! It should be a history of the year 1775, which no one knows or can
write better than I. How the nobility, feeling itself outrun by the
middle classes, began to do all it could not to be left behind in the
race; how liberalism, Jacobinism, and all that devilry awoke; how a new
life began; how we studied and poetized, made love and wasted our time;
how we young folk, full of life and activity, but awkward as we could
be, scoffed at the aristocratic propensities of Messrs. Nicolai and Co.,
in Berlin, who at that time reigned supreme." "Ah, yes, that was a
spring, when everything was budding and shooting, when more than one
tree was yet bare, while others were already full of leaves. All that in
the year 1775!"

Old pedantic Nicholai, at whom he scoffed thus, foresaw, with his prosy
common-sense, what would happen "with all those confounded striplings,"
as Wieland called them, "who gave themselves airs as if they were
accustomed to play at blind-man's buff with Shakespeare." "In four or
five years," said he in 1776, "this fine enthusiasm will have passed
away like smoke; a few drops of spirit will be found in the empty
helmet, and a big _caput mortuum_ in the crucible." This proved true
certainly for the great majority, but not so as regards the two coursers
which then broke loose, and for him who had cut their traces and
released them. Goethe, indeed, modified, or at least cleared up, his
early views under the influence of a deeper study of nature and the
sight of ancient and Renaissance art in Italy (1786-1788); Schiller put
himself to school under Kant (1790), and went out of it with a
completely altered philosophy: Kant himself became another after, if not
in consequence of, the great King's death (1786); Herder alone remained
faithful throughout to the creed he had himself preached.

The way opened by Herder, although partly and temporarily abandoned
during the classical period which intervened, was followed again by the
third generation of the founders of German culture, the so-called
Romanticists, and by all the great scholars, who, in the first half of
this century, revived the historical sciences in Germany. Herder's ideas
have, indeed, penetrated our whole thought to such a degree, while his
works are so unfinished and disconnected, that it is hardly possible for
us to account for the extraordinary effect these ideas and works
produced in their day, except by marking the contrast which they present
with the the