escaped with his life, but the thorns into which he fell pierced his eyes. Then he wandered quite blind about the forest, ate nothing but roots and berries, and did nothing but lament and weep over the loss of his dearest wife. Thus he roamed about in misery for some years, and at length came to the desert where Rapunzel, with the twins to which she had given birth, a boy and a girl, lived in wretchedness. He heard a voice, and it seemed so familiar to him that he went toward it, and, when he approached, Rapunzel knew him and fell on his neck and wept. Two of her tears wetted his eyes and they grew clear again so that he could see with them as before. He led her to his kingdom where he was joyfully received, and they lived for a long time afterward, happy and contented. * * * * * HAENSEL AND GRETHEL Hard by a great forest dwelt a poor wood-cutter with his wife and his two children. The boy was called Haensel and the girl Grethel. He had little to bite and to break, and once, when great scarcity fell on the land, he could no longer procure daily bread. Now when he thought over this by night in his bed, and tossed about in his anxiety, he groaned and said to his wife, "What is to become of us? How are we to feed our poor children when we no longer have anything even for ourselves?" "I'll tell you what, husband," answered the woman, "early tomorrow morning we will take the children out into the forest to where it is the thickest, and there we will light a fire for them, and give each of them one piece of bread more; then we will go to our work and leave them alone. They will not find the way home again, and we shall be rid of them." "No, wife," said the man, "I will not do that; how can I bear to leave my children alone in the forest? The wild animals would soon come and tear them to pieces." "O, thou fool!" said she, "then we must all four die of hunger and thou mayest as well plane the planks for our coffins;" and she left him no peace until he consented. "But I feel very sorry for the poor children, all the same," said the man. [Illustration: HAeNSEL AND GRETHEL Ludwig Richter] The two children had also not been able to sleep for hunger, and had heard what their step-mother had said to their father. Grethel wept bitter tears, and said to Haensel, "Now all is over with us." "Be quiet, Grethel," said Haensel. "Do not distress thyself, I will soon find a way to help us." And when the old folks had fallen asleep, he got up, put on his coat, opened the door below, and crept outside. The moon shone brightly and the white pebbles which lay in front of the house glittered like real silver pennies. Haensel stooped and put as many of them in the little pocket of his coat as he could possibly get in. Then he went back and said to Grethel, "Be comforted, dear little sister, and sleep in peace; God will not forsake us;" and he lay down again in his bed. When day dawned, but before the sun had risen, the woman came and awoke the two children, saying, "Get up, you sluggards! we are going into the forest to fetch wood." She gave each a little piece of bread, and said, "There is something for your dinner, but do not eat it up before then, for you will get nothing else." Grethel took the bread under her apron, as Haensel had the stones in his pocket. Then they all set out together on the way to the forest. When they, had walked a short time, Haensel stood still and peeped back at the house, and did so again and again. His father said, "Haensel, what art thou looking at there and staying behind for? Mind what thou art about, and do not forget how to use thy legs." "Ah, father," said Haensel, "I am looking at my little white cat, which is sitting upon the roof, and wants to say good-bye to me." The wife said, "Fool, that is not thy little cat; that is the morning sun which is shining on the chimneys." Haensel, however, had not been looking back at the cat, but had been constantly throwing one of the white pebble-stones out of his pocket on the road. When they had reached the middle of the forest, the father said, "Now, children, pile up some wood, and I will light a fire that you may not be cold." Haensel and Grethel gathered brushwood together, as high as a little hill. The brushwood was lighted, and when the flames were burning very high the woman said, "Now, children, lay yourselves down by the fire and rest and we will go into the forest and cut some wood. When we have done, we will come back and fetch you away." Haensel and Grethel sat by the fire, and, when noon came, each ate a little piece of bread, but, as they heard the strokes of the wood-axe, they believed that their father was near. It was, however, not the axe; it was a branch which he had fastened to a withered tree which the wind was blowing backward and forward; and, as they had been sitting such a long time, their eyes shut with fatigue and they fell fast asleep. When at last they awoke it was already dark night. Grethel began to cry and said, "How are we to get out of the forest now?" But Haensel comforted her and said, "Just wait a little, until the moon has risen, and then we will soon find the way." And when the full moon had risen, Haensel took his little sister by the hand and followed the pebbles, which shone like newly-coined silver pieces and showed them the way. They walked the whole night long, and by break of day came once more to their father's house. They knocked at the door, and when the woman opened it and saw that it was Haensel and Grethel, she said, "You naughty children, why have you slept so long in the forest? We thought you were never coming back at all!" The father, however, rejoiced, for it had cut him to the heart to leave them behind alone. Not long afterward, there was once more great scarcity in all parts, and the children heard their mother saying at night to their father, "Everything is eaten again; we have one-half loaf left, and after that there is an end. The children must go. We will take them farther into the wood, so that they will not find their way out again; there is no other means of saving ourselves!" The man's heart was heavy, and he thought, "It would be better for thee to share the last mouthful with thy children." The woman, however, would listen to nothing that he had to say, but scolded and reproached him. He who says A must say B likewise, and, as he had yielded the first time, he had to do so a second time also. The children were, however, still awake and had heard the conversation. When the old folks were asleep, Haensel again got up, and wanted to go out and pick up pebbles; but the woman had locked the door, and Haensel could not get out. Nevertheless he comforted his little sister, and said, "Do not cry, Grethel, go to sleep quietly. The good God will help us." Early in the morning came the woman, and took the children out of their beds. Their bit of bread was given to them, but it was still smaller than the time before. On the way into the forest Haensel crumbled his in his pocket, and often stood still and threw a morsel on the ground. "Haensel, why dost thou stop and look around?" asked the father; "go on." "I am looking back at my little pigeon which is sitting on the roof, and wants to say good-bye to me," answered Haensel. "Simpleton!" said the woman, "that is not thy little pigeon, that is the morning sun that is shining on the chimney." Haensel, however, little by little, threw all the crumbs on the path. The woman led the children still deeper into the forest, where they had never in their lives been before. Then a great fire was again made, and the mother said, "Just sit there, you children, and when you are tired you may sleep a little; we are going into the forest to cut wood, and in the evening, when we are done, we will come and fetch you away." When it was noon, Grethel shared her piece of bread with Haensel, who had scattered his by the way. Then they fell asleep and evening came and went, but no one came to the poor children. They did not awake until it was dark night; but Haensel comforted his little sister and said, "Just wait, Grethel, until the moon rises, and then we shall see the crumbs of bread which I have strewn about. They will show us our way home again." When the moon rose they set out, but they found no crumbs, for the many thousands of birds which fly about in the woods and fields had picked them all up. Haensel said to Grethel, "We shall soon find the way," but they did not find it. They walked the whole night and all the next day too, from morning till evening, but they did not get out of the forest, and were very hungry, for they had nothing to eat but two or three berries which grew on the ground. And as they were so weary that their legs would carry them no longer, they lay down beneath a tree and fell asleep. It was now three mornings since they had left their father's house. They began to walk again, but they always got so much deeper into the forest that, if help did not come soon, they must die of hunger and weariness. When it was mid-day, they saw a beautiful snow-white bird sitting on a bough, which sang so delightfully that they stood still and listened to it. And when it had finished its song, it spread its wings and flew away before them, and they followed it until they reached a little house, on the roof of which it alighted; and when they came quite up to the little house they saw that it was built of bread and covered with cakes, and that the windows were of clear sugar. "We will set to work on that," said Haensel, "and have a good meal. I will eat a bit of the roof, and thou, Grethel, canst eat some of the window; it will taste sweet." Haensel reached up above, and broke off a little of the roof to try how it tasted, and Grethel leant against the window and nibbled at the panes. Then a soft voice cried from the room-- "Nibble, nibble, gnaw, Who is nibbling at my little house?" The children answered-- "The wind, the wind, The heaven-born wind," and went on eating without disturbing themselves. Haensel, who thought the roof tasted very nice, tore down a great piece of it, and Grethel pushed out the whole of one round window-pane, sat down, and enjoyed herself with it. Suddenly the door opened, and a very, very old woman, who supported herself on crutches, came creeping out. Haensel and Grethel were so terribly frightened that they let fall what they had in their hands. The old woman, however, nodded her head, and said, "Oh, you dear children, who has brought you here? Do come in, and stay with me. No harm shall happen to you." She took them both by the hand, and led them into her little house. Then good food was set before them, milk and pancakes, with sugar, apples, and nuts. Afterward two pretty little beds were covered with clean white linen, and Haensel and Grethel lay down in them, and thought they were in heaven. The old woman had only pretended to be so kind; she was in reality a wicked witch, who lay in wait for children, and had only built the little bread house in order to entice them there. When a child fell into her power, she killed it, cooked and ate it, and that was a feast day with her. Witches have red eyes, and cannot see far, but they have a keen scent, like the beasts, and are aware when human beings draw near. When Haensel and Grethel came into her neighborhood, she laughed maliciously, and said mockingly, "I have them; they shall not escape me again!" Early in the morning, before the children were awake, she was already up, and when she saw both of them sleeping and looking so pretty, with their plump red cheeks, she muttered to herself, "That will be a dainty mouthful!" Then she seized Haensel with her shriveled hand, carried him into a little stable, and shut him in with a grated door. He might scream as he liked, that was of no use. Then she went to Grethel, shook her till she awoke, and cried, "Get up, lazy thing, fetch some water, and cook something good for thy brother; he is in the stable outside, and is to be made fat. When he is fat, I will eat him." Grethel began to weep bitterly, but it was all in vain; she was forced to do what the wicked witch ordered her. And now the best food was cooked for poor Haensel, but Grethel got nothing but crab-shells. Every morning the woman crept to the little stable, and cried, "Haensel, stretch out thy finger that I may feel if thou wilt soon be fat." Haensel, however, stretched out a little bone to her, and the old woman, who had dim eyes, could not see it, and thought it was Haensel's finger, and was astonished that there was no way of fattening him. When four weeks had gone by, and Haensel still continued thin, she was seized with impatience and would not wait any longer. "Hola, Grethel," she cried to the girl, "be active, and bring some water. Let Haensel be fat or lean, tomorrow I will kill him and cook him." Ah, how the poor little sister did lament when she had to fetch the water, and how her tears did flow down over her cheeks! "Dear God, do help us!" she cried. "If the wild beasts in the forest had but devoured us, we should at any rate have died together." "Just keep thy noise to thyself," said the old woman; "all that won't help thee at all." Early in the morning, Grethel had to go out and hang up the caldron with the water, and light the fire. "We will bake first," said the old woman; "I have already heated the oven, and kneaded the dough." She pushed poor Grethel out to the oven from which flames of fire were already darting. "Creep in," said the witch, "and see if it is properly heated, so that we can shut the bread in." And when once Grethel was inside, she intended to shut the oven and let her bake in it, and then she would eat her, too. But Grethel saw what she had in her mind, and said, "I do not know how I am to do it; how do you get in?" "Silly goose," said the old woman. "The door is big enough; just look, I can get in myself!" and she crept up and thrust her head into the oven. Then Grethel gave her a push that drove her far into it, and shut the iron door, and fastened the bolt. Oh! then she began to howl quite horribly, but Grethel ran away, and the godless witch was miserably burnt to death. Grethel, however, ran as quick as lightning to Haensel, opened his little stable, and cried, "Haensel, we are saved! The old witch is dead!" Then Haensel sprang out like a bird from its cage when the door is opened for it. How they did rejoice and embrace each other, and dance about and kiss each other! And as they had no longer any need to fear her, they went into the witch's house; and in every corner there stood chests full of pearls and jewels. "These are far better than pebbles!" said Haensel, and thrust into his pockets whatever could be got in; and Grethel said, "I, too, will take something home with me," and filled her pinafore full. "But now we will go away," said Haensel, "that we may get out of the witch's forest." When they had walked for two hours, they came to a great piece of water. "We cannot get over," said Haensel, "I see no foot-plank, and no bridge." "And no boat crosses either," answered Grethel, "but a white duck is swimming there; if I ask her, she will help us over." Then she cried-- "Little duck, little duck, dost thou see, Haensel and Grethel are waiting for thee? There's never a plank, or bridge in sight, Take us across on thy back so white." The duck came to them, and Haensel seated himself on its back, and told his sister to sit by him. "No," replied Grethel, "that will be too heavy for the little duck; she shall take us across, one after the other." The good little duck did so, and when they were once safely across and had walked for a short time, the forest seemed to be more and more familiar to them, and at length they saw from afar their father's house. Then they began to run, rushed into the parlor, and threw themselves into their father's arms. The man had not known one happy hour since he had left the children in the forest; the woman, however, was dead. Grethel emptied her pinafore until pearls and precious stones ran about the room, and Haensel threw one handful after another out of his pocket to add to them. Then all anxiety was at an end, and they lived together in perfect happiness. My tale is done. There runs a mouse; whosoever catches it may make himself a big fur cap out of it. * * * * * THE FISHERMAN AND HIS WIFE There was once on a time a Fisherman who lived with his wife in a miserable hovel close by the sea, and every day he went out fishing. And once as he was sitting with his rod, looking at the clear water, his line suddenly went down, far down below, and when he drew it up again he brought out a large Flounder. Then the Flounder said to him, "Hark, you Fisherman, I pray you, let me live; I am no Flounder really, but an enchanted prince. What good will it do you to kill me? I should not be good to eat; put me in the water again, and let me go." "Come," said the Fisherman, "there is no need for so many words about it--a fish that can talk I should certainly let go, anyhow." With that he put him back again into the clear water, and the Flounder went to the bottom, leaving a long streak of blood behind him. Then the Fisherman got up and went home to his wife in the hovel. "Husband," said the woman, "have you caught nothing today?" "No," said the man; "I did catch a Flounder, who said he was an enchanted prince, so I let him go again." "Did you not wish for anything first?" said the woman. "No," said the man; "what should I wish for?" "Ah," said the woman, "it is surely hard to have to live always in this dirty hovel. You might have wished for a small cottage for us. Go back and call him. Tell him we want to have a small cottage; he will certainly give us that." "Ah," said the man, "why should I go there again?" "Why," said the woman, "you did catch him, and you let him go again; he is sure to