hese, in which Wordsworth conveys the sudden
apocalypse, as by an apparition, to an ardent and sympathising spirit,
of the stupendous world of America, rising, at once, like an
exhalation, with all its shadowy forests, its endless savannas, and
its pomp of solitary waters--well and truly might I have applied to my
first launching upon that vast billowy ocean of the German literature.
As a past literature, as a literature of inheritance and tradition,
the German was nothing. Ancestral titles it had none; or none
comparable to those of England, Spain, or even Italy; and there, also,
it resembled America, as contrasted with the ancient world of Asia,
Europe, and North Africa.[21] But, if its inheritance were nothing,
its prospects, and the scale of its present development, were in the
amplest style of American grandeur. _Ten thousand_ new books, we are
assured by Menzel, an author of high reputation--a _literal
myriad_--is considerably below the number annually poured from all
quarters of Germany, into the vast reservoir of Leipsic; spawn
infinite, no doubt, of crazy dotage, of dreaming imbecility, of
wickedness, of frenzy, through every phasis of Babylonian confusion;
yet, also, teeming and heaving with life and the instincts of
truth--of truth hunting and chasing in the broad daylight, or of truth
groping in the chambers of darkness; sometimes seen as it displays its
cornucopia of tropical fruitage; sometimes heard dimly, and in
promise, working its way through diamond mines. Not the tropics, not
the ocean, not life itself, is such a type of variety, of infinite
forms, or of creative power, as the German literature, in its recent
motions (say for the last twenty years), gathering, like the Danube, a
fresh volume of power at every stage of its advance. A banner it was,
indeed, to me of miraculous promise, and suddenly unfurled. It seemed,
in those days, an El Dorado as true and undeceiving as it was
evidently inexhaustible. And the central object in this interminable
wilderness of what then seemed imperishable bloom and verdure--the
very tree of knowledge in the midst of this Eden--was the new or
transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant.

[Footnote 20: [Greek: Epea pteroenta], literally _winged words_. To
explain the use and origin of this phrase to non-classical readers, it
must be understood that, originally, it was used by Homer to express
the few, rapid, and significant words which conveyed some hasty order,
counse