was journeying
partly in search of physical heat. To-day certainly, in this great
vineyard, physical heat was about him in measure sufficient, at least
for [144] a German constitution. Might it be not otherwise with the
imaginative, the intellectual, heat and light; the real need being that
of an interpreter--Apollo, illuminant rather as the revealer than as
the bringer of light? With large belief that the Eclaircissement, the
Aufklaerung (he had already found the name for the thing) would indeed
come, he had been in much bewilderment whence and how. Here, he began
to see that it could be in no other way than by action of informing
thought upon the vast accumulated material of which Germany was in
possession: art, poetry, fiction, an entire imaginative world,
following reasonably upon a deeper understanding of the past, of
nature, of one's self--an understanding of all beside through the
knowledge of one's self. To understand, would be the indispensable
first step towards the enlargement of the great past, of one's little
present, by criticism, by imagination. Then, the imprisoned souls of
nature would speak as of old. The Middle Age, in Germany, where the
past has had such generous reprisals, never far from us, would reassert
its mystic spell, for the better understanding of our Raffaelle. The
spirits of distant Hellas would reawake in the men and women of little
German towns. Distant times, the most alien thoughts, would come near
together, as elements in a great historic symphony. A kind of ardent,
new patriotism awoke in him, sensitive for the first time at the words
national [145] poesy, national art and literature, German philosophy.
To the resources of the past, of himself, of what was possible for
German mind, more and more his mind opens as he goes on his way. A
free, open space had been determined, which something now to be
created, created by him, must occupy. "Only," he thought, "if I had
coadjutors! If these thoughts would awake in but one other mind!"

At Strasbourg, with its mountainous goblin houses, nine stories high,
grouped snugly, in the midst of that inclement plain, like a great
stork's nest around the romantic red steeple of its cathedral, Duke
Carl became fairly captive to the Middle Age. Tarrying there week
after week he worked hard, but (without a ray of light from others) in
one long mistake, at the chronology and history of the coloured
windows. Antiquity's very self seemed expr