do it. Go at once." The man still did not quite like to go, but did not like to oppose his wife, either, and so went to the sea. When he got there the sea was all green and yellow, and no longer smooth, as before; so he stood and said-- "Flounder, Flounder, in the sea, Come, I pray thee, here to me; For my wife, good Ilsabil, Wills not as I'd have her will." Then the Flounder came swimming to him and said, "Well, what does she want, then?" "Ah," said the man, "I did catch you, and my wife says I really ought to have wished for something. She does not like to live in a wretched hovel any longer; she would like to have a cottage." "Go, then," said the Flounder, "she has it already." When the man went home, his wife was no longer in the hovel, but, instead of it, there stood a small cottage, and she was sitting on a bench before the door. Then she took him by the hand and said to him, "Just come inside, look, now isn't this a great deal better?" So they went in, and there was a small porch, and a pretty little parlor and bedroom and a kitchen and pantry, with the best of furniture, and fitted up with the most beautiful things made of tin and brass, whatsoever was wanted. And behind the cottage there was a small yard, with hens and ducks, and a little garden with flowers and fruit. "Look," said the wife, "is not that nice!" "Yes," said the husband, "and so we must always think it; now we will live quite contented." "We will think about that," said the wife. With that they ate something and went to bed. Everything went well for a week or a fortnight, and then the woman said, "Hark you, husband, this cottage is far too small for us, and the garden and yard are little; the Flounder might just as well have given us a larger house. I should like to live in a great stone castle; go to the Flounder, and tell him to give us a castle." "Ah, wife," said the man, "the cottage is quite good enough; why should we live in a castle?" "What!" said the woman; "just go there, the Flounder can always do that." "No, wife," said the man, "the Flounder has just given us the cottage; I do not like to go back so soon. It might make him angry." "Go," said the woman, "he can do it quite easily, and will be glad to do it; just you go to him." The man's heart grew heavy, and he would not go. He said to himself, "It is not right," and yet he went. And when he came to the sea the water was quite purple and dark-blue, and gray and thick, and no longer green and yellow; but it was still quiet. And he stood there and said-- "Flounder, Flounder, in the sea, Come, I pray thee, here to me; For my wife, good Ilsabil, Wills not as I'd have her will." "Well, what does she want, then?" said the Flounder. "Alas," said the man, half scared, "she wants to live in a great stone castle." "Go to it, then, she is standing before the door," said the Flounder. Then the man went away, intending to go home, but when he got there, he found a great stone palace, and his wife was just standing on the steps going in, and she took him by the hand and said, "Come in." So he went in with her, and in the castle was a great hall paved with marble, and many servants, who flung wide the doors; and the walls were all bright with beautiful hangings, and in the rooms were chairs and tables of pure gold, and crystal chandeliers hung from the ceiling, and all the rooms and bedrooms had carpets, and food and wine of the very best were standing on all the tables so that they nearly broke down beneath it. Behind the house, too, there was a great courtyard, with stables for horses and cows, and the very best of carriages; there was a magnificent large garden, too, with the most beautiful flowers and fruit-trees, and a park quite half a mile long, in which were stags, deer, and hares, and everything that could be desired. "Come," said the woman, "isn't that beautiful?" "Yes, indeed," said the man; "now let it be; we will live in this beautiful castle and be content." "We will consider about that," said the woman, "and sleep upon it;" thereupon they went to bed. Next morning the wife awoke first, and it was just daybreak, and from her bed she saw the beautiful country lying before her. Her husband was still stretching himself, so she poked him in the side with her elbow, and said, "Get up, husband, and just peep out of the window. Look you, couldn't we be the King over all that land? Go to the Flounder, we will be the King." "Ah, wife," said the man, "why should we be King? I do not want to be King." "Well," said the wife, "if you won't be King, I will; go to the Flounder, for I will be King." "Oh, wife," said the man, "why do you want to be King? I do not like to say that to him." "Why not?" asked the woman; "go to him this instant; I must be King!" So the man went, and was quite unhappy because his wife wished to be King. "It is not right; it is not right," thought he. He did not wish to go; but yet he went. And when he came to the sea, it was quite dark-gray, and the water heaved up from below, and smelt putrid. Then he went and stood by it, and said-- "Flounder, Flounder, in the sea, Come, I pray thee, here to me; For my wife, good Ilsabil, Wills not as I'd have her will." "Well, what does she want, then?" asked the Flounder. "Alas," said the man, "she wants to be King." "Go to her; she is King already." So the man went, and when he came to the palace, the castle had become much larger, and had a great tower and magnificent ornaments, and the sentinel was standing before the door, and there were numbers of soldiers with kettle-drums and trumpets. And when he went inside the house, everything was of real marble and gold, with velvet covers and great golden tassels. Then the doors of the hall were opened, and there was the court in all its splendor, and his wife was sitting on a high throne of gold and diamonds, with a great crown of gold on her head, and a sceptre of pure gold and jewels in her hand, and on both sides of her stood her maids-in-waiting in a row, each of them always one head shorter than the last. Then he went and stood before her, and said, "Ah, wife, and now you are King!" "Yes," said the woman, "now I am King." So he stood and looked at her, and when he had looked at her thus for a time he said, "And now that you are King, let all else be; now we will wish for nothing more." "Nay, husband," said the woman, quite anxiously, "I find time pass very heavily; I can bear it no longer; go to the Flounder. I am King, but I must be Emperor, too." "Alas, wife, why do you wish to be Emperor?" "Husband," said she, "go to the Flounder. I will be Emperor." "Alas, wife," said the man, "he cannot make you Emperor; I may not say that to the fish. There is only one Emperor in the land. An Emperor the Flounder cannot make you! I assure you he cannot." "What!" said the woman, "I am the King, and you are nothing but my husband; will you go this moment? Go at once! If he can make a king he can make an emperor. I will be Emperor; go instantly." So he was forced to go. As the man went, however, he was troubled in mind, and thought to himself, "It will not end well; it will not end well! Emperor is too shameless! The Flounder will at last be tired out." With that he reached the sea, and the sea was quite black and thick, and began to boil up from below, so that it threw up bubbles, and such a sharp wind blew over it that it curdled, and the man was afraid. Then he went and stood by it, and said-- "Flounder, Flounder, in the sea, Come, I pray thee, here to me; For my wife, good Ilsabil, Wills not as I'd have her will." "Well, what does she want, then?" asked the Flounder. "Alas, Flounder," said he, "my wife wants to be Emperor." "Go to her," said the Flounder; "she is Emperor already." So the man went, and when he got there the whole palace was made of polished marble with alabaster figures and golden ornaments, and soldiers were marching before the door blowing trumpets, and beating cymbals and drums; and in the house, barons, and counts, and dukes were going about as servants. Then they opened the doors to him, which were of pure gold. And when he entered, there sat his wife on a throne, which was made of one piece of gold, and was quite two miles high; and she wore a great golden crown that was three yards high, and set with diamonds and carbuncles, and in one hand she had the sceptre, and in the other the imperial orb; and on both sides of her stood the yeomen of the guard in two rows, each being smaller than the one before him, from the biggest giant, who was two miles high, to the very smallest dwarf, just as big as my little finger. And before it stood a number of princes and dukes. Then the man went and stood among them, and said, "Wife, are you Emperor now?" "Yes," said she, "now I am Emperor." Then he stood and looked at her well; and when he had looked at her thus for some time, be said, "Ah, wife, be content, now that you are Emperor." "Husband," said she, "why are you standing there? Now, I am Emperor, but I will be Pope too; go to the Flounder." "Alas, wife," said the man, "what will you not wish for? You cannot be Pope; there is but one in Christendom; he cannot make you Pope." "Husband," said she, "I will be Pope; go immediately, I must be Pope this very day." "No, wife," said the man, "I do not like to say that to him; that would not do; it is too much; the Flounder can't make you Pope." "Husband," said she, "what nonsense! If he can make an emperor he can make a pope. Go to him directly. I am Emperor and you are nothing but my husband; will you go at once?" Then he was afraid, and went; but he was quite faint, and shivered and shook, and his knees and legs trembled. And a high wind blew over the land, and the clouds flew, and toward evening all grew dark, and the leaves fell from the trees, and the water rose and roared as if it were boiling, and splashed upon the shore; and in the distance he saw ships which were firing guns in their sore need, pitching and tossing on the waves. And yet in the midst of the sky there was still a small bit of blue, though on every side it was as red as in a heavy storm. So, full of despair, he went and stood in much fear and said-- "Flounder, Flounder, in the sea, Come, I pray thee, here to me; For my wife, good Ilsabil, Wills not as I'd have her will." "Well, what does she want, then?" asked the Flounder. "Alas," said the man, "she wants to be Pope." "Go to her then," said the Flounder; "she is Pope already." So he went, and when he got there, he saw what seemed to be a large church surrounded by palaces. Inside, however, everything was lighted up with thousands and thousands of candles, and his wife was clad in gold, and she was sitting on a much higher throne, and had three great golden crowns on, and around about her there was much ecclesiastical splendor; and on both sides of her was a row of candles the largest of which was as tall as the very tallest tower, down to the very smallest kitchen candle, and all the emperors and kings were on their knees before her, kissing her shoe. He pushed his way through the crowd. "Wife," said the man, and looked attentively at her, "are you now Pope?" "Yes," said she, "I am Pope." So he stood and looked at her, and it was just as if he was looking at the bright sun. When he had stood looking at her thus for a short time, he said, "Ah, wife, if you are Pope, do let well alone!" But she looked as stiff as a post, and did not move or show any signs of life. Then said he, "Wife, now that you are Pope, be satisfied; you cannot become anything greater now." "I will consider about that," said the woman. Thereupon they both went to bed, but she was not satisfied, and greediness let her have no sleep, for she was continually thinking what there was left for her to be. The man slept well and soundly, for he had run about a great deal during the day; but the woman could not fall asleep at all, and flung herself from one side to the other the whole night through, thinking always what more was left for her to be, but unable to call to mind anything else. At length the sun began to rise, and when the woman saw the red of dawn, she sat up in bed and looked at it. And when, through the window, she saw the sun thus rising, she said, "Cannot I, too, order the sun and moon to rise?" "Husband," said she, poking him in the ribs with her elbow, "wake up! go to the Flounder, for I wish to be even as God is." The man was still half asleep, but he was so horrified that he fell out of bed. He thought he must have heard amiss, and rubbed his eyes, and said, "Alas, wife, what are you saying?" "Husband," said she, "if I can't order the sun and moon to rise, and have to look on and see the sun and moon rising, I can't bear it. I shall not know what it is to have another happy hour, unless I can make them rise myself." Then she looked at him so terribly that a shudder ran over him, and said, "Go at once; I wish to be like unto God." "Alas, wife," said the man, falling on his knees before her, "the Flounder cannot do that; he can make an emperor and a pope; I beseech you, go on as you are, and be Pope." Then she fell into a rage, and her hair flew wildly about her head, and she cried, "I will not endure this, I'll not bear it any longer; wilt thou go?" Then he put on his trousers and ran away like a madman. But outside a great storm was raging and blowing so hard that he could scarcely keep his feet; houses and trees toppled over, the mountains trembled, rocks rolled into the sea, the sky was pitch black, and it thundered and lightened, and the sea came in with black waves as high as church-towers and mountains, and all with crests of white foam at the top. Then he cried, but could not hear his own words-- "Flounder, Flounder, in the sea, Come, I pray thee, here to me; For my wife, good Ilsabil, Wills not as I'd have her will" "Well, what does she want, then?" asked the Flounder. "Alas," said he, "she wants to be like unto God." "Go to her, and you will find her back again in the dirty hovel." And there they are living still at this very time. _ERNST MORITZ ARNDT_ * * * * * SONG OF THE FATHERLAND[9] (1813) God, who gave iron, purposed ne'er That man should be a slave; Therefore the sabre, sword, and spear In his right hand He gave. Therefore He gave him fiery mood, Fierce speech, and free-born breath, That he might fearlessly the feud Maintain through blood and death. Therefore will we what God did say, With honest truth, maintain-- And ne'er a fellow-creature slay, A tyrant's pay to gain! But he shall perish by stroke of brand Who fighteth for sin and shame, And not inherit the German land With men of the German name. O Germany! bright Fatherland! O German love so true! Thou sacred land--thou beauteous land-- We swear to thee anew! Outlawed, each knave and coward shall The crow and raven feed; But we will to the battle all-- Revenge shall be our meed. Flash forth, flash forth, whatever can, To bright and flaming life! Now, all ye Germans, man for man, Forth to the holy strife! Your hands lift upward to the sky-- Your hearts shall upward soar-- And man for man let each one cry, Our slavery is o'er! Let sound, let sound, whatever can Trumpet and fife and drum! This day our sabres, man for man, To stain with blood, we come; With hangman's and with coward's blood, O glorious day of ire That to all Germans soundeth good!-- Day of our great desire! Let wave, let wave, whatever can-- Standard and banner wave! Here will we purpose, man for man, To grace a hero's grave. Advance, ye brave ranks, hardily-- Your banners wave on high; We'll gain us freedom's victory, Or freedom's death we'll die! [Illustration: ERNST MORITZ ARNDT Julius Roeting] * * * * * UNION SONG[10] (1814) This blessed hour we are united, Of German men a mighty choir, And from the lips of each, delighted, Our praying souls to heaven aspire; With high and sacred awe abounding We join in solemn thoughts today, And so our hearts should be resounding In clear harmonic song and play. To whom shall foremost thanks be given? To God, the great, so long concealed, Who, when the cloud of shame was riven, Himself in flames to us revealed, Who, stubborn foes with lightning felling, Restored to us our strength of yore, Who, on the stars in power dwelling, Reigns ever and forevermore. Who should our second wish be hearing? The majesty of Fatherland-- Destroyed be those who still are sneering! Hail them who with it fall and stand! By virtue winning admiration, Beloved for honesty and might, Long live through centuries our nation As strong in honor and in might! The third is German manhood's treasure-- Ring out it shall, with clearness mete! For Freedom is the German pleasure, And Germans step to Freedom's beat. Be life and death by her inspired-- Of German hearts, oh, longing bright! And death for Freedom's sake desired Is German honor and delight. The fourth--for noble consecration Now lift on high both heart and hand! Old loyalty within our nation And German faith forever stand!