influence on the great
concerns of human life, morals, politics and religion. The reign of
light, liberality and common sense was every where proclaimed; objects
formerly deemed great, awful and holy, were brought down by ingenious
accommodations to the level of ordinary capacities, and men were
surprized to find how they had been abused by imposing names, when they
saw what had once appeared to them too vast and mighty for the
imagination to compass reduced to dimensions which they could so easily
grasp. Hopes were entertained, that an enlightened system of education
might destroy the germ of such mischief for the future, and that it
might be possible, if not in all cases to eradicate inveterate
prejudices, yet to prevent the seeds of them from lodging in the
breasts of the young, by suppressing the first feelings of wonder,
faith and love; and that the rising generation, trained in the
principles of a calculating morality, a cosmopolitan independence and a
reflecting religion, might be effectually secured from the influence of
all the bugbears and charms that had ever awed or fascinated the world.

But notwithstanding this false and unnatural tendency of the public
mind, the prospect, though here and there clouded and threatening, was
not absolutely cheerless and unpromising. The heart of Germany was
still sound and entire, and the foreign cultivation, in spite of the
activity with which it was conducted, could not find a congenial soil.
Even when the moral and intellectual imbecility and dependence were at
their height, the great mass of the people remained uncorrupted and
unperverted. The soul of poetry and the life of religion had retreated
from the crown and topmost branches toward the root of society, and
there, while the sere and many-coloured leaves trembled on the boughs,
preserved the hope of a coming spring. Among the middling and lower
classes, particularly in situations exempt from the contagion of
courtly example, the faith, the traditions and the manners of former
times flourished in happy obscurity, and in proportion as they were
despised and rejected by the great and the refined were held dear by
the common man, and kept his heart warm, his imagination fresh, and his
life pure. Even about the middle of the last century the workings of a
regenerating spirit began to appear. Some great writers then took the
lead in German literature, who, though themselves not wholly free from
the influence of the age, y