f God." This is not the
place where I can say more of Lessing, but I cannot refrain from
remarking that he is, of all who are recorded in the whole history of
literature, the writer whom I love best.

I will here mention another author who worked in the same spirit, with
the same object, as Lessing, and who may be regarded as his successor.
It is true that his eulogy is here also out of place, since he occupies
an altogether peculiar position in literature, and a unique relation to
his time and to his contemporaries. It is Johann Gottfried Herder, born
in 1744 at Mohrungen, in East Prussia, and who died at Weimar in the
year 1803.

Literary history is the great "Morgue" where every one seeks his dead,
those whom he loves or to whom he is related. When I see there, among so
many dead who were of little interest, a Lessing or a Herder, with their
noble, manly countenances, my heart throbs; I cannot pass them by
without hastily kissing their dead lips.

Yet if Lessing did so much to destroy the habit of imitating French
second-hand Greekdom, he still, by calling attention to the true works
of art of Greek antiquity, gave an impulse to a new kind of ridiculous
imitations. By his battling with religious superstition he advanced the
sober search for clearer views which spread widely in Berlin, which had
in the late blessed Nicolai its chief organ, and in the General German
Library its arsenal. The most deplorable mediocrity began to show itself
more repulsively than ever, and flatness and insipidity blew themselves
up like the frog in the fable.

It is a great mistake to suppose that Goethe, who had already come
before the world, was at once universally recognized as a writer of
commanding genius. His _Goetz von Berlichingen_ and his _Werther_ were
received with a degree of enthusiasm, to be sure; but so, too, were the
works of common bunglers, and Goethe had but a small niche in the temple
of literature. As I have said, _Goetz_ and _Werther_ had a spirited
reception, but more on account of the subject-matter than their artistic
merits, which very few appreciated in these masterworks. _Goetz_ was a
dramatized romance of chivalry, and such writings were then the rage. In
_Werther_ the world saw the reproduction of a true story, that of young
Jerusalem, who shot himself dead for love, and thereby, in those
dead-calm days, made a great noise. People read with tears his touching
letters; some shrewdly observed that the manner