-- These virtues shall, our weal assuring, Remain our union's shield and stay; Our manly word will be enduring Until the world shall pass away. Now let the final chord be ringing In jubilee--stand not apart! Let sound our mighty, joyful singing From lip to lip, from heart to heart! The weal from which no devils bar us, The word that doth our league infold-- The bliss which tyrants cannot mar us We must believe in, we must hold! _THEODOR KOeRNER_ * * * * * MEN AND KNAVES[11] (1813) The storm is out; the land is roused; Where is the coward who sits well-housed? Fie, on thee, boy, disguised in curls, Behind the stove, 'mong gluttons and girls! A graceless, worthless wight thou must be; No German maid desires thee, No German song inspires thee, No German Rhine-wine fires thee. Forth in the van, Man by man, Swing the battle-sword who can! When we stand watching, the livelong night, Through piping storms, till morning light, Thou to thy downy bed canst creep, And there in dreams of rapture sleep. _Chorus_. When, hoarse and shrill, the trumpet's blast, Like the thunder of God, makes our hearts beat fast, Thou in the theatre lov'st to appear, Where trills and quavers tickle the ear. _Chorus_. When the glare of noonday scorches the brain, When our parched lips seek water in vain, Thou canst make the champagne corks fly, At the groaning tables of luxury. _Chorus_. When we, as we rush to the strangling fight, Send home to our true loves a long "Good night," Thou canst hie thee where love is sold, And buy thy pleasure with paltry gold. _Chorus_. When lance and bullet come whistling by, And death in a thousand shapes draws nigh, Thou canst sit at thy cards, and kill King, queen, and knave, with thy spadille. _Chorus_. If on the red field our bell should toll, Then welcome be death to the patriot's soul. Thy pampered flesh shall quake at its doom, And crawl in silk to a hopeless tomb. A pitiful exit thine shall be; No German maid shall weep for thee, No German song shall they sing for thee, No German goblets shall ring for thee. Forth in the van, Man for man, Swing the battle-sword who can! * * * * * LUeTZOW'S WILD BAND[12] (1813) What gleams through the woods in the morning sun? Hear it nearer and nearer draw! It winds in and out in columns dun, And the trumpet-notes on the roused winds run, And they startle the soul with awe. Should you of the comrades black demand-- That is Luetzow's wild and untamed band. What passes swift through the darksome glade, And roves o'er the mountains all? It crouches in nightly ambuscade; The hurrah breaks round the foe dismayed, And the Frankish sergeants fall. Should you of the rangers black demand-- That is Luetzow's wild and audacious band. Where the vineyards flourish, there roars the Rhine; There the tyrant thought him secure; Then by thunder-crash and lightning-shine In the waters plunges the fighting line; Of the hostile bank makes sure. Should you of the swimmers black demand-- That is Luetzow's wild and foolhardy band. There down in the valley what clamorous fight! What clangor of bloody swords! Fierce-hearted horsemen wage the fight, And the spark of freedom's at last alight, Flaming red the heavens towards. Should you of the horsemen black demand-- That is Luetzow's wild and intrepid band. Who with death-rattle there bid the day farewell 'Mid the moans of prostrate foes? Of the hand of death the drawn features tell, Yet the dauntless hearts triumphant swell, For his Fatherland's safe each knows! Should you of the black-clad fallen demand-- That is Luetzow's wild and invincible band. The wild, fierce band and the Teuton band, For all tyrants' blood athirst!-- So you who would mourn us, be not unmanned; For the morning dawns, and we freed our land, Though to free it we won death first! Then tell, at your grandsons' rapt demand: That was Luetzow's wild and unconquered band! [Illustration: THEODOR KOeRNER] * * * * * PRAYER DURING BATTLE[13](1813) Father, I call to thee. The roaring artillery's clouds thicken round me, The hiss and the glare of the loud bolts confound me. Ruler of battles, I call on thee O Father, lead thou me! O Father, lead thou me; To victory, to death, dread Commander, O guide me; The dark valley brightens when thou art beside me; Lord, as thou wilt, so lead thou me. God, I acknowledge thee. God, I acknowledge thee; When the breeze through the dry leaves of autumn is moaning, When the thunder-storm of battle is groaning, Fount of mercy, in each I acknowledge thee. O Father, bless thou me! O Father, bless thou me; I trust in thy mercy, whate'er may befall me; 'Tis thy word that hath sent me; that word can recall me. Living or dying, O bless thou me! Father, I honor thee. Father, I honor thee; Not for earth's hoards or honors we here are contending; All that is holy our swords are defending; Then falling, and conquering, I honor thee. God, I repose in thee. God, I repose in thee; When the thunders of death my soul are greeting, When the gashed veins bleed, and the life is fleeting, In thee, my God, I repose in thee. Father, I call on thee. _MAXIMILIAN GOTTFRIED VON SCHENKENDORF_ * * * * * THE MOTHER TONGUE[14] (1814) Mother tongue, oh, tongue most dear, Sweet and gladsome to mine ear! Word that first I heard, endearing Word of love, first timid sound That I stammered--still I'm hearing Thee within my soul profound. Oh, my heart will ever grieve When my Fatherland I leave, For in foreign tongues repeating Words of strangers, I lose cheer. Oh, they seem not like a greeting, And I'll never hold them dear. Speech so wonderful to hear-- How thou ringest pure and clear! Though thy beauty hath enthralled me, Still I'll deepen my delight, Awed, as if my fathers called me From the grave's eternal night. Ring on ever, tongue of old, Tongue of lovers, heroes bold! Rise, old song, though lost for ages, From thy secret tomb, and go Live again in sacred pages, Set all hearts once more aglow. Breath of God is everywhere, Custom sacred here as there. Yet when I give thanks, am praying, A beloved heart would seek, When my highest thoughts I'm saying-- Then my mother tongue I speak. [Illustration: MAXIMILIAN GOTTFRIED VON SCHENKENDORF] * * * * * SPRING GREETING TO THE FATHERLAND[15] (1814) Fatherland, thy pleasures greet me After bondage, war's distress! I must steep my soul completely Here in all thy gorgeousness. Where the oak-trees murmur mildly With their crowns to heaven raised, Mighty streams are roaring wildly-- There the German land be praised. From the Rhinefall, all delighted, I have walked, from Danube's spring; Mildly, in my soul benighted Love-stars rose, illumining; Now I would descend, and brightly Radiate a joyous shine Into Neckar's valleys sprightly, O'er the blue and silver Main. Onward fly, my message, bringing Freedom's greeting evermore, Far away thou shalt be ringing By my home on Memel's shore. Where the German tongue is spoken, Hearts have fought to make her free-- Fought right gladly--there unbroken Stays our sacred Germany. All with sunlight seems a-blazing, All things seem adorned with green-- Pastures where the herds are grazing, Hills where ripening grapes are seen. Such a spring time has not graced thee, Fatherland, for thousand years; Glory of thy fathers faced thee Once in dreams, and now appears. Once more weapons must be wielded; Go, a spirit-fray begin, Till the latest foe has yielded-- He who threatens you within. Passions vile ye should be blighting, Hate, suspicion, envy, greed-- Then take, after heavy fighting, German hearts, the rest ye need. Then shall all men be possessing Honor, humbleness, and might, And thus only can the blessing Sent our monarch shine with right. All the ancient sins must perish-- In the God-sent deluge all, And the heritage we cherish To a worthy heir must fall. God has blessed the grain that's growing And the vineyard's fruit no less; Men with hunter's joy are glowing; In the homes reigns happiness. And our freedom's sure foundation, Pious longing, fills the breast; Love that charms in every nation In our German land is best. Ye that are in castles dwelling, Or in towns that grace our soil, Farmers that in harvests swelling Reap the fruits of German toil-- German brothers dear, united, Mark my words both old and new! That our land may stay unblighted, Keep this concord, and be true! * * * * * FREEDOM[16] (1815) Freedom that I love, Shining in my heart, Come now from above, Angel that thou art. Wilt thou ne'er appear To the world oppressed? With thy grace and cheer Only stars are blessed? In the forest gay When the trees are green, 'Neath the blooming spray, Freedom, thou art seen. Oh, what dear delight! Music fills the air, And thy secret might Thrills us everywhere, When the rustling boughs Friendly greetings send, When we lovers' vows Looks and kisses spend. But the heart aspires Upward evermore, And our high desires Ever sky-ward soar. From his simple kind Comes my rustic child, Shows his heart and mind To the world beguiled; For him gardens bloom, For him fields have grown, Even in, the gloom Of a world of stone. Where in that man's breast Glows a God-sent flame Who with loyal zest Loves the ancient name, Where the men unite Valiantly to face Foes of honor's right-- There dwells freedom's race. Ramparts, brazen doors Still may bar the light, Yet the spirit soars Into regions bright; For the fathers' grave, For the church to fall, And for dear ones--brave, True at freedom's call-- That indeed is light, Glowing rosy-red; Heroes' cheeks grow bright And more fair when dead. Down to us, oh, guide Heaven's grace, we pray! In our hearts reside-- German hearts--to stay! Freedom sweet and fair, Trusting, void of fear, German nature e'er Was to thee most clear. _LUDWIG UHLAND_ * * * * * THE CHAPEL[17] (1805) Yonder chapel, on the mountain, Looks upon a vale of joy; There, below, by moss and fountain, Gaily sings the herdsman's boy. Hark! Upon the breeze descending, Sound of dirge and funeral bell; And the boy, his song suspending, Listens, gazing from the dell. Homeward to the grave they're bringing Forms that graced the peaceful vale; Youthful herdsman, gaily singing! Thus they'll chant thy funeral wail. * * * * * THE SHEPHERD'S SONG ON THE LORD'S DAY[18] (1805) The Lord's own day is here! Alone I kneel on this broad plain; A matin bell just sounds; again 'Tis silence, far and near. Here kneel I on the sod; O deep amazement, strangely felt! As though, unseen, vast numbers knelt And prayed with me to God! Yon heav'n afar and near-- So bright, so glorious seems its cope As though e'en now its gates would ope-- The Lord's own day is here! [Illustration: LUDWIG UHLAND] * * * * * THE CASTLE BY THE SEA[19] (1805) Hast thou seen that lordly castle, That castle by the sea? Golden and red above it The clouds float gorgeously. And fain it would stoop downward To the mirrored lake below; And fain it would soar upward In the evening's crimson glow. Well have I seen that castle, That castle by the sea, And the moon above it standing, And the mist rise solemnly. The winds and the waves of ocean-- Had they a merry chime? Didst thou hear, from those lofty chambers, The harp and the minstrel's rhyme? The winds and the waves of ocean, They rested quietly; But I heard in the gale a sound of wail, And tears came to mine eye. And sawest thou on the turrets The king and his royal bride, And the wave of their crimson mantles, And the golden crown of pride? Led they not forth, in rapture, A beauteous maiden there, Resplendent as the morning sun, Beaming with golden hair! Well saw I the ancient parents, Without the crown of pride; They were moving slow, in weeds of woe-- No maiden was by their side! * * * * * SONG OF THE MOUNTAIN BOY[20] (1806) The mountain shepherd-boy am I; The castles all below me spy. The sun sends me his earliest beam, Leaves me his latest, lingering gleam. I am the boy of the mountain! The mountain torrent's home is here, Fresh from the rock I drink it clear; As out it leaps with furious force, I stretch my arms and stop its course. I am the boy of the mountain! I claim the mountain for my own; In vain the winds around me moan; From north to south let tempests brawl-- My song shall swell above them all. I am the boy of the mountain! Thunder and lightning below me lie, Yet here I stand in upper sky; I know them well, and cry, "Harm not My father's lowly, peaceful cot." I am the boy of the mountain! But when I hear the alarm-bell sound, When watch-fires gleam from the mountains round, Then down I go and march along, And swing my sword, and sing my song. I am the boy of the mountain! [Illustration: THE VILLA BY THE SEA From the Painting by Arnold Boecklin] * * * * * DEPARTURE[21] (1806) What jingles and carols along the street! Fling open your casements, damsels sweet! The prentice' friends, they are bearing The boy on his far wayfaring. 'Mid fluttering ribbons and tossing caps, Full merry the rabble huzzas and claps; But the boy regards not the token-- He walks like one heartbroken. Full clear clinks the wine-can, full red gleams the wine "Drink deep and drink deeper, dear brother mine!" "Oh, have done with the red wine of parting That burns me within with its smarting!" And outside from the cottage, last of all, A maiden peeps out and her tear-drops fall, Yet her tear-drops to none she discloses But forget-me-nots and roses. And outside by the cottage, last of all, The boy glances up at a casement small, And glances down without greeting. 'Neath his hand his heart is beating. "What, brother! Art lacking a bright nosegay? See yonder--the beckoning, blossomy spray! God save thee, thou prettiest sweeting! Drop down now a nosegay for greeting!" "Nay, brothers, pass yonder casement by. No prettiest sweeting like her have I. In the sun those blossoms would wither; The wind it would blow them thither." So farther and farther with shout and song! And the maiden listens and harkens long "Ah, me! he is flown now beyond me-- The boy I have loved so fondly! And here I stay, with my lonely lot, With roses, ah!--and forget-me-not, And he whose heart I'd be sharing-- He is gone on his far wayfaring!" * * * * * FAREWELL[22] (1807) Farewell, farewell! From thee Today, love, must I sever. One kiss, one kiss give me, Ere I quit thee forever! One blossom from yon tree O give to me, I pray! No fruit, no fruit for me! So long I may not stay. [Illustration: LEAVING AT DAWN] * * * * * THE HOSTESS' DAUGHTER[23] (1809) Three students had cross'd o'er the Rhine's dark tide; At the door of a hostel they turned aside. "Hast thou, Dame hostess, good ale and wine And where is thy daughter, so sweet and fine?" "My ale and wine are cool and clear; On her death-bed lieth my daughter dear." And when to the chamber they made their way, In a sable coffin the damsel lay. The first--the veil from her face he took, And gazed upon her with mournful look: "Alas! fair maiden--didst thou still live, To thee my love would I henceforth give!" The second--he lightly replaced the shroud, Then round he turned him, and wept aloud: "Thou liest, alas I on thy death-bed here; I loved thee fondly for many a year!" The third--he lifted again the veil, And gently he kissed those lips so pale: "I love thee now, as I loved of yore, And thus will I love thee forevermore!" * * * * * THE GOOD COMRADE[24] (1809) I had a gallant comrade, No better e'er was tried; The drum beat loud to battle-- Beside me, to its rattle, He marched, with equal stride. A bullet flies toward us us-- "Is that for me or thee?" It struck him, passing o'er me; I see his corpse before me As 'twere a part of me! And still, while I am loading, His outstretched hand I view; "Not now--awhile we sever; But, when we live forever, Be still my comrade true!" * * * * * THE WHITE HART[25] (1811) Three huntsmen forth to the greenwood went; To hunt the white hart was their intent. They laid them under a green fir-tree, And a singular vision befell those three. THE FIRST HUNTSMAN I dreamt I arose and beat on the bush, When forth came rushing the stag--hush, hush! THE SECOND As with baying of hound he came rushing along, I fired my gun at his hide--bing, bang! THE THIRD And when the stag on the ground I saw, I merrily wound my horn--trara! Conversing thus did the huntsmen lie, When lo! the white hart came bounding by; And before the huntsmen had noted him well, He was up and away over mountain and dell!-- Hush, hush!--bing, bang!