is even more striking, for
in the American the supernatural is the embodiment of the Puritan
New England conscience. In Hoffmann there is no such elevation of the
moral world to the rank of an atmosphere.

In Hoffmann there is no out-of-doors, no lyric love; some of his
characters are frankly insane. The musical takes on a supreme
significance among the sensations, and music seemed the only art which
was able to draw the soul of the man from his earth-bound habitation.
Only in music did Hoffmann find the ability to make the Romantic
escape from the homelessness of this existence to the all-embracing
world of the unreal. But too often in his works does the unreal fail
to satisfy the reader. There is an effort felt, an effect sought for,
and, while the amalgamation of the two worlds is perfect, the world
to which Hoffmann is able to take us proves to be without the cogency
which our imaginations expect. Here Hoffmann fails. His world of the
imagination cannot always be taken seriously.

Count August von Platen-Hallermund (1796-1835) is characterized by
the eternal Romantic homelessness; at every turn of his career this
impresses one. Of ancient noble Franconian stock, he felt himself a
foreigner in Bavaria which had acquired Franconia in the Napoleonic
period. In his early life in the military academy at Munich he was
never thoroughly at home, for his was not a military spirit and he was
unable to follow his literary tastes. When finally he was enabled to
study at Wuerzburg and Erlangen, even the friendship of Schelling could
not compensate for the late beginning of a university career which was
filled with the study of modern European and Oriental languages but
which had the bitterest personal disappointments. Even in Italy, the
land of every German poet's dreams, Platen never felt himself at
home, and the pictures of him from his Italian life are of a tragic,
lonesome figure. The discord between body and soul, that homelessness
in one's own physical body which characterized Hoffmann and made him
seem diabolical to so many, is also to be noted in Platen. Carried
over to the moral world, it accounts for his ardent cultivation of
friendship rather than love, and frees him from the bitter accusations
of Heine, whose attack in _The Baths of Lucca_ is one of the most
scurrilous and venomous pasquils in all literary history. Finally, in
the esthetic world, Platen seems largely un-German. His esthetics were
of the Classical