cs, it merely remains to conclude the
chapter with a brief resume. We have then in Friedrich Hoelderlin a youth
peculiarly predisposed to feel himself isolated from and repelled by the
world, growing up without a strong fatherly hand to guide, giving
himself over more and more to solitude and so becoming continually less
able to cope with untoward circumstances and conditions. Growing into
manhood, he was unfortunate in all his love-affairs and as though doomed
to unceasing disappointments. Early in life he devoted himself to the
study of antiquity, making Greece his hobby, and thus creating for
himself an ideal world which existed only in his imagination, and taking
refuge in it from the buffetings of the world about him. He was a man
of a deeply philosophical trend of mind, and while not often speaking of
it, felt very keenly the humiliating condition of Germany, although his
patriotic enthusiasm found its artistic expression not with reference to
Germany but to Greece. As a poet, finally, his intimacy with nature was
such that nature-worship and pantheism became his religion.

In reviewing the whole range of Hoelderlin's writings, we cannot avoid
the conclusion, that in him we have a type of Weltschmerz in the
broadest sense of the term; we might almost term it Byronism, with the
sensual element eliminated. He shows the hypersensitiveness of Werther,
fanatical enthusiasm for a vague ideal of liberty, vehement opposition
to existing social and political conditions; there is, in fact, a
breadth in his Weltschmerz, which makes the sorrows of Werther seem very
highly specialized in comparison. Bearing in mind the distinction made
between the two classes, we must designate Hoelderlin's Weltschmerz as
cosmic rather than egoistic; the egoistic element is there, but it is
outweighed by the cosmic and finds its poetic expression not so
frequently nor so intensely with reference to the poet himself, as with
reference to mankind at large.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 12: _Anz. f. d. Alt._, vol. 22, p. 212-218.]

[Footnote 13: In a letter to his mother he writes: "Freilich ist's mir
auch angeboren, dass ich alles schwerer zu Herzen nehme." ("Friedrich
Hoelderlins Leben, in Briefen von und an Hoelderlin, von Carl C.T.
Litzmann," Berlin, 1890, p. 27. Hereafter quoted as "Briefe.").]

[Footnote 14: "Hoelderlins gesammelte Dichtungen, herausgegeben von B.
Litzmann," Stuttgart, Cotta (hereafter quoted as "Werke"). Vol. II, p.
9.]

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