--trara! * * * * * THE LOST CHURCH[26] (1812) When one into the forest goes, A music sweet the spirit blesses; But whence it cometh no one knows, Nor common rumor even guesses. From the lost Church those strains must swell That come on all the winds resounding; The path to it now none can tell, That path with pilgrims once abounding. As lately, in the forest, where No beaten path could be discover'd, All lost in thought, I wander'd far, Upward to God my spirit hover'd. When all was silent round me there, Then in my ears that music sounded; The higher, purer, rose my prayer, The nearer, fuller, it resounded. Upon my heart such peace there fell, Those strains with all my thoughts so blended, That how it was I cannot tell That I so high that hour ascended. It seem'd a hundred years and more That I had been thus lost in dreaming, When, all earth's vapors op'ning o'er, A free large place stood, brightly beaming. The sky it was so blue and bland, The sun it was so full and glowing, As rose a minster vast and grand, The golden light all round it flowing. The clouds on which it rested seem'd To bear it up like wings of fire; Piercing the heavens, so I dream'd, Sublimely rose its lofty spire. The bell--what music from it roll'd! Shook, as it peal'd, the trembling tower; Rung by no mortal hand, but toll'd By some unseen, unearthly power. The selfsame power from Heaven thrill'd My being to its utmost centre, As, all with fear and gladness fill'd, Beneath the lofty dome I enter. I stood within the solemn pile-- Words cannot tell with what amazement, As saints and martyrs seem'd to smile Down on me from each gorgeous casement. I saw the picture grow alive, And I beheld a world of glory, Where sainted men and women strive And act again their godlike story. Before the altar knelt I low-- Love and devotion only feeling, While Heaven's glory seem'd to glow, Depicted on the lofty ceiling. Yet when again I upward gazed, The mighty dome in twain was shaken, And Heaven's gate wide open blazed, And every veil away was taken. What majesty I then beheld, My heart with adoration swelling; What music all my senses fill'd, Beyond the organ's power of telling, In words can never be exprest; Yet for that bliss who longs sincerely, O let him to the music list, That in the forest soundeth clearly! * * * * * CHARLEMAGNE'S VOYAGE[27] (1812) With comrades twelve upon the main King Charles set out to sail. The Holy Land he hoped to gain, But drifted in a gale. Then spake Sir Roland, hero brave: "Well I can fight and shield; Yet neither stormy wind nor wave Will to my weapon yield." Sir Holger spoke, from Denmark's strand: "The harp I feign would play; But what avails the music bland When tempests roaring sway!" Sir Oliver was not too glad; Upon his sword he'd stare: "For my own weal 'twere not so bad, I grieve, for good Old Clare." Said wicked Ganilon with gall (He said it 'neath his breath): "The devil come and take ye all-- Were I but spared this death!" Archbishop Turpin deeply sighed: "The knights of God are we. O come, our Savior, be our guide, And lead us o'er the sea!" Then spake Sir Richard Fearless stern: "Ye demons there in hell, I served ye many a goodly turn, Now serve ye me as well!" "My counsel often has been heard," Sir Naimes did remark. "Fresh water, though, and helpful word Are rare upon a bark." Then spake Sir Riol, old and gray: "An aged knight am I; And they shall lay my corpse away Where it is good and dry." And then Sir Guy began to sing-- He was a courtly knight: "Feign would I have a birdie's wing, And to my love take flight!" Then Count Garein, the noble, said: "God, danger from us keep! I'd rather drink the wine so red Than water in the deep." Sir Lambert spake, a sprightly youth: "May God behold our state! I'd rather eat good fish, forsooth, Than be myself a bait." Then quoth Sir Gottfried: "Be it so, I heed not how I fare; Whatever I must undergo, My brothers all would share." But at the helm King Charles sat by, And never said a word, And steered the ship with steadfast eye Till no more tempest stirred. * * * * * FREE ART[28] (1812) Thou, whom song was given, sing In the German poets' wood! When all boughs with music ring-- Then is life and pleasure good. Nay, this art doth not belong To a small and haughty band; Scattered are the seeds of song All about the German land. Music set thy passions free From the heart's confining cage; Let thy love like murmurs be, And like thunder-storm thy rage! Singest thou not all thy days, Joy of youth should make thee sing. Nightingales pour forth their lays In the blooming months of spring! Though in books they hold not fast What the hour to thee imparts, Leaves unto the breezes cast, To be seized by youthful hearts! Fare thou well, thou secret lore: Necromancy, Alchemy! Formulas shall bind no more, And our art is poesy. Names we deem but empty air; Spirits we revere alone; Though we honor masters rare. Art is free--it is our own! Not in haunts of marble chill, Temples drear where ancients trod-- Nay, in oaks on woody hill, Lives and moves the German God. * * * * * TAILLEFER[29] (1812) Duke William of the Normans spoke unto his servants all: "Who is it sings so sweetly in the court and in the hall? Who sings from early morn till the house is still at night So sweetly that he fills my heart with laughter and delight?" "'Tis Taillefer," they answered him, "so joyously that sings Within the courtyard, as the wheel above the well he swings, And when the fire upon the hearth he stirs to burn more bright, And when he rises to his toil or lays him down at night." Then spoke the Duke, "In him I trow I have a faithful knave-- This Taillefer that serves me here, so loyal and so brave; He turns the wheel and stirs the fire with willing, sturdy arm, And, best of all, with blithesome song he knows my heart to charm." Then out spake lusty Taillefer, "Ah, lord, if I were free, Far better would I serve thee then, and gladly sing to thee. How on my stately charger would I serve thee in the field, How sing before thee cheerily, with clang of sword and shield!" The days went by, and Taillefer rode out as rides a knight Upon a prancing charger borne, a gay and gallant sight; And from the tower looked down on him Duke William's sister fair, And softly murmured, "By my troth, a stately knight goes there!" When as he rode before the tower, and spied her harkening, Now sang he like a driving storm, now like a breeze of spring; She cried, "To hear that wondrous song is of all joys the best-- The very stones they tremble, and the heart within my breast." And now the Duke has called his men and crossed the salt sea-foam; With gallant knights and vassals bold to England he has come. And as he sprang from out the ship, he slipped upon the strand, And "By this token, thus," he cried, "I seize a subject land!" And now on Hastings field arrayed, the host for fight prepare; Before the Duke reins up his horse the valiant Taillefer: "If I have sung and blown the fire for many a weary year, And since for other years have borne the knightly shield and spear, "If I have sung and served thee well, and praises won from thee, First as a lowly knave and then a warrior, bold and free, Today I claim my guerdon just, that all the host may know-- To ride the foremost to the field, strike first against the foe!" So Taillefer rode on before the glittering Norman line Upon his stately steed, and waved a sword of temper fine; Above the embattled plain his song rang all the tumult o'er-- Of Roland's knightly deeds he sang and many a hero more. And as the noble song of old with tempest-might swelled out, The banners waved and knights pressed on with war-cry and with shout; And every heart among the host throbbed prouder still and higher, And still through all sang Taillefer, and blew the battle-fire. Then forward, lance in rest, against the waiting foe he dashed, And at the shock an English knight from out the saddle crashed; Anon he swung his sword and struck a grim and grisly blow, And on the ground beneath his feet an English knight lay low. The Norman host his prowess saw, and followed him full fain; With joyful shouts and clang of shields the whole field rang again, And shrill and fast the arrows sped, and swords made merry play-- Until at last King Harold fell, his stubborn carles gave way. The Duke his banner planted high upon the bloody plain, And pitched his tent a conqueror amid the heaps of slain; Then with his captains sat at meat, the wine-cup in his hand, Upon his head the royal crown of all the English land. "Come hither, valiant Taillefer, and drink a cup with me! Full oft thy song has soothed my grief, made merrier my glee; But all my life I still shall hear the battle-shout that pealed Above the noise of clashing arms today on Hastings field!" * * * * * SUABIAN LEGEND[30] (1814) When Emperor Redbeard with his band Came marching through the Holy Land, He had to lead, the way to seek, His noble force o'er mountains bleak. Of bread there rose a painful need, Though stones were plentiful indeed, And many a German rider fine Forgot the taste of mead and wine. The horses drooped from meagre fare, The rider had to hold his mare. There was a knight from Suabian land Of noble build and mighty hand; His little horse was faint and ill, He dragged it by the bridle still; His steed he never would forsake, Though his own life should be at stake. And so the horseman had to stay Behind the band a little way. Then all at once, right in his course, Pranced fifty Turkish men on horse. And straight a swarm of arrows flew; Their spears as well the riders threw. Our Suabian brave felt no dismay, And calmly marched along his way. His shield was stuck with arrows o'er, He sneered and looked about--no more; Till one, whom all this pastime bored, Above him swung a crooked sword. The German's blood begins to boil, He aims the Turkish steed to foil, And off he knocks with hit so neat The Turkish charger's two fore-feet. And now that he has felled the horse, He grips his sword with double force And swings it on the rider's crown And splits him to the saddle down; He hews the saddle into bits, And e'en the charger's back he splits. See, falling to the right and left, Half of a Turk that has been cleft! The others shudder at the sight And hie away in frantic flight, And each one feels, with gruesome dread, That he is split through trunk and head. A band of Christians, left behind, Came down the road, his work to find; And they admired, one by one, The deed our hero bold had done. From these the Emperor heard it all, And bade his men the Suabian call, Then spake: "Who taught thee, honored knight, With hits like those you dealt, to fight?" Our hero said, without delay "These hits are just the Suabian way. Throughout the realm all men admit, The Suabians always make a hit." * * * * * THE BLIND KING[31] (1804, 1814) Why stands uncovered that northern host High on the seaboard there? Why seeks the old blind king the coast, With his white, wild-fluttering hair? He, leaning on his staff the while, His bitter grief outpours, Till across the bay the rocky isle Sounds from its caverned shores. "From the dungeon-rock, thou robber, bring My daughter back again! Her gentle voice, her harp's sweet string Soothed an old father's pain. From the dance along the green shore Thou hast borne her o'er the wave; Eternal shame light on thy head; Mine trembles o'er the grave." Forth from his cavern, at the word, The robber comes, all steeled, Swings in the air his giant sword, And strikes his sounding shield. "A goodly guard attends thee there; Why suffered they the wrong? Is there none will be her champion Of all that mighty throng?" Yet from that host there comes no sound; They stand unmoved as stone; The blind king seems to gaze around; Am I all, all alone?" "Not all alone!" His youthful son Grasps his right hand so warm-- "Grant me to meet this vaunting foe! Heaven's might inspires my arm." "O son! it is a giant foe; There's none will take thy part; Yet by this hand's warm grasp, I know Thine is a manly heart. Here, take the trusty battle-sword-- 'Twas the old minstrel's prize;-- If thou art slain, far down the flood Thy poor old father dies!" And hark! a skiff glides swiftly o'er, With plashing, spooming sound; The king stands listening on the shore; 'Tis silent all around-- Till soon across the bay is borne The sound of shield and sword, And battle-cry, and clash, and clang, And crashing blows, are heard. With trembling joy then cried the king: "Warrior! what mark you? Tell! 'Twas my good sword; I heard it ring; I know its tone right well." "The robber falls; a bloody meed His daring crime hath won; Hail to thee, first of heroes! hail! Thou monarch's worthy son!" Again 'tis silent all around; Listens the king once more; "I hear across the bay the sound As of a plashing oar." Yes, it is they!--They come!--They come-- Thy son, with spear and shield, And thy daughter fair, with golden hair, The sunny-bright Gunild." "Welcome!" exclaims the blind old man, From the rock high o'er the wave; "Now my old age is blest again; Honored shall be my grave. Thou, son, shalt lay the sword I wore Beside the blind old king. And thou, Gunilda, free once more, My funeral song shalt sing." * * * * * THE MINSTREL'S CURSE[32] (1814) Once in olden times was standing A castle, high and grand, Broad glancing in the sunlight, Far over sea and land. And round were fragrant gardens, A rich and blooming crown; And fountains, playing in them, In rainbow brilliance shone. There a haughty king was seated, In lands and conquests great; Pale and awful was his countenance, As on his throne he sate; For what he thinks, is terror, And what he looks, is wrath, And what he speaks, is torture, And what he writes, is death. And 'gainst a marble pillar He shiver'd it in twain; And thus his curse he shouted, Till the castle rang again: "Woe, woe, thou haughty castle, With all thy gorgeous halls! Sweet string or song be sounded No more within thy walls. No, sighs alone, and wailing, And the coward steps of slaves! Already round thy towers The avenging spirit raves! "Woe, woe, ye fragrant gardens, With all your fair May light! Look on this ghastly countenance, And wither at the sight! Let all your flowers perish! Be all your fountains dry! Henceforth a horrid wilderness, Deserted, wasted, lie! "Woe, woe, thou wretched murderer, Thou curse of minstrelsy! Thy struggles for a bloody fame, All fruitless shall they be. Thy name shall be forgotten, Lost in eternal death, Dissolving into empty air Like a dying man's last breath!" The old man's curse is utter'd, And Heaven above hath heard. Those walls have fallen prostrate At the minstrel's mighty word. Of all that vanish'd splendor Stands but one column tall; And that, already shatter'd, Ere another night may fall. Around, instead of gardens, In a desert heathen land, No tree its shade dispenses, No fountains cool the sand. The king's name, it has vanish'd; His deeds no songs rehearse; Departed and forgotten-- This is the minstrel's curse. * * * * * THE LUCK OF EDENHALL[33] (1834) Of Edenhall the youthful lord Bids sound the festal trumpets' call; He rises at the banquet board, And cries, 'mid the drunken revelers all, "Now bring me the Luck of Edenhall!" The butler hears the words with pain-- The house's oldest seneschal-- Takes slow from its silken cloth again The drinking glass of crystal tall; They call it the Luck of Edenhall. Then said the lord, "This glass to praise, Fill with red wine from Portugal!" The graybeard with trembling hand obeys; A purple light shines over all; It beams from the Luck of Edenhall. Then speaks the lord, and waves it light-- "This glass of flashing crystal tall Gave to my sires the Fountain-Sprite; She wrote in it, 'If this glass doth fall, Farewell then, O Luck of Edenhall!'" "'Twas right a goblet the fate should be Of the joyous race of Edenhall! We drink deep draughts right willingly; And willingly ring, with merry call, Kling! klang! to the Luck of Edenhall!" First rings it deep, and full, and mild, Like to the song of a nightingale; Then like the roar of a torrent wild; Then mutters, at last, like the thunder's fall, The glorious Luck of Edenhall. "For its keeper, takes a race of might The fragile goblet of crystal tall; It has lasted longer than is right; Kling! klang!--with a harder blow than all We'll try the Luck of Edenhall!" As the goblet, ringing, flies apart, Suddenly cracks the vaulted hall; And through the rift the flames upstart; The guests in dust are scattered all With the breaking Luck of Edenhall! In storms the foe with fire and sword! He in the night had scaled the wall; Slain by the sword lies the youthful lord, But holds in his hand the crystal tall, The shattered Luck of Edenhall. On the morrow the butler gropes alone, The graybeard, in the desert hall; He seeks his lord's burnt skeleton; He seeks in the dismal ruin's fall The shards of the Luck of Edenhall. "The stone wall," saith he, "doth fall aside; Down must the stately columns fall; Glass is this earth's Luck and Pride; In atoms shall fall this earthly hall, One day, like the Luck of Edenhall!" * * * * * ON THE DEATH OF A CHILD[34] (1859) You came, you went, as angels go, A fleeting guest within our land. Whence and where to?--We only know: Forth from God's hand into God's hand. _JOSEPH VON EICHENDORFF_ * * * * * THE BROKEN RING[35] (1810) Down in yon cool valley I hear a mill-wheel go: Alas! my love has left me, Who once dwelt there below. A ring of gold she gave me, And vowed she would be true; The vow long since was broken, The gold ring snapped in two. I would I were a minstrel, To rove the wide world o'er, And sing afar my measures, And rove from door to door; Or else a soldier, flying Deep into furious fight, By silent camp-fires lying A-field in gloomy night. Hear I the mill-wheel going: I know not what I will; 'Twere best if I were dying-- Then all were calm and still. [Illustration: JOSEPH VON EICHENDORFF] * * * * * MORNING PRAYER[36] (1833) O silence, wondrous and profound! O'er earth doth solitude still reign; The woods alone incline their heads, As if the Lord walked o'er the plain. I feel new life within me glow; Where now is my distress and care? Here in the blush of waking morn, I blush at yesterday's despair. To me, a pilgrim, shall the world, With all its joy and sorrows, be But as a bridge that leads, O Lord, Across the stream of time to Thee. And should my song woo worldly gifts, The base rewards of vanity-- Dash down my lyre! I'll hold my peace Before thee to eternity. FROM THE LIFE OF A GOOD-FOR-NOTHING (1826) BY JOSEPH VON EICHENDORFF TRANSLATED BY MRS. A.L.W. WISTER CHAPTER I The wheel of my father's mill was once more turning and whirring merrily, the melting snow trickled steadily from the roof, the sparrows chirped and hopped about, as I, taking great delight in the warm sunshine, sat on the door-step and rubbed my eyes to rid them of sleep. Then my father made his appearance; he had been busy in the mill since daybreak, and his nightcap was all awry as he said to me-- You Good-for-nothing! There you sit sunning yourself, and stretching yourself till your bones crack, leaving me to do all the work alone. I can keep you here no longer. Spring is at hand. Off with you into the world and earn your own bread!" "Well," said I, "all right; if I am a Good-for-nothing, I will go forth into the world and make my fortune." In fact, I was very glad to have my father speak thus, for I myself had been thinking of starting on my travels; the yellow-hammer, which all through the autumn and winter had been chirping sadly at our window, "Farmer, hire me; farmer, hire me," was, now that the lovely spring weather had set in, once more piping cheerily from the old tree, "Farmer, nobody wants your work." So I went into the house and took down from the wall my fiddle, on which I could play quite skilfully; my father gave me a few pieces of money to set me on my way; and I sauntered off along the village street. I was filled with secret joy as I saw all my old acquaintances and comrades right and left going to their work digging and ploughing, just as they had done yesterday and the day before, and so on, whilst