g, obedient to some vague embryonic law, still
find in it for a season the pleasure, the thrilling melancholy, which
their grandfathers found."{44} But Professor Carpenter, speaking from
the point of view of the younger generation, does not fail to recognize
that Paul Flemming's complaints cease when he reads the tombstone
inscription which becomes the motto of the book; and I recall with
pleasure that, being a youth nurtured on "Hyperion," I selected that
passage for the text of my boyish autobiography written in the Harvard
"Class Book" at the juvenile age of seventeen. Dozens of youths were
perhaps adopting the motto in the same way at the same time, and it is
useless to deny to a book which thus reached youthful hearts the credit
of having influenced the whole period of its popularity.

Apart from the personal romance which his readers attached to it, the
book had great value as the first real importation into our literature
of the wealth of German romance and song. So faithful and ample are its
local descriptions that a cheap edition of it is always on sale at
Heidelberg, and every English and American visitor to that picturesque
old city seems to know the book by heart. Bearing it in his hand, the
traveller still climbs the rent summit of the Gesprengte Thurm and looks
down upon the throng in the castle gardens; or inquires vainly for the
ruined linden-tree, or gives a sigh to the fate of Emma of Ilmenau, and
murmurs solemnly,--as a fat and red-faced Englishman once murmured to me
on that storied spot,--"That night there fell a star from heaven!" There
is no doubt that under the sway of the simpler style now prevailing,
much of the rhetoric of "Hyperion" seems turgid, some of its learning
obtrusive, and a good deal of its emotion forced; but it was
nevertheless an epoch-making book for a generation of youths and
maidens, and it still retains its charm. The curious fact, however,
remains--a fact not hitherto noticed, I think, by biographers or
critics--that at the very time when the author was at work on
"Hyperion," there was a constant reaction in his mind that was carrying
him in the direction of more strictly American subjects, handled under a
simpler treatment. He wrote on September 13, 1838, "Looked over my notes
and papers for 'Hyperion.' Long for leisure to begin once more." It is
impossible to say how long a preparation this implies; it may have been
months or years. Yet the following letter to a young girl,