by refusing to bend the knee before the images of men mortal as ourselves, they at the same time robbed us of the noble creative power of art-painting was banished with the pictures of the saints; yea, and in some comfortless regions, religion was deprived of all light, and colour, and enchantment, and stood forth a bare naked rock of stern intellect, battered by the east wind of theological polemics.

The student of church history knows too well what special reference these remarks have to Germany. In no Protestant country did church dogmatism celebrate a more complete triumph; no where did the mere formal understanding "that murders to dissect" more completely monopolize the domain of religion, and choke up the fair flowers of fancy and feeling. And when once this barren formalism fell, a cure followed almost as bad as the disease. The church dogmatist was superseded by the biblical critic, the biblical critic was supplanted by the neologian. Calov yielded to Michaelis, and Michaelis paved the way for Wegcheider. Whatever their abilities might be, these certainly were not the men to restore the lost poetry of Christianity, and infuse the blood of new feeling into the stark body of the Protestant church. The consequence was unavoidable. Men who could find no poetical nourishment in the merely intellectual Protestantism of the then Lutheran church cast their eyes with longing back to the religion of the middle ages. From the strifes, and contentions of and vain disputations of learned Protestant theologians, they sought repose in the bosom of a church which seemed to put mere dogmas wisely beyond the reach of argument, in order that its disciples might give themselves with more singleness of soul to the pious exercises of faith and love. And thus was generated that poetical neo-Catholicism, which forms so remarkable a feature in the history of modern German literature; a phenomenon certainly in these unbelieving days not a little remarkable, and deserving of the deepest attention from every philosophic and religious mind.

If any one now asks-and it is a very natural question-how it happens that in Germany Romanticism took such a deeply serious and religious hue, whereas, among ourselves, when Walter Scott recreated the ballad poetry and the times of chivalry, we continued to look upon the spectacle, pleased indeed and delighted with its novelty, but with a most clear and discriminating eye of Protestant reason?-the answer is not far off. The Germans are not only more the children of feeling and fancy than the English, but they do every thing in a much more serious, thorough-going, exhaustive style than we do; and they have also, we are inclined to suspect, more capacity of religion than we have. This may appear

a harsh saying, but we believe it is founded in truth. By religion, of course, we do not mean a mere intellectual faith in church dogmas, or a superstitious punctiliousness in church-going, much less a mere party zeal for the only true church as by law established; but we understand by this much-abused term a deep and pervading feeling of reverence and love towards the Supreme Being in all his ordinary and extraordinary manifestations.

It requires but a very superficial acquaintance with German literature to know that this feeling of religion more completely interpenetrates and interfuses all poetry and all philosophy than among ourselves. Accordingly a German will often be found serious when an Englishman laughs; and worshipping where an Englishman sneers. In matters of art especially an Englishman's creed hangs very lightly on his shoulders; but in Germany art is a religion. John Bull looks upon a Madonna of Raphael's merely as a fine picture, the expression, design or colouring of which he may amuse himself to critizise or to imitate; and perhaps, if he be in a sentimental mood, he may condescend to write a sonnet to the Virgin. To the German this same picture is a holy revelation of art, something proceeding from the very bosom of God; and he lives and breathes in the perception of its beauty. There is something very ennobling and very elevating in this character of mind, but it is also apt to be attended, and has in Germany practically been attended, with many egregious follies; and this neocatholicism of the Romantic school to which we have alluded is one of them. It is a pleasant thing in imagination to conceive a vessel borne gently along by the mere favourable impulse of wind and wave; but in practice no good can be done without a helm. The great error of the Germans is precisely this want of practicality; and truly it is a sad want. But "time brings roses," as the proverb says; and, if we mistake not, the rail-roads, of which we now hear so much in Germany, will work, and that speedily, a most wonderful change in their metaphysics. Had Kant, and Schelling, and Hegel, not talked themselves to silence, the times and the omnipotent spirit of the age would have put a gag upon them.

We have in these remarks purposely confined ourselves to the Christian, or (what in this case is the same thing) the Catholic element of the romantic, leaving out of view altogether the Gothic and merely mundane ingredient to which it owes not a few of its charms. The earnest religious character which romantic poetry has assumed in Germany, is peculiarly characteristic as well of that poetry, as of the nation to which it belongs; and to this it is peculiarly proper that the attention of the foreigner should be

directed. The Frenchman comprehends the voice of German romance not at all, because he has no religion: the Englishman with difficulty, because his religion consists too much in an unpoetical faith of the understanding, and in acts of merely outward statutory observance. Besides, the strong Protestant prejudices of a mere Englishman preclude him from sympathizing seriously with the spirit of the middle ages, not always because he has less religious feeling than the German, but because he has a more deep-rooted hatred against Popery. But when the middle age is held forth merely in its outward pomp and splendour to astonish us, merely in its dark and dismal terrors to freeze us, merely in its chivalrous devotedness to fair woman to melt us, merely in its mad and grotesque combinations to make us laugh, then we bid it most hearty welcome. Take away the sacredness of that time; unsanctify, secularize, caricature its most loved and cherished ideas; burn out the smell of the Popish devil; make the Madonna a mere woman; and John Bull will straightway be willing to receive a whole army of knights and ladies, giants and dwarfs, ghosts and goblins, into his plain, practical, prosaic brain. On this principle his literary tastes are accounted for. Ariosto and Cervantes are his special favourites; Tieck he can allow to divert him for an hour, though not without a certain lurking feeling of discomfort occasioned by the Catholic element in which that poet is accustomed to move; Frederick Schlegel he denounces as mystical and unintelligible: and Novalis he utterly reprobates, or, what is much more common, absolutely ignores. A regular Englishman would no more think of reading Novalis, than of gleaning philosophy from Jacob Böhme or ethics from Spinoza. But there is one German book of which he is very fond, and that book is Wieland's Oberon. He loves a laugh and here he finds it. This laugh he cannot find in Tieck's Genoveve;" and are you so sanguine as to dream that this pure creation of Christian beauty and Christian love will ever be generally admired in England? If one or two stray students are now found to read and to praise it, it is because it is now fashionable to study German, and because Tieck is confessedly a great German poet.

