out of the
sentiment for his country, which, in Goethe's whole literary career,
is peculiar only to the poetry of the Strassburg period, tendencies
develop like those which manifest themselves in the literature of the
Wars of Liberation, of the Swabian School, in the older poetry of
political conflict--in short, like all those tendencies which we
connect with Ludwig