spontaneously, though gradually. This seems to be the
inner meaning of the episodic tale, _Hyacinth and Rose-Blossom_. The
rhythmic prose _Hymns to Night_ exhale a delicate melancholy, moving
in a vague haze, and yet breathing a peace which comes from a
knowledge of the deeper meanings of things, divined rather than
experienced. Their stealing melody haunts the soul, however dazed the
mind may be with their vagueness, and their exaltation of death above
life. In his _Spiritual Poems_ we feel a simple, passionate intensity
of adoration, a yearning sympathy for the hopeless and the
heavy-laden; in their ardent assurance of love, peace, and rest, they
are surely to be reckoned among the most intimate documents in the
whole archives of the "varieties of religious experience."

The unfinished novel _Henry of Ofterdingen_ reaches a depth of
obscurity which is saved from absurdity only by the genuinely fervent
glow of a soul on the quest for its mystic ideals: "The blue flower it
is that I yearn to look upon!" No farcical romance of the nursery
shows more truly the mingled stuff that dreams are made on, yet the
intimation that the dream is not all a dream, that the spirit of an
older day is symbolically struggling for some expression in words,
gave it in its day a serious importance at which our own age can
merely marvel. It brings no historical conviction; it is altogether
free from such conventional limits as Time and Space. Stripped of its
dreamy diction, there is even a tropical residue of sensuousness, to
which the English language is prone to give a plainer name. It
develops into a fantastic _melange_ which no American mind can
possibly reckon with; what its effect would be upon a person relegated
to reading it in close confinement, it would not be safe to assert,
but it is quite certain that "this way madness lies."

To generalize about the Romantic movement, may seem about as practical
as to attempt to make a trigonometrical survey of the Kingdom of
Dreams. No epoch in all literary history is so hopelessly entangled in
the meshes of subtle philosophical speculation, derived from the most
complex sources. To deal with the facts of classic art, which is
concerned with seeking a clearly-defined perfection, is a simple
matter compared with the unbounded and undefined concepts of a school
which waged war upon "the deadliness of ascertained facts" and
immersed itself in vague intimations of glories that were to be. Its
mos