any
extraordinary productiveness in the power that regulates the seed-time
and the harvests of the human race, or from the mighty excitements and
stimulants wherewith the world was then teeming--among the richest in
the blossoming of genius. For not to mention the great military talents
first developed in those days, among the holders of which were he who
conquered all the continent of Europe, and he before whom that conqueror
fell; turning away from the many rank but luxuriant weeds that sprang up
in France, after all its plains had been manured with blood; and fixing
the eye solely upon literary excellence, we find in our own country,
that the chief part of those men by whom we may hope that the memory of
our days will be transmitted to posterity as a thing precious and to be
held in honour, that Wordsworth, and Coleridge, and Southey, and Lamb,
and Landor, and Scott, put forth during those ten years the first-fruits
of their minds; while in Germany, the same period was rendered
illustrious by Fichte and John Paul Richter at its commencement, and
subsequently by Schelling, and Hegel, and Steffens, Schleiermacher, and
the Schlegels, and Novalis, and Tieck. Of this noble brotherhood, who
all, I believe, studied at the same university, that of Jena, and who
were all bound together by friendship, by affinity of genius, and by
unity of aim, the two latter, Novalis and Tieck, were the poets: for
though there are several things of great poetical beauty in the works of
the Schlegels, their fame, upon the whole, rests on a different basis.
The lovely dreamy mind of Novalis was cut off in the full promise of its
spring; it only just awoke from the blissful visions of its childhood,
to breathe forth a few lyrical murmurs about the mysteries it had been
brooding over, and then fell asleep again. Upon Tieck, therefore, the
character of German poetry in the age following those of Goethe and
Schiller will mainly depend: and never did Norwegian or Icelandic spring
burst forth more suddenly than the youth of Ludwig Tieck. I know not in
the whole history of literature, any poet who can count up so many and
so great exploits achieved on his first descent into the arena: in
number and variety even Goethe must yield the precedence, though his
youthful triumphs were _Goetz of Berlichingen_ and _Werther_. There was
in Tieck's early works the promise, and far more than the promise, of
the greatest dramatic poet whom Europe had seen since the