I was roaming out into the wide world. I called out "Good-by!" to the poor people on all sides, but no one took much notice of me. A perpetual Sabbath seemed to reign in my soul, and when I got out among the fields I took out my dear fiddle and played and sang, as I walked along the country road-- "The favored ones, the loved of Heaven, God sends to roam the world at will; His wonders to their gaze are given By field and forest, stream and hill. "The dullards who at home are staying Are not refreshed by morning's ray; They grovel, earth-born calls obeying, And petty cares beset their day. "The little brooks o'er rocks are springing, The lark's gay carol fills the air; Why should not I with them be singing A joyous anthem free from care? "I wander on, in God confiding, For all are His, wood, field, and fell; O'er earth and skies He, still presiding, For me will order all things well." As I was looking around, a fine traveling-carriage drove along very near me; it had probably been just behind me for some time without my perceiving it, so filled with melody had I been, for it was going quite slowly, and two elegant ladies had their heads out of the window, listening. One was especially beautiful, and younger than the other, but both pleased me extremely. When I stopped singing the elder ordered the coachman to stop his horses, and accosted me with great condescension: "Aha, my merry lad, you know how to sing very pretty songs!" I, nothing loath, replied, "Please Your Grace, I know some far prettier." "And where are you going so early in the morning?" she asked. I was ashamed to confess that I did not myself know, and so I said, boldly, "To Vienna." The two ladies then talked together in a strange tongue which I did not understand. The younger shook her head several times, but the other only laughed, and finally called to me, "Jump up behind; we too are going to Vienna." Who more ready than I! I made my best bow, and sprang up behind the carriage, the coachman cracked his whip, and away we bowled along the smooth road so swiftly that the wind whistled in my ears. Behind me vanished my native village with its gardens and church-tower, before me appeared fresh villages, castles, and mountains, beneath me on either side the meadows in the tender green of spring flew past, and above me countless larks were soaring in the blue air. I was ashamed to shout aloud, but I exulted inwardly, and shuffled about so on the foot-board behind the carriage that I well-nigh lost my fiddle from under my arm. But when the sun rose higher in the sky, while heavy, white, noonday clouds gathered on the horizon, and the air hung sultry and still above the gently-waving grain, I could not but remember my village and my father, and our mill, and how cool and comfortable it was beside the shady mill-pool, and how far, far away from me it all was. And the most curious sensation overcame me; I felt as if I must turn and run back; but I stuck my fiddle between my coat and my vest, settled myself on the foot-board, and went to sleep. When I opened my eyes again, the carriage was standing beneath tall linden-trees, on the other side of which a broad flight of steps led between columns into a magnificent castle. Through the trees beyond I saw the towers of Vienna. The ladies, it appeared, had left the carriage, and the horses had been unharnessed. I was startled to find myself alone, and I hurried into the castle. As I did so I heard some one at a window above laughing. An odd time I had in this castle. First, as soon as I found myself in the cool, spacious vestibule, some one tapped me on the shoulder with a stick. I turned quickly about, and there stood a tall gentleman in state apparel, with a broad bandolier of silk and gold crossing his breast from his shoulder to his hip, a staff in his hand, gilded at the top, and an extraordinarily large Roman nose; he strutted up to me, swelling like a ruled-up turkey-cock, and asked me what I wanted there. I was taken entirely aback, and in my confusion was unable to utter a word. Several servants passed, going up and down the staircase; they said nothing, but eyed me superciliously. Then a lady's-maid appeared; she came up to me, declared that I was a charming young fellow, and that her mistress had sent to ask me if I did not want a place as gardener's boy. I put my hand in my pocket--the few coins I had possessed were gone. They must have been jerked out by my shuffling on the foot-board behind the carriage. I had nothing to depend upon save my skill with the fiddle, for which the gentleman with the staff, as he informed me in passing, would not give a farthing. Therefore, in my distress, I said "yes" to the maid, keeping my eyes fixed the while upon the portentous figure pacing the hall to and fro like the pendulum of a clock in a church-tower, appearing from the background with imposing majesty and with unfailing regularity. At last a gardener came, muttering something about boors and vagabonds, and led me off to the garden, preaching me a long sermon on the way about my being diligent and industrious and never loitering about the world any more, and how, if I would give up all my idle and foolish ways, I might come to some good in the end. There was a great deal of exhortation in this strain, very good and useful, but I have since forgotten it nearly all. In fact, I really hardly know how it all came about; I went on saying "yes" to everything, and I felt like a bird with its wings clipped. But, thank God, in the end I was earning my living! I found life delightful in that garden. I had a hot dinner every day and plenty of it, and more money than I needed for my glass of wine, only, unfortunately, I had quite a deal to do. The pavilions, and arbors, and long green walks delighted me, if I could only have sauntered about and talked pleasantly like the gentlemen and ladies who came there every day. Whenever the gardener was away and I was alone, I took out my short tobacco-pipe, sat down, and thought of all the beautiful, polite things with which I could have entertained that lovely young lady who had brought me to the castle, had I been a cavalier walking beside her. Or on sultry afternoons I lay on my back on the grass, when all was so quiet that you could hear the bees humming, and I gazed up at the clouds sailing away toward my native village, and around me at the waving grass and flowers, and thought of the lovely lady; and it sometimes chanced that I really saw her in the distance walking in the garden, with her guitar or a book, tall and beautiful as an angel, and I was only half conscious whether I were awake or dreaming. Thus, once as I was passing a summer-house on my way to work, I was singing to myself-- "I gaze around me, going By forest, dale, and lea, O'er heights where streams are flowing, My every thought bestowing, Ah, Lady fair, on thee!"-- when, through the half-opened lattice of the cool, dark summer-house buried amid flowers, I saw the sparkle of a pair of beautiful, youthful eyes. I was so startled that I could not finish my song, but passed on to my work without looking round. In the evening--it was Saturday, and, in joyous anticipation of the coming Sunday, I was standing, fiddle in hand, at the window of the gardener's house, still thinking of the sparkling eyes--the lady's-maid came tripping through the twilight--"The gracious Lady fair sends you this to drink her health, and a 'Good-Night' besides!" And in a twinkling she put a flask of wine on the window-sill and vanished among the flowers and shrubs like a lizard. I stood looking at the wonderful flask for a long time, not knowing what to think. And if before I played the fiddle merrily, I now played it ten times more so, and I sang the song of the Lady fair all through, and all the other songs that I knew, until the nightingales wakened outside and the moon and stars lit up the garden. Ah, that was a lovely night! No cradle-song tells the child's future; a blind hen finds many a grain of wheat; he laughs best who laughs last; the unexpected often happens; man proposes, God disposes: thus did I meditate the next day, sitting in the garden with my pipe, and as I looked down at myself I seemed to myself to be a downright dunce. Contrary to all my habits hitherto, I now rose betimes every day, before the gardener and the other assistants were stirring. It was most beautiful then in the garden. The flowers, the fountains, the rose-bushes, the whole place, glittered in the morning sunshine like pure gold and jewels. And in the avenues of huge beeches it was as quiet, cool, and solemn as a church, only the little birds fluttered around and pecked in the gravel paths. In front of the castle, just under the windows, there was a large bush in full bloom. Thither I used to go in the early morning, and crouch down beneath the branches where I could watch the windows, for I had not the courage to appear in the open. Thence I sometimes saw the Lady fair in a snow-white robe come, still drowsy and warm, to the open window. She would stand there braiding her dark-brown hair, gazing abroad over the garden and shrubbery, or she would tend and water the flowers upon her window-sill, or would rest her guitar upon her white arm and sing out into the clear air so wondrously that to this day my heart faints with sadness when one of her songs recurs to me. And ah, it was all so long ago! So my life passed for a week and more. But once--she was standing at the window and all was quiet around--a confounded fly flew directly up my nose, and I was seized with an interminable fit of sneezing. She leaned far out of the window and discovered me cowering in the shrubbery. I was overcome with mortification and did not go there again for many a day. At last I ventured to return to my post, but the window remained closed. I hid in the bushes for four, five, six mornings, but she did not appear. Then I grew tired of my hiding-place and came out boldly, and every morning promenaded bravely beneath all the windows of the castle. But the lovely Lady fair was not to be seen. At a window a little farther on I saw the other lady standing; I had never before seen her so distinctly. She had a fine rosy face, and was plump, and as gorgeously attired as a tulip. I always made her a low bow, and she acknowledged it, and her eyes twinkled very kindly and courteously. Once only, I thought I saw the Lady fair standing behind the curtain at her window, peeping out. Many days passed and I did not see her, either in the garden or at the window. The gardener scolded me for laziness; I was out of humor, tired of myself and of all about me. I was lying on the grass one Sunday afternoon, watching the blue wreaths of smoke from my pipe, and fretting because I had not chosen some other trade which would not have bored me so day after day. The other fellows had all gone off to the dance in the neighboring village. Every one was strolling about in Sunday attire, the houses were gay, and there was melody in the very air. But I walked off and sat solitary, like a bittern among the reeds, by a lonely pond in the garden, rocking myself in a little skiff tied there, while the vesper bells sounded faintly from the town and the swans glided to and fro on the placid water. A sadness as of death possessed me. On a sudden I heard, in the distance, voices talking gaily, and bursts of merry laughter. They sounded nearer and nearer, and red and white kerchiefs and hats and feathers were visible through the shrubbery. A party of gentlemen and ladies were coming from the castle, across the meadow, directly toward me, and my two ladies among them. I stood up and was about to retire, when the elder perceived me. "Aha, you are just what we want!" she called to me, smiling. "Row us across the pond to the other side." The ladies cautiously took their seats in the boat, assisted by the gentlemen, who made quite a parade of their familiarity with the water. When all the ladies were seated, I pushed off from the shore. One of the young gentlemen who stood in the prow began, unperceived, to rock the boat. The ladies looked frightened, and one or two screamed. The Lady fair, who had a lily in her hand, and was sitting well in the centre of the skiff, looked down with a quiet smile into the clear water, touching the surface of the pond now and then with a lily, her image, amid the reflections of the clouds and trees, appearing like an angel soaring gently through the deep blue skies. As I was gazing at her, the other of my two ladies, the plump, merry one, suddenly took it into her head that I must sing as we glided along. A very elegant young gentleman with an eye-glass, who sat beside her, instantly turned to her, and, as he kissed her hand, said, "Thanks for the poetic idea! A folk-song sung by one of the people in the open air is an Alpine rose, upon the very Alps--the Alpine horns are nothing but herbaria--the soul of the national consciousness." But I said I did not know anything fine enough to sing to such great people. Then the pert lady's-maid, who was beside me with a basket of cups and bottles, and whom I had not perceived before, said, "He knows a very pretty little song about a lady fair." "Yes, yes, sing that one!" the lady exclaimed. I felt hot all over, and the Lady fair lifted her eyes from the water and gave me a look that went to my very soul. So I did not hesitate any longer, but took heart and sang with all my might might-- "I gaze around me, going By forest, dale, and lea, O'er heights where streams are flowing, My every thought bestowing, Ah, Lady fair, on thee! "And in my garden, finding Bright flowers fresh and rare, While many a wreath I'm binding, Sweet thoughts therein I'm winding Of thee, my Lady fair. "For me 'twould be too daring To lay them at her feet. They'll soon away be wearing, But love beyond comparing Is thine, my Lady sweet. "In early morning waking, I toil with ready smile, And though my heart be breaking, I'll sing to hide its aching, And dig my grave the while." The boat touched the shore, and all the party got out; many of the young gentlemen, as I had perceived, had made game of me in whispers to the ladies while I was singing. The gentleman with the eye-glass took my hand as he left the boat, and said something to me, I do not remember what, and the elder of my two ladies gave me a kindly glance. The Lady fair had never raised her eyes all the time I was singing, and she went away without a word. As for me, before my song was ended the tears stood in my eyes; my heart seemed like to burst with shame and misery. I understood now for the first time how beautiful she was, and how poor and despised and forsaken I, and when they had all disappeared behind the bushes I could contain myself no longer, but threw myself down on the grass and wept bitterly. CHAPTER II The highroad was close on one side of the castle garden, and separated from it only by a high wall. A very pretty little toll-house with a red-tiled roof stood near, with a gay little flower-garden inclosed by a picket-fence behind it. A breach in the wall connected this garden with the most secluded and shady part of the castle garden itself. The toll-gate keeper who occupied the cottage died suddenly, and early one morning, when I was still sound asleep, the Secretary from the castle waked me in a great hurry and bade me come immediately to the Bailiff. I dressed myself as quickly as I could and followed the brisk Secretary, who, as we went, plucked a flower here and there and stuck it into his button-hole, made scientific lunges in the air with his cane, and talked steadily to me all the while, although my eyes and ears were so filled with sleep that I could not understand anything he said. When we reached the office, where as yet it was hardly light, the Bailiff, behind a huge inkstand and piles of books and papers, looked at me from out of his huge wig like an owl from out its nest, and began: "What's your name? Where do you come from? Can you read, write, and cipher?" And when I assented, he went on, "Well, her Grace, in consideration of your good manners and extraordinary merit, appoints you to the vacant post of Receiver of Toll." I hurriedly passed in mental review the conduct and manners that had hitherto distinguished me, and was forced to admit that the Bailiff was right. And so, before I knew it, I was Receiver of Toll. I took possession of my dwelling, and was soon comfortably established there. The deceased toll-gate keeper had left behind him for his successor various articles, which I appropriated, among others a magnificent scarlet dressing-gown dotted with yellow, a pair of green slippers, a tasseled nightcap, and several long-stemmed pipes. I had often wished for these things at home, where I used to see our village pastor thus comfortably provided. All day long, therefore--I had nothing else to do--I sat on the bench before my house in dressing-gown and nightcap, smoking the longest pipe from the late toll-gate keeper's collection, and looking at the people walking, driving, and riding on the high-road. I only wished that some of the folks from our village, who had always said that I never would be worth anything, might happen to pass by and see me thus. The dressing-gown became my complexion, and suited me extremely well. So I sat there and pondered many things--the difficulty of all beginnings, the great advantages of an easier mode of existence, for example--and privately resolved to give up travel for the future, save money like other people, and in time do something really great in the world. Meanwhile, with all my resolves, anxieties, and occupations, I in no wise forgot the Lady fair. I dug up and threw out of my little garden all the potatoes and other vegetables that I found there, and planted it instead with the choicest