the translation of Bardic and Scaldic remains. But in Germany
there was no Elizabethan literature to mediate between the modern mind
and the Middle Age, and so the Germans resorted to England and Shakspere
for this.

In Germany, as in England, though for different reasons, the romantic
revival did not culminate until the nineteenth century, until the
appearance of the _Romantische Schule_ in the stricter sense--of Tieck,
Novalis, the Schlegel brothers, Wackenroder, Fouque, Von Arnim, Brentano,
and Uhland. In England this was owing less to arrested development than
to the absence of genius. There the forerunners of Scott, Coleridge, and
Keats were writers of a distinctly inferior order: Akenside, Shenstone,
Dyer, the Wartons, Percy, Walpole, Mrs. Radcliffe, "Monk" Lewis, the boy
Chatterton. If a few rise above this level, like Thomason, Collins, and
Gray, the slenderness of their performance, and the somewhat casual
nature of their participation in the movement, diminish their relative
importance. Gray's purely romantic work belongs to the last years of his
life. Collins' derangement and early death stopped the unfolding of many
buds of promise in this rarely endowed lyrist. Thomson, perhaps, came
too early to reach any more advanced stage of evolution than Spenserism.
In Germany, on the contrary, the pioneers were men of the highest
intellectual stature, Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller. But there the
movement was checked for a time by counter-currents, or lost in broader
tides of literary life. English romanticism was but one among many
contemporary tendencies: sentimentalism, naturalism, realism. German
romanticism was simply an incident of the _sturm- und Drangperiode_,
which was itself but a temporary phase of the swift and many-sided
unfolding of the German mind in the latter half of the last century; one
element in the great intellectual ferment which threw off, among other
products, the Kantian philosophy, the "Laocooen," "Faust," and "Wilhelm
Meister"; Winckelmann's "Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums" and
Schiller's "Wallenstein" and "Wilhelm Tell." Men like Goethe and
Schiller were too broad in their culture, too versatile in their talents,
too multifarious in their mental activities and sympathies to be
classified with a school. The temper which engendered "Goetz" and "Die
Raeuber" was only a moment in the history of their _Entwickelung_; they
passed on presently into other regions of thought and