already expresses himself
thus: "That the stream of chaste love filled his heart to overflowing."
The bride of the Glauburger still decorously addressed her bridegroom
in her letters as "Dearly beloved Junker;" but now in a tender epistle
from a wife to her husband, she accosts him as "Most beautiful angel."
In other European nations also, we find the same false refinement; with
them also the finest feelings were overloaded with ornament. Through
the foreign and classical poets this style had been brought into
Germany, partly a bad kind of renaissance, which had originated in an
unskilful imitation of the ancients. But nevertheless it satisfied a
real need of the heart; men wished to raise themselves and those they
loved, out of the common realities of life into a purer atmosphere: as
angels, they placed them in the golden halo of the Christian heaven; as
goddesses, in the ancient Olympus; as Chloe, in the sweet perfumed air
of the Idylls. In the same childish effort to make themselves
honourable, dignified, and great, they wore peruques, introduced
ridiculous titles, believed in the philosopher's stone, and entered
into secret societies; and whoever would write a history of the German
mind might well call this a period of ardent aspirations. These
aspirations were not altogether estimable, by turns they became vague,
childish, fanatical, stupid, sentimental, and at last dissolute; but
beneath might always be discovered the feeling that there was something
wanting in German life. Was it a higher morality? Was it gaiety?
Perhaps it was the grace of God? The beautiful or the frivolous? Or
perhaps that was wanting to the people, which the princes had long
possessed, political life. With the broken window-panes of the Thirty
years' war, and the choice phrases of the young officers who banqueted
in the tent of General Hatzfeld, this period of aspiration began; it
reached its highest point in the fine minds which gathered round
Goethe, and in the brothers who embraced in the east, and it ended
perhaps with the war of freedom, or amidst the alarms of 1848.

The home life of the respectable citizen of the seventeenth century was
as strictly regulated as was his wooing, prudent and circumspect, even
in the most minute particulars. His energies were occupied in strenuous
labour from morning to evening, which afforded him a secret
satisfaction. Thoughtful and meditative, the artisan sat over his work,
and sought to derive pleasur