sure he feels in thinking like nobody else. Thence, in England, the
plenteousness, the wealth, the amplitude of the lyric vein; it being
granted that _individualism_ is the very spring of lyric poetry, and
that an ode or an elegy is, as it were, the involuntary surging, the
outflowing of what is most intimate, most secret, most peculiar in the
poet's soul. Thence also the _eccentricity_ of all the great English
writers when compared with the rest of the nation, as though they became
conscious of themselves only by distinguishing themselves from those who
claim to differ from them least. But is it not possible to otherwise
characterize the literature of England? It will be easily conceived that
I dare not assert such a thing; all I say here is, that I cannot better
express the differences which distinguish that literature from our own.

That is also all I claim, in stating that the essential character of the
literature of Germany is, that it is _philosophical_. The philosophers
there are poets, and the poets are philosophers. Goethe is to be found
no more, or no less, in his 'Theory of Colors' or in his 'Metamorphosis
of Plants,' than in his 'Divan' or his 'Faust'; and lyrism, if I may use
this trite expression, "is overflowing" in Schleiermacher's theology and
in Schelling's philosophy. Is this not perhaps at least one of the
reasons of the inferiority of the German drama? It is surely the reason
of the depth and scope of Germanic poetry. Even in the masterpieces of
German literature it seems that there is mixed something indistinct, or
rather mysterious, _suggestive_ in the extreme, which leads us to
thought by the channel of the dream. But who has not been struck by
what, under a barbarous terminology, there is of attractive, and as such
of eminently poetical, of realistic and at the same time idealistic, in
the great systems of Kant and Fichte, Hegel and Schopenhauer? Assuredly
nothing is further removed from the character of our French literature.
We can here understand what the Germans mean when they charge us with a
lack of depth. Let them forgive us if _we_ do not blame their literature
for not being the same as ours.

For it is good that it be thus, and for five or six hundred years this
it is that has made the greatness not only of European literature, but
of Western civilization itself; I mean that which all the great nations,
after slowly elaborating it, as it were, in their national isolation,
have afterward