logue of the latter far
more intimately suggests their quality than does the speech of
the flutes in Tieck, where their spirit is cerulean blue. _Wasa_,
unfortunately, runs off into dull allegory, and this work is not to be
compared with August von Schlegel's _Gate of Honor_ as a satire on the
same subject.

Brentano's _Godwi_ (1801), the sub-title of which, "An Unmanageable
Novel by Maria," shows its character, is a far better production. It
has the strong, full-blooded, passionate love of life characteristic
of its author, "the many-souled" Brentano, whose Romantic irony
resulted from his being ashamed of his sentimentality, and whose
hatred of philistinism was caused by his fear of his own latent
tendency toward that point of view. The plot of _Godwi_ runs wild, but
the satire and the interspersed lyrics make it interesting reading.
Romantic irony can go no farther than in this book, in which the
author's own death-bed scene is portrayed and in which the preceding
parts of the work are referred to by page and line--"This is the pond
into which I fall on page so and so."

If Brentano's _Rosary_ cycle (1809) is somewhat unpleasantly
superhuman, and if, at times, he mixes sex and religion like a mystic
of the Middle Ages or a Spaniard of the Counter Reformation, he rises
to wonderful lyric heights when he touches his own experiences, or
when he expresses the note of the people. His use of the supernatural,
of the subconscious mood, gives rise to such poems as _The Lore-Lay_,
the legend of which was actually invented by Brentano. Like all
Romanticists, Brentano was a poet of incomplete works, of moods
which abandoned him before the artistic perfection of his effort was
reached; but his suggestive touches, and, above all, his constant use
of the refrain in all phases and _genres_, especially to emphasize
and summarize his musical consciousness, are a striking proof of the
French adage, "Quand le coeur chante, c'est toujours un refrain."
Brentano surrenders himself passionately to his mood. His surrender
and his distorting irony, like Heine's, arise from his desire to
assimilate all of the outside world; it explains, in part, the
Romantic desire to mediate, to translate, to bridge the cleft between
oneself and the world. In part, too, it explains the desire for
musical imitation so apparent in both Tieck and Brentano. It is an
attempt to express in terms of one sense the ideas or apperceptions
of another. But where Tiec