flowers, which proceeding caused the Porter from the castle with the big Roman nose--who since I had been made Receiver often came to see me, and had become my intimate friend--to eye me askance as a person crazed by sudden good fortune. But that did not deter me. For from my little garden I could often hear feminine voices not far off in the castle garden, and among them I thought I could distinguish the voice of my Lady fair, although, because of the thick shrubbery, I could see nobody. And so every day I plucked a nosegay of my finest flowers, and when it was dark in the evening, I climbed over the wall and laid it upon a marble table in an arbor near by, and every time that I brought a fresh nosegay the old one was gone from the table. One evening all the castle inmates were away hunting; the sun was just setting, flooding the landscape with flame and color, the Danube wound toward the horizon like a band of gold and fire, and the vine-dressers on all the hills throughout the country were glad and gay. I was sitting with the Porter on the bench before my cottage, enjoying the mild air and the gradual fading to twilight of the brilliant day. Suddenly the horns of the returning hunting-party sounded on the air; the notes were tossed from hill to hill by the echoes. My soul delighted in it all, and I sprang up and exclaimed, in an intoxication of joy, "That is what I ought to follow in life, the huntsman's noble calling!" But the Porter quietly knocked the ashes out of his pipe and said, "You only think so; I've tried it. You hardly earn the shoes you wear out, and you're never without a cough or a cold from perpetually getting your feet wet." I cannot tell how it was, but upon hearing him speak thus, I was seized with such a fit of foolish rage that I fairly trembled. On a sudden the entire fellow, with his bedizened coat, his big feet, his snuff, his big nose, and everything about him, became odious to me. Quite beside myself, I seized him by the breast of his coat and said, "Home with you, Porter, on the instant, or I'll send you there in a way you won't like!" At these words the Porter was more than ever convinced that I was crazy. He gazed at me with evident fear, extricated himself from my grasp, and went without a word, looking reproachfully back at me, and striding toward the castle, where he reported me as stark, staring mad. But after all I burst into a hearty laugh, glad in fact to be rid of the pompous fellow, for it was just the hour when I was wont to carry my nosegay to the arbor. I clambered over the wall, and was just about to place the flowers on the marble table, when I heard the sound of a horse's hoofs at some distance. There was no time for escape; my Lady fair was riding slowly along the avenue in a green hunting-habit, apparently lost in thought. All that I had read in an old book of my father's about the beautiful Magelona came into my head--how she used to appear among the tall forest-trees, when horns were echoing and evening shadows were flitting through the glades. I could not stir from the spot. She started when she perceived me and paused involuntarily. I was as if intoxicated with intense joy, dread, and the throbbing of my heart, and when I saw that she actually wore at her breast the flowers I had left yesterday, I could no longer keep silent, but said in a rapture, "Fairest Lady fair, accept these flowers too, and all the flowers in my garden, and everything I have! Ah, if I could only brave some danger for you!" At first she had looked at me so gravely, almost angrily, that I shivered, but then she cast down her eyes, and did not lift them while I was speaking. At that moment voices and the tramp of horses were heard in the distance. She snatched the flowers from my hand, and without saying a word, swiftly vanished at the end of the avenue. After this evening I had neither rest nor peace. I felt continually, as I had always felt when spring was at hand, restless and merry, and as if some great good fortune or something extraordinary were about to befall me. My wretched accounts in especial never would come right, and when the sunshine, playing among the chestnut boughs before my window, cast golden-green gleams upon my figures, illuminating "Bro't over" and "Total," my addition grew sometimes so confused that I actually could not count three. The figure "eight" always looked to me like my stout, tightly-laced lady with the gay head-dress, and the provoking "seven" like a finger-post pointing the wrong way, or a gallows. The "nine" was the queerest, suddenly, before I knew what it was about, standing on its head to look like "six," whilst "two" would turn into a pert interrogation-point, as if to ask me, "What in the world is to become of you, you poor zero? Without the others, the slender 'one' and all the rest, you never can come to anything!" I had no longer any ease in sitting before my door. I took out a stool to make myself more comfortable, and put my feet upon it; I patched up an old parasol, and held it over me like a Chinese pleasure-dome. But all would not do. As I sat smoking and speculating, my legs seemed to stretch to twice their size from weariness, and my nose lengthened visibly as I looked down at it for hours. And when sometimes, before daybreak, an express drove up, and I went out, half asleep, into the cool air, and a pretty face, but dimly seen in the dawning except for its sparkling eyes, looked out at me from the coach window and kindly bade me good-morning, while from the villages around the cock's clear crow echoed across the fields of gently-waving grain, and an early lark, high in the skies among the flushes of morning, soared here and there, and the Postilion wound his horn and blew, and blew--as the coach drove off, I would stand looking after it, feeling as if I could not but start off with it on the instant into the wide, wide world. I still took my flowers every day, when the sun had set, to the marble table in the dim arbor. But since that evening all had been over. Not a soul took any notice of them, and when I went to look after them early the next morning, there they lay as I had left them, gazing sadly at me with their heads hanging, and the dew-drops glistening upon their fading petals as if they were weeping. This distressed me, and I plucked no more flowers. I let the weeds grow in my garden as they pleased, and the flowers stayed on their stalks until the wind blew them away. Within me there were the same desolation and neglect. In this critical state of affairs it happened once that, as I was leaning out of my window gazing dully into vacancy, the lady's-maid from the castle came tripping across the road. When she saw me she came and stood just outside the window. "His Grace returned from his travels yesterday," she remarked, hurriedly. "Indeed!" I said, surprised, for I had taken no interest in anything for several weeks, and did not even know that his Grace had been traveling. "Then his lovely daughter will be very glad." The maid looked at me with a strange expression of face, so that I began to wonder whether I had said anything especially stupid. "He knows absolutely nothing!" she said at last, turning up her little nose. "Well," she resumed, "there is to be a ball and masquerade this evening at the castle in honor of his Grace. My lady is to be dressed as a flower-girl--understand, as a flower-girl. And she has noticed that you have particularly pretty flowers in your garden." "That's strange," I thought to myself; "there is hardly a flower to be seen there for the weeds!" But she continued: "And since my lady needs perfectly fresh flowers for her costume, you are to bring her some this evening, and wait under the big pear-tree in the castle garden when it is dark until she comes for the flowers herself." I was completely dazed with joy at this intelligence, and in my rapture I leaped out of the window and ran after the maid. "Ugh, what an ugly dressing-gown!" she exclaimed, when she saw me with my fluttering robe in the open air. This vexed me, but, not to be behindhand in gallantry, I capered gaily after her to give her a kiss. Unluckily, my feet became entangled in my dressing-gown, which was much too long for me, and I fell flat on the ground. When I had picked myself up the maid was gone, and I heard her in the distance laughing fit to kill herself. Now I had delightful food for my reflections. After all, she still remembered me and my flowers! I went into my garden and hastily tore up all the weeds from the beds, throwing them high above my head into the sunlit air, as if with the roots I were eradicating all melancholy and annoyance from my life. Once more the roses were like _her_ lips, the sky-blue convolvulus was like _her_ eyes, the snowy lily with its pensive, drooping head was _her_ very image. I put them all tenderly in a little basket; the evening was calm and lovely, not a speck of a cloud in the sky. Here and there a star appeared; the murmur of the Danube was heard afar over the meadows; in the tall trees of the castle garden countless birds were twittering to one another merrily. Ah, I was so happy! When at last night came I took my basket on my arm and set out for the large garden. The flowers in the little basket looked so gay, white, red, blue, and smelled so sweet, that my very heart laughed when I peeped in at them. Filled with joyous thoughts, I walked in the lovely moonlight over the trim paths strewn with gravel, across the little white bridge, beneath which the swans were sleeping on the bosom of the water, and past the pretty arbors and summer-houses. I soon found the big pear-tree; it was the same under which, while I was gardener's boy, I used to lie on sultry afternoons. All around me here was dark and lonely. A tall aspen quivered and kept whispering with its silver leaves. The music from the castle was heard at intervals, and now and then there were voices in the garden; sometimes they passed quite near me, and then all would be still again. My heart beat fast. I had a strange uncomfortable sensation as if I were a robber. I stood for a long time stock-still, leaning against the tree and listening; but when no one appeared I could bear it no longer. I hung my basket on my arm and clambered up into the pear-tree to breathe a purer air. The music of the dance floated up to me over the tree-tops. I overlooked the entire garden and gazed directly into the brilliantly illuminated windows of the castle. Chandeliers glittered there like galaxies of stars; a multitude of gaily-dressed gentlemen and ladies wandered and waltzed and whirled about unrecognizable, like the gay figures of a magic-lantern; at times some of them leaned out of the windows and looked down into the garden. In front of the castle the brilliant light gilded the grass, the shrubbery, and the trees, so that the flowers and the birds seemed to be aroused by it. All around and below me, however, the garden lay black and still. "_She_ is dancing there now," I thought to myself up in the tree," and has long since forgotten you and your flowers. All are gay; not a human being cares for you in the least. And thus it is with me, always and everywhere. Every one has his little nook marked out for him on this earth, his warm hearth, his cup of coffee, his wife, his glass of wine in the evening, and is perfectly happy; even the Porter with his big nose is content. For me there is no place, I seem to be just too late everywhere; the world has not a bit of need of me." As I was philosophizing thus, I suddenly heard something rustle on the grass below me. Two soft voices were speaking together in a low tone. In a moment the foliage of the shrubbery was parted, and the lady's-maid's little face appeared among the leaves, peering about on all sides. The moonlight sparkled in her saucy eyes as they peeped out. I held my breath and stared down at her. Before long the flower-girl did actually appear among the trees, just as the maid had described her to me yesterday. My heart throbbed as if it would burst. She had on a mask, and seemed to be gazing around in surprise. Somehow she did not look to me as slender and graceful as she had been. At last she reached the tree, and took off her mask. It was the other--the elder lady! How glad I was, when I had recovered from the first shock, that I was up here in safety! How in the world did she chance to come here? If the dear, lovely Lady fair should happen to come at this instant for her flowers, there would be a fine to-do! I could have cried for vexation at the whole affair. Meanwhile the disguised flower-girl beneath me began: "It is so stifling hot in the ball-room, I had to come out to cool myself in this lovely open air." Thereupon she fanned herself with her mask and puffed and blew. In the bright moonlight I could plainly see how swollen were the cords of her neck; she looked very angry and quite scarlet in the face. The lady's maid was all the while searching behind every bush, as if she were looking for a lost pin. "I do so need more fresh flowers for my character," the flower-girl continued. "Where can he be?" The maid went on searching, and kept chuckling to herself. "What did you say, Rosetta?" the flower-girl asked, shrewishly. "I say what I always have said," the maid replied, putting on a very serious, honest face; "the Receiver is a lazy fellow; of course he is lying behind some bush sound asleep." My blood tingled with longing to jump down and defend my reputation, when on a sudden a burst of music and loud shouts were heard from the castle. The flower-girl could stay no longer. "The people are cheering his Grace," she said passionately. "Come, we shall be missed!" And she clapped on her mask in a hurry, and ran in a rage with the maid toward the castle. The trees and bushes seemed to point after her with long, derisive fingers, the moonlight danced nimbly up and down over her stout figure as though over the key-board of a piano, and thus to the sound of trumpets and kettle-drums she made her exit, like many a singer whom I have seen upon the stage. I, seated above in my tree, was downright bewildered, and gazed fixedly at the castle; a circle of tall torches upon the steps of the entrance cast a strange glare upon the glittering windows and deep into the garden; the assembled servants were to serenade their master. In the midst of them stood the gorgeous Porter, like a minister of state, before a music-stand, working away busily at a bassoon. Just as I had settled myself to listen to the beautiful serenade, the folding-doors leading to the balcony above the entrance parted. A tall gentleman, very handsome and dignified, in uniform and glittering with orders, stepped out on the balcony, leading by the hand the lovely young Lady fair, dressed in white like a lily in the night, or like the moon in the clear skies. I could not take my eyes from her, and garden, trees, and fields disappeared before me, as she stood there tall and slender, so wondrously illuminated by the torch-light, now speaking with such grace to the young officer, and now nodding down kindly to the musicians. The people below were beside themselves with delight, and at last I too could restrain myself no longer, and joined in the cheers with all my might. But when, soon after, she disappeared from the balcony, one after another the torches below were extinguished and the music-stands cleared away, and the garden around was once more dark, and the trees rustled as before--then it all became clear to me; I saw that it was really only the aunt who had ordered the flowers of me, that the Lady fair never thought of me and had been married long ago, and that I myself was a big fool. All this plunged me into an abyss of reflection. I rolled myself round like a hedgehog on the prickles of my own thoughts. Snatches of music still reached me now and then from the ball-room--the clouds floated lonely away above the dim garden. And there I sat, all through the night, up in the tree, like a night-owl, amid the ruins of my happiness. The cool breeze of morning aroused me at last from my dreamings. I was startled as I looked about me. The music and dancing had long since ceased, and everything around the castle and on the lawn, and the marble steps and columns, all looked quiet, cool, and solemn; the fountain alone plashed on before the entrance. Here and there in the boughs near me the birds were awaking, shaking their bright feathers, and as they stretched their little wings, peering curiously and amazed at their strange fellow-sleeper. The joyous rays of morning flashed across my breast and over the garden. I stood erect in my tree, and for the first time for a long while looked far abroad over the country, to where the ships glided down the Danube among the vineyards, and the high-roads, still deserted, stretched like bridges across the gleaming landscape and far over the distant hills and valleys. I cannot tell how it was, but all at once my former love of travel took possession of me, all the old melancholy, and delight, and ardent expectation. And at the same moment I thought of the Lady fair over in the castle sleeping among flowers, beneath silken coverlets, with an angel surely keeping watch beside her bed in the silence of the dawn. "No!" I cried aloud. "I must go away from here, far, far away--as far as the sky stretches its blue arch!" As I uttered the words I tossed my basket high into the air, so that it was beautiful to see how the flowers fell among the branches and lay in gay colors on the green sod below. Then I got down as quickly as possible, and went through the quiet garden to my dwelling. I paused many times at spots where I had seen her pass, or where I had lain in the shade and thought of her. In and about my cottage all was just as I had left it the day before. The garden