days of
Calderon; there was a rich, elastic, buoyant, comic spirit, not like the
analytical reflection, keen biting wit of Moliere and Congreve, and
other comic writers of the satirical school, but like the living
merriment, the uncontrollable, exuberant joyousness, the humour arising
from _good_ humour, not, as it often does, from _ill_ humour, the
incarnation, so to say, of the principle of mirth, in Shakespeare, and
Cervantes, and Aristophanes; and as a wreath of flowers to crown the
whole, there was the heavenly purity and starlike loveliness of his
_Genoveva_. Had the rest of Tieck's life kept pace with the fertility of
the six years from 1798 to 1804, he must have been beyond all rivalry
the second of German poets; and as Eschylus in the _Frogs_ shares his
supremacy with Sophocles, so would Goethe have invited Tieck to sit
beside him on his throne. Unfortunately for those who would have feasted
upon his fruits, the poet, during the last twenty years, has been so
weighed down by almost unintermitting ill health, that he has published
but little. There was a short interval indeed that seemed to bid fairer,
about the year 1812, when he began to collect his tales and lesser
dramas, on a plan something like that of the _Decameron_, in the
_Phantasm_, but it has not yet been carried beyond the second reign, out
of seven through which it was designed to extend. Of that collection the
chief part had been known to the world ten or twelve years before: some
things, however, appeared then for the first time, and among them, I
believe, was the tale of _The Love-Charm_. Latterly, Tieck's genius has
taken a new spring, in a somewhat different direction from that of his
youth. He has written half a dozen novels, in the manner of the couple
recently translated; nor are the others of less excellence than those
two; a beautiful tale of magic has also been just published; and the
speedy appearance of several other things that have employed him during
the long period of seeming inactivity, is promised; wherein he has been
engaged more or less for above a quarter of a century, and to gather
materials for which he some years since visited England. Of this work
the highest expectations may justly be formed: not many people, even, in
this country, possess a more extensive and accurate acquaintance with
our ancient drama than Tieck; no one has entered more fully into the
spirit of its great poets, than Tieck has shown himself to have done i