We may now allow ourselves a cursive glance at the historical development of the Romantic school in Germany. Frederick Schlegel was born in 1769; Ludwig Tieck in 1773; Novalis in 1772; and Ludwig Uhland in 1785. We mention these dates particularly that the student of poetry may remark this striking coincidence with the chronology of what has been called "The Lake School" in England. Our own Wordsworth was born in

1770, and Coleridge in 1773. This coincidence is not unimportant. The English "lakers" are as like the German romanticists, as an Englishman can possibly be to a German. Indeed Wordsworth and Coleridge are, in all the essential features of their genius, more German than English. Who, for instance, could have looked for such a mad, and at the same time such a wise, Creation, as "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner," from the same soil on which Pope and Swift were native? Does it not smack of Fouqué? is it not redolent of Chamisso? does it not make a perfect harmonic triad with Undine, and Peter Schlemihl? Believe it, reader, the inspiration of Coleridge is altogether German; and, as to Wordsworth, where do the homely, the sublime, and the ridiculous live together in such friendly fellowship as in Germany? and what worshipper however blind of the great poet of the Excursion can deny that he has once and again done no small disrespect to his own dignity, by encouraging the same motley partnership?

The fact is certain. German romanticism and English laking are one. Their origin is the same. They are the products of one wide-working cause. They are the children of reaction, and that reaction not single, but double; reaction first against the overrefinement of the French culture of Louis XIV.; secondly, against the over-excitement of the French revolution of 1792. These causes only require to be stated to be recognized as the great movers of two mighty tides of intellect, on one of which ourselves of the present generation are partly borne. Our business is with Germany; but we must mention one fact with regard to England which has had the greatest influence not only upon German poetry, but on the whole poetry of modern Europe. England preceded both France and Germany in the poetical reaction against the over-refinement of the Louis XIV. school; and what is remarkable, this reaction was originated among us not by a poet, but by a poetical antiquary. Every body sees that we speak here of the publication of the Percy ballads; and he who does not trace these ballads through the poetry of Wordsworth and Scott in this country, and from Burger, through Göthe, and thence to Ludwig Uhland, in Germany, is blind as a bat.

But the Germans were not content to drink of the English stream. Once raised from the coldness and stiffness, the formality and the pedantry, of the Franco-Gottschedian school, they pursued the new chase after "Nature" with a diligence and an enthusiasm (sometimes also with an extravagance and a childishness) most peculiarly German. From the days of Herder to the present hour, "the voices of the people" have been gathered together in Germany, from the north and from the south, and from the east and from the west. The mighty heart of Gottfried Herder

called around him every sweet echo of every age and every time. Humanity was his watch-word, as indeed it may be said to be the watch-word of the all-comprehensive literature of Germany in general. A German is never content to be a mere German; he must also be a man, a cosmopolitan. But the German fatherland was not forgotten; too long indeed it had been but a wide battle-field for the heroes and heroic madmen of foreign soldiership to play their murderous pranks upon; the horn of the Percies had startled the ear of Germany, and it was answered by a blast from the war-trumpet of Barbarossa.

In reference to Ludwig Uhland (and indeed in some measure to the whole living lyric poetry of Germany) we are especially called upon to make mention here of a work which issued from the Romantic school, and which has always been considered as one of its most precious fruits. We allude to the "Knaben Wunderhorn;" a collection of old German songs and ballads, published by Arnim and Brentano. The nature and simplicity which are so characteristic of the later lyric poetry of Germany may be traced in a great measure to this source; though here the absorbing totality with which the Germans throw themselves into a favorite theme has not been without its evil consequences. The trifling childishness and the puling sentimentality which are to be found in not a few of Uhland's poems, and in almost all of Justinus Kerner's, arise from this cause. Uhland and his Swabian collaborators have been styled, or have styled themselves, xar' oxnu, "Naturdichter;" and if wandering in lonely woods, listening to love-lorn nightingales, and weeping pious tears to keep the morning dew company, are the great leading characteristics of a "poet of Nature," they certainly have most peculiar claims to the monopoly of this designation. If we thought it at all probable that a profound German physician, who holds holy converse with magnetic maids and sees blue spirits and green, red spirits and grey, with an eye situated now at the point of his finger, and now at the pit of his stomach, would listen to a passing word of advice from a plain, practical Englishman, we would say to him in one sentence: Though nature is on all occasions the only true guide of the poet, yet there are two natures, the one the nature of a man, the other the nature of a baby-this to be shunned, and that to be followed.

But how indeed could an honest German have been expected to keep himself free from this modern vice of poetic silliness and mawkishness, when even we in England, with all our boasted British sound sense, have not been able to stand against the infection? When such a mighty change in the poetic world was to be made, as that from kings and courtiers and courtesans, to wag