was torn up and laid waste, the big account-book lay open on the table in my room, my fiddle, which I had almost clean forgotten, hung dusty on the wall; a ray of morning light glittered upon the strings. It struck a chord in my heart. "Yes," I said, "come here, thou faithful instrument! Our kingdom is not of this world!" So I took the fiddle from the wall, and leaving behind me the account-book, dressing-gown, slippers, pipes, and parasol, I walked out of my cottage, as poor as when I entered it, and down along the gleaming high-road. I looked back often and often; I felt very strange, sad, and yet merry, like a bird escaping from his cage. And when I had walked some distance I took out my fiddle and sang-- "I wander on, in God confiding, For all are His, wood, field, and fell; O'er earth and skies He still presiding, For me will order all things well." The castle, the garden, and the spires of Vienna vanished behind me in the morning mists; far above me countless larks exulted in the air; thus, past gay villages and hamlets and over green hills, I wandered on toward Italy. CHAPTER III Here was a puzzle! It had never occurred to me that I did not know my way. Not a human being was to be seen in the quiet early morning whom I could question, and right before me the road divided into many roads, which went on far, far over the highest mountains, as though to the very end of the world--so that I actually grew giddy as I looked along them. At last a peasant appeared, going to church I fancy, as it was Sunday, in an old-fashioned coat with large silver buttons, and swinging a long malacca cane with a massive silver head, which sparkled from afar in the sunlight. I immediately asked him very politely, "Can you tell me which is the road to Italy?" The fellow stood still, stared at me, thrust out his under lip reflectively, and stared at me again. I began once more: "To Italy, where oranges grow." "What do I care for your oranges!" said the peasant, and walked on sturdily. I should have credited the fellow with more politeness, for he really looked very fine. What was to be done? Turn round and go back to my native village? Why, the folks would have jeered me, and the boys would have run after me crying, "Oh, indeed! you're welcome back from 'out in the world.' How does it look 'out in the world?' Haven't you brought us some ginger-nuts from 'out in the world?'" The Porter with the High Roman nose, who certainly was familiar with Universal History, used often to say to me, "Respected Herr Receiver, Italy is a beautiful country; the dear God takes care of every one there. You can lie on your back in the sunshine and raisins drop into your mouth; and if a tarantula bites you, you dance with the greatest ease, although you never in your life before learned to dance." "Ay, to Italy! to Italy!" I shouted with delight, and, heedless of any choice of roads, hurried on along the first that came. After I had gone a little way I saw on the right a most beautiful orchard, with the morning sun shimmering on the trunks and through the tree-tops so brilliantly that it looked as if the ground were spread with golden rugs. As no one was in sight, I clambered over the low fence and lay down comfortably on the grass under an apple-tree; all my limbs were still aching from camping out in the tree on the previous night. From where I lay I could see far abroad over the country, and as it was Sunday the sound of the church-bells from the far distance came to me over the quiet fields, and gaily-dressed peasants were walking across the meadows and along the lanes to church. I was glad at heart; the birds sang in the tree overhead; I thought of my father's mill, and of the garden of the lovely Lady fair, and of how far, far away it all was--until I fell sound asleep. I dreamed that the Lady fair came walking, or rather slowly flying, toward me from the lovely landscape to the music of the church-bells, in long white robes that waved in the rosy morning. Then again it seemed that we were not in a strange country, but in my native village, in the deep shade beside the mill. But everything was still and deserted, as it is when the people are all gone to church and only the solemn sounds of the organ wafted down through the trees break the stillness; I was oppressed with melancholy. But the Lady fair was very kind and gentle, and put her hand in mine and walked along with me, and sang, amid this solitude, the beautiful song that she used to sing to her guitar early in the morning at her open window, and in the placid mill-pool I saw her image, lovelier even than herself, except that the eyes were wondrous large and looked at me so strangely that I was almost afraid. Then suddenly the mill-wheel began to turn, at first slowly, then faster and more noisily; the pool became dark and troubled, the Lady fair turned very pale, and her robes grew longer and longer, and fluttered wildly in long strips like pennons of mist up toward the skies; the roaring of the mill-wheel sounded ever louder, and it seemed as though it were the Porter blowing upon his bassoon, so that I waked up with my heart throbbing violently. In fact, a breeze had arisen, which was gently stirring the leaves of the apple-tree above me; but the noise and roaring came neither from the mill nor from the Porter's bassoon, but from the same peasant who had before refused to show me the way to Italy. He had taken off his Sunday coat and put on a white smock-frock. "Oho!" he said, as I rubbed my sleepy eyes, "do you want to pick your oranges here, that you trample down all my grass instead of going to church, you lazy lout, you?" I was vexed that the boor should have waked me, and I started up and cried, "Hold your tongue! I have been a better gardener than you will ever be, and a Receiver, and if you had been driving to town, you would have had to take off your dirty cap to me, sitting at my door in my yellow-dotted, red dressing-gown--" But the fellow was nothing daunted, and, putting his arms akimbo, merely asked, "What do you want here? eh! eh!" I saw that he was a short, stubbed, bow-legged fellow, with protruding goggle-eyes, and a red, rather crooked nose. And when he went on saying nothing but "Eh! eh!" and kept advancing toward me step by step, I was suddenly seized with so curious a sensation of disgust that I hastily jumped to my feet, leaped over the fence, and, without looking round, ran across country until my fiddle in my pocket twanged again. When at last I stopped to take breath, the orchard and the whole valley were out of sight and I was in a beautiful forest. But I took little note of it, for I was downright provoked at the peasant's impertinence, and I fumed for a long time, to myself. I walked on quickly, going farther and farther from the high-road and in among the mountains. The plank-roadway which I had been following ceased, and before me was only a narrow, unfrequented foot-path. Not a soul was to be seen anywhere, and no sound was to be heard. But it was very pleasant walking; the trees rustled and the birds sang sweetly. I resigned myself to the guidance of heaven, and, taking out my violin, played all my favorite airs. Very joyous they sounded in the lonely forest. I grew tired of playing after a while, for I stumbled every minute over the tiresome roots of the trees, and I began to grow very hungry, while the wood seemed endless. Thus I wandered for the entire day, until the sun's rays came aslant through the trunks of the trees, when at last I emerged on a little grassy vale shut in by the mountains and gay with red and yellow flowers, above which myriads of butterflies were fluttering in the golden light of the setting sun. It was as secluded here as though the world had been hundreds of miles away. The crickets chirped, and a shepherd lad lying among the tall grasses blew so melancholy an air upon his horn that it was enough to break one's heart. "Yes," thought I to myself, "who has as happy a lot as a lazy lout! Some of us, though, have to wander about among strangers, and be always on the go." As a lovely, clear stream separated me from him, I called to him to ask where the nearest village was. But he did not disturb himself to reply--only stretched his head a little out of the grass, pointed with his horn to the opposite wood, and coolly resumed his piping. I marched on briskly, for twilight was at hand. The birds, which had made a great clatter while the sun was disappearing on the horizon, suddenly fell silent, and I began to feel almost afraid, so solemn was the perpetual rustling of the lonely forest. At last I heard dogs barking in the distance. I walked more quickly, the forest grew less and less dense, and in a little while I saw through the last trees a beautiful village-green, where a crowd of children were frolicking, and capering around a huge linden in the centre. Opposite me was an inn, and at a table before it were seated some peasants playing cards and smoking. On one side a number of lads and lasses were gathered in a group, the girls with their arms rolled in their aprons, and all gossiping together in the cool of the evening. I took very little time for consideration, but, drawing my fiddle from my pocket, I played a merry waltz as I came out from the forest. The girls were surprised, and the old folks laughed so that the woods reechoed with their merriment. But when I reached the linden, and, leaning my back against it, went on playing gay waltzes, a whisper went round among the groups of young people to the right and left; the lads laid aside their pipes, each put his arm around his lass's waist, and in the twinkling of an eye the young folk were all waltzing around me; the dogs barked, skirts and coat-tails fluttered, and the children stood around me in a circle gazing curiously into my face and at my briskly-moving fingers. When the first waltz was ended, it was easy to see how good music loosens the limbs. The peasant lads, who had before been restlessly shuffling about on the benches, with their pipes in their mouths and their legs stretched out stiffly in front of them, were positively transformed, and, with their gay handkerchiefs hanging from the button-holes of their coats, capered about with the lasses so that it was a pleasure to look at them. One of them, who evidently thought a deal of himself, fumbled in his waistcoat-pocket for a long while, that the others might see him, and finally brought out a little silver coin, which he tried to put into my hand. It irritated me, although I had not a stiver in my pocket. I told him to keep his pennies, I was playing only for joy, because I was glad to be among people once more. Soon afterward, however, a pretty girl came up to me with a great tankard of wine. "Musicians are thirsty folk," she said, with a laugh that displayed her pearls of teeth gleaming so temptingly between her red lips that I should have liked to kiss her then and there. She put the tankard to her charming mouth, and her eyes sparkled at me over its rim; she then handed it to me; I drained it to the bottom, and played afresh, till all were spinning merrily about me once more. By and by the old peasants finished their game, and the young people grew tired and separated, so that gradually all was quiet and deserted in front of the inn. The girl who had brought me the wine also walked toward the village, but she went very slowly, and looked around from time to time as if she had forgotten something. At last she stopped and seemed to search for it on the ground, but as she stooped I saw her glance toward me from under her arm. I had learned polite manners at the castle, so I sprang toward her and said, "Have you lost anything, my pretty ma'amselle?" She blushed crimson. "Ah, no," she said; "it was only a rose; will you have it?" I thanked her, and stuck the rose in my button-hole. She looked very kindly at me, and said, "You play beautifully." "Yes," I replied, "it is a gift from God." "Musicians are very rare in the country about here," she began again, then stammered, and cast down her eyes. "You might earn a deal of money here. My father plays the fiddle a little, and likes to hear about foreign countries--and my father is very rich." Then she laughed, and said, "If you only would not waggle your head so, when you play." "My dearest girl," I said, "do not blush so--and as for the tremoloso motion of the head, we can't help it, great musicians all do it." "Oh, indeed!" rejoined the girl. She was about to say more, when a terrible racket arose in the inn; the front door was opened with a bang, and a tall, lean fellow was shot out of it like a ramrod, after which it was slammed to behind him. At the first sound the girl ran off like a deer and vanished in the darkness. The man picked himself up and began to rave against the inn with such volubility that it was a wonder to hear him. "What!" he yelled, "I drunk? I not pay the chalk-marks on your smoky door? Rub them out! rub them out! Did I not shave you yesterday over a ladle, and cut you just under the nose so that you bit the ladle in two? Shaving takes off one mark; ladle, another mark; court-plaster on your nose, another. How many more of your dirty marks do you want to have paid? But all right--all right. I'll let the whole village, the whole world go unshaved. Wear your beards, for all I care, till they are so long that at the judgment-day the Almighty will not know whether you are Jews or Christians. Yes, hang yourselves with your beards, shaggy bears that you are!" Here he burst into tears and, in a maudlin, falsetto voice, sobbed out, "Am I to drink water like a wretched fish? Is that loving your neighbor? Am I not a man and a skilled surgeon? Ah, I am beside myself today; my heart is full of pity, and of love for my fellow-creatures." And then, finding that all was quiet in the house, he began to walk away. When he saw me, he came plunging toward me with outstretched arms. I thought the fellow was about to embrace me, and sprang aside, letting him stumble on in the darkness, where I heard him discoursing to himself for some time. All sorts of fancies filled my brain. The girl who had given me the rose was young, pretty, and rich. I could make my fortune before one could turn round. And sheep and pigs, turkeys, and fat geese stuffed with apples--verily, I seemed to see the Porter strutting up to me: "Seize your luck, Receiver, seize your luck! 'Marry young, you're never wrong;' take home your bride, live in the country, and live well." Plunged in these philosophical reflections, I sat me down on a stone, for, since I had no money, I did not venture to knock at the inn. The moon shone brilliantly, the forests on the mountain-side murmured in the still night; now and then a dog barked in the village which lay farther down the valley, buried, as it were, beneath foliage and moonlight. I gazed up at the heavens, where a few clouds were sailing slowly and now and then a falling star shot down from the zenith. Thus this same moon, thought I, is shining down upon my father's mill and upon his Grace's castle. Everything there is quiet by this time, the Lady fair is asleep, and the fountains and leaves in the garden are whispering just as they used to whisper, all the same whether I am there, or here, or dead. And the world seemed to me so terribly big, and I so utterly alone in it, that I could have wept from the very depths of my heart. While I was thus sitting there, suddenly I heard the sound of horses' hoofs in the forest. I held my breath and listened as the sound came nearer and nearer, until I could hear the horses snorting. Soon afterward two horsemen appeared under the trees, but paused at the edge of the woods, and talked together in low, very eager tones, as I could see by the moving shadows which were thrown across the bright village-green, and by their long dark arms pointing in various directions. How often at home, when my mother, now dead, had told me of savage forests and fierce robbers, had I privately longed to be a part of such a story! I was well paid now for my silly, rash longings. I reached up the linden-tree, beneath which I was sitting, as high as I could, unobserved, until I clasped the lowest branch, and then I swung myself up. But just as I had got my body half across the branch, and was about to drag my legs up after it, one of the horsemen trotted briskly across the green toward me. I shut my eyes tight amid the thick foliage, and did not stir. "Who is there?" a voice called directly under me. "Nobody!" I yelled in terror at being detected, although I could not but laugh to myself at the thought of how the rogues would look when they should turn my empty pockets inside out. "Aha!" said the robber, "whose are these legs, then, hanging down here?" There was no help for it. "They are," I replied, "only a couple of legs of a poor, lost musician." And I hastily let myself drop, for I was ashamed to hang there any longer like a broken fork. The rider's horse shied when I dropped so suddenly from the tree. He patted the animal's neck, and said, laughing, "Well, we too are lost, so we are comrades; perhaps you can help us to find the road to B. You shall be no loser by it." I assured him that I knew nothing about the road to B., and said that I would ask in the inn, or would conduct them to the village. But the man would not listen to reason; he drew from his girdle a pistol, the barrel of which glittered in the moonlight. "My dear fellow," he said in a very friendly tone, as he wiped off the glittering barrel and then ran his eye along it--"my dear fellow, you will have the kindness to go yourself before us to B." Verily, I was in a scrape. If I chanced to hit the right road, I should certainly get into the midst of the robber band and be beaten because I had no money; if I did not find the road, I should be beaten of course. I wasted very little thought upon the matter, but took the first road at hand, the one past the inn which led away from the village. The horseman galloped back to his companion, and both followed me slowly at some distance. Thus we wandered on foolishly enough at hap-hazard through the moonlit night. The road led through forests on the side of a mountain. Sometimes we could see, above the tops of the pines stirring darkly beneath us, far abroad into the deep, silent valleys; now and then a nightingale burst into song; the dogs bayed in the distant villages. A brook babbled ceaselessly from the depths below us, and here and there glistened in the moonlight. The hush was disturbed by the monotonous tramp of the horses and by the stir and movement of their riders, who talked together incessantly in a foreign tongue, and the bright moonlight contrasted sharply with the long shadows of the trees, which swept across the figures of the horsemen, making them appear now black, now light, now dwarfish, and anon gigantic. My thoughts grew strangely confused, as though in a dream from which I could not waken, but I marched straight ahead. We certainly must reach the end of the forest and of the night too, I thought. At last long, rosy streaks flushed the horizon here and there but faintly, as when one breathes upon a mirror, and a lark began to sing high up above the peaceful valley. My heart at once grew perfectly light at the approach of dawn, and all fear left me. The two horsemen stretched themselves, looked around, and seemed for the first time to suspect that we might not have taken the right road. They chatted much, and I could perceive that they were talking of me; it even seemed to me that one of them began to mistrust me, as though I were a rogue trying to lead them astray in the forest. This amused me mightily, for the lighter it grew the greater grew my courage, until we emerged upon a fine, spacious opening. Here I looked about me quite savagely, and whistled once or twice through my fingers, as scoundrels always do when they wish to signal one another. "Halt!" exclaimed one of the horsemen, so suddenly that I jumped. When I looked round I saw that both had alighted and had tied their horses to a tree. One of them came up to me rapidly, stared me full in the face, and then burst into a fit of immoderate laughter. I must confess this senseless merriment irritated me. But he said, "Why, it is actually the gardener--I should say the Receiver, from the castle!" I stared at him in turn, but could not remember who he was; indeed, I should have had enough to do to recognize all the young gentlemen who came and went at the castle. He kept up an eternal laughter, however, declaring, "This is magnificent! You're taking a holiday, I see; we are just in want of a servant; stay with us and you will have a perpetual holiday." I was dumbfounded, and said at last that I was just on my way to visit Italy. "Italy?" the stranger rejoined. "That is just where we wish to go!" "Ah, if that be so!" I exclaimed, and, taking out my fiddle, I tuned up so that all the birds in the wood awaked. The young fellow immediately threw his arm around his companion, and they waltzed about the meadow like mad. Suddenly they stood still. "By heavens," exclaimed one, "I can see the church-tower of B.! We shall soon be there." He took out his watch and made it repeat, then shook his head, and made the watch strike again. "No," he said, "it will not do; we should arrive too early, and that might be very bad." Then they brought out from their saddle-bags cakes, cutlets, and bottles of wine, spread a gay cloth on the grass, stretched themselves beside it, and feasted to their hearts' content, sharing all generously with me, which I greatly enjoyed, seeing that for some days I had not had over and above enough to eat. "And let me tell you," one of them said to me--"but you do not know us yet?" I shook my head. "Then let me tell you. I am the painter Lionardo, and my friend here is a painter also, called Guido." I could see the two painters more clearly in the dawning morning. Herr Lionardo was tall, brown, and slender, with merry, ardent eyes. The other was much younger, smaller, and more delicate, dressed in antique German style, as the Porter called it, with a white collar and bare throat, about which hung dark brown curls, which he was often obliged to toss aside from his pretty face. When he had breakfasted, he picked up my fiddle, which I had laid on the grass beside me, seated himself upon the fallen trunk of a tree, and strummed the strings. Then he sang in a voice clear as a wood-robin's, so that it went to my very heart heart-- "When the earliest morning ray Through the valley finds its way, Hill and forest fair awaking, All who can their flight are taking. "And the lad who's free from care Shouts, with cap flung high in air, 'Song its flight can aye be winging; Let me, then, be ever singing.'" As he sang, the ruddy rays of morning exquisitely illumined his pale face and dark, love-lit eyes. But I was so tired that the words and notes of his song mingled and blended strangely in my ears, until at last I fell sound asleep. When, by and by, I began gradually to awaken, I heard, as in a dream, the two painters talking together beside me, and the birds singing overhead, while the morning sun shining through my closed eyelids produced the sensation of looking toward the light through red curtains. "_Com' e bello_!" I heard some one exclaim close to me. I opened my eyes, and saw the younger painter bending over me in the clear morning light, so near that I seemed to see only his large black eyes between his drooping curls. I sprang up hastily, for it was broad day. Herr Lionardo seemed cross--he had two angry furrows on his brow--and hastily made ready to move on. But the other painter shook his curls away from his face and quietly hummed an air to himself as he was bridling his steed, until at last Lionardo burst into a sudden fit of laughter, picked up a bottle standing on the grass, and poured the contents into a couple of glasses. "To our happy arrival!" he exclaimed, as the two clinked their glasses melodiously. Whereupon Lionardo tossed the empty bottle high in the air, and it sparkled brilliantly. At last they mounted their horses, and I marched on beside them. Just at our feet lay a valley in measureless extent, into which our road descended. How clear and fresh and bright and jubilant were all the sights and sounds around! I was so cool, so happy, that I felt as if I could have flown from the mountain out into the glorious landscape. CHAPTER IV Farewell, mill, and castle, and Porter! We went at such a pace that the wind nearly blew my hat off. Right and left, villages, towns, and vineyards flew past in a twinkling; behind me the two painters were seated in the carriage, before me were four horses and a gorgeous postilion, while I, seated high up on the box, bounced into the air from time to time. It had happened thus: Arrived at B., while we were as yet in the outskirts a tall, thin, crusty gentleman in a green plush coat came to meet us, and, with many obeisances to the two painters, conducted us into the village, where, beneath the tall linden beside the post-station, stood a fine carriage with four post-horses. Herr Lionardo meanwhile insisted that I had outgrown my clothes, and in a trice he produced another suit from his portmanteau, and I had to put on a beautiful new dress-coat and vest; very fine to see, but they were too long and too wide for me, and absolutely fluttered about me. And I also had a brand-new hat, which shone in the sunlight as if it had been smeared with fresh butter. Then the crusty stranger gentleman took the bridles of the two horses which the painters had been riding, the painters themselves got into the carriage, I mounted upon the box, and we started, just as the postmaster poked his head out of the window, in his nightcap. The postilion blew his horn merrily, and we were off for Italy. I led a magnificent existence up there, like a bird in the air, except that I did not need to fly. I had absolutely nothing to do but to sit on the box day and night, and bring out food and drink to the carriage from the inns, for the painters never alighted, and in the daytime they shut the carriage windows close, as if the sun would have killed them; only now and then Herr Guido put his pretty head out of the carriage window and chatted kindly with me, laughing the while at Herr Lionardo, who always seemed to dislike these talks. Once or twice I nearly fell into disgrace with my master--the first time because on a clear starry night I began to play the fiddle up there on my box, and then because of my sleeping. It _was_ strange! I longed to see all that I could of Italy, and opened my eyes wide every fifteen minutes. And yet, after I had gazed steadily about me for a while, the sixteen trotting feet before me would grow indistinct and dreamy, my eyes would gradually close, and at last I would fall into a slumber so profound and invincible that it was impossible to rouse me. Then day or night, rain or sunshine, Tyrol or Italy, it was all the same; I swayed first to the right, then to the left, then backward--nay, sometimes my head nodded down so low that my hat dropped off, and Herr Guido screamed aloud. Thus we had passed, I hardly know how, half through the part of Italy that they call Lombardy, when on a fine evening we stopped at a country inn. The post-horses were to be ready for us at the neighboring station in a couple of hours, so the painters left the carriage, and were shown into a special apartment, to rest a little, and to write some letters. I was greatly pleased, and betook myself to the common room to eat and drink in comfort. Here everything looked rather disreputable: the maids were going about with their hair in disorder and their neckerchiefs awry, exposing their sallow skin; the men-servants were at their supper in blue smock-frocks, around a circular table, whence they glowered at me from time to time. They all wore their hair tied behind in a short, thick queue which looked quite dandified. "Here you are," I said to myself, as I ate my supper, "here you are in the country from which such queer people used to come to the Herr Pastor's with mouse-traps, and barometers, and pictures. How much a man learns who makes up his mind not to stick close to his own hearth-stone all his life!" As I was thus eating my supper and meditating, a little man, who had been sitting in a dim corner of the room over a glass of wine, darted out of his nook at me like a spider. He was quite short and crooked, and he had a big ugly head, with a long hooked nose and sparse red whiskers, while his powdered hair stood on end all over his head as if a hurricane had swept over it. He wore an old-fashioned, threadbare dress-coat, short, plush breeches, and faded silk stockings. He had once been in Germany, and prided himself upon his knowledge of German. He sat down by me and asked a hundred questions, perpetually taking snuff the while--Was I the _servitore_? When did we arrive? Had we gone to Roma? All this I myself did not know, and really I could not understand his gibberish. "_Parlez-vous francais_?" I asked him at last in my distress. He shook his big head, and I was very glad, for neither did I speak French. But it was of no use, he had taken me in hand, and went on asking question after question; the more we parleyed the less we understood each other, until at last we both grew angry, and I actually thought the Signor would have liked to peck me with his hooked beak, until the maids, who had been listening to our confusion of tongues, laughed heartily at us. I put down my knife and fork and went out of doors; for in this strange land I, with my German tongue, seemed to have sunk down fathoms deep into the sea, where all sorts of unfamiliar, crawling creatures were gliding about me, peopling the solitude and glaring and snapping at me. Outside, the summer night was warm and inviting. From the distant vineyards a laborer's song now and then fell on the ear; there was lightning low on the horizon, and the landscape seemed to tremble and whisper in the moonlight. Sometimes I thought I perceived a tall, dim figure gliding behind the hazel hedge in front of the house and peeping through the twigs, and then all would be motionless. Suddenly Herr Guido appeared on the balcony above me. He did not see me, and began to play with great skill on a zither which he must have found in the house, singing to it like a nightingale: "When the yearning heart is stilled As in dreams, the forest sighing, To the listening earth replying, Tells the thoughts with which 'twas filled: Days long vanished, soothing sorrow-- From the Past a light they borrow, And the heart is gently thrilled." I do not know whether he sang any more, for I had stretched myself on a bench outside the door, and I fell asleep in the warm air from sheer exhaustion. A couple of hours must have passed, when I was roused by the winding of a post-horn, which sounded merrily in my dreams for a while before I fully recovered consciousness. At last I sprang up; day was already dawning on the mountains, and I felt through all my limbs the freshness of the morning. Then it occurred to me that by this time we ought to be far on our way. "Aha!" I thought, "now it is my turn to laugh. How Herr Guido will shake his sleepy, curly head when he hears me outside!" So I went close beneath the window in the little garden at the back of the house, stretched my limbs well in the morning air, and sang merrily-- "If the cricket's chirp we hear, Then be sure the day is near; When the sun is rising--then 'Tis good to go to asleep again." The window of the room where my masters were stood open, but all within was quiet; the breeze alone rustled the leaves of the vine that clambered into the window itself. "What does this mean?" I exclaimed in surprise, and ran into the house, and through the silent corridors, to the room. But when I opened the door my heart stood still with dismay; the room was perfectly empty; not a coat, not a hat, not a boot, anywhere. Only the zither upon which Herr Guido had played was hanging on the wall, and on the table in the centre of the room lay a purse full of money, with a card attached to it. I took it to the window, and could scarcely trust my eyes when I read, in large letters, "For the Herr Receiver!" But what good could it all do me if I could not find my dear, merry masters again? I thrust the purse into my deep coat-pocket, where it plumped down as into a well and almost pulled me over backward. Then I rushed out, and made a great noise, and waked up all the maids and men in the house. They could not imagine what was the matter, and thought I must have gone crazy. But they were not a little amazed when they saw the empty nest. No one knew anything of my masters. One maid only had observed--so far as I could make out from her signs and gesticulations--that Herr Guido, when he was singing on the balcony on the previous evening, had suddenly screamed aloud, and had then rushed back into the room to the other gentleman. And once, when she waked in the night afterward, she had heard the tramp of a horse. She peeped out of the little window of her room, and saw the crooked Signor, who had talked so much to me, on a white horse, galloping so furiously across the field in the moonlight that he bounced high up from his saddle; and the maid crossed herself, for he looked like a ghost riding upon a three-legged horse. I did not know what in the world to do. Meanwhile, however, our carriage was standing before the door ready to start, and the impatient postilion blew his horn fit to burst, for he had to be at the next station at a certain hour, because everything had been ordered with great exactitude in the way of changing horses. I ran once more through all the house, calling the painters, but no one made answer; the inn-people stared at me, the postilion cursed, the horses neighed, and, at last, completely dazed, I sprang into the carriage, the hostler shut the door behind me, the postilion cracked his whip, and away I went into the wide world. CHAPTER V We drove on now over hill and dale, day and night. I had no time for reflection, for wherever we arrived the horses were standing ready harnessed. I could not talk with the people, and my signs and gestures were of no use; often just in the midst of a fine dinner the postilion wound his horn, and I had to drop knife and fork and spring into the carriage again without knowing whither I was going, or why or wherefore I was obliged to hurry on at such a rattling pace. Otherwise the life was not unpleasant. I reclined upon the soft cushions first in one corner of the carriage and then in the other, and took note of countries and people, and when we drove through the villages I leaned both arms on the window of the carriage, and acknowledged the courtesy of the men who took off their hats to me, or else I kissed my hand like an old acquaintance to the young girls at the windows, who looked surprised, and stared after me as long as the carriage was in sight. But a day came when I was in a terrible fright. I had never counted the money in the purse left for me, and I had to pay a great deal to the postmasters and innkeepers everywhere, so that before I was aware, the purse was empty. When I first discovered this I had an idea of jumping out of the carriage and making my escape, the next time we drove through a lonely wood. But I could not make up my mind to give up the beautiful carriage and leave it all alone, when, if it were possible, I would gladly have driven in it to the end of the world. So I sat buried in thought, not knowing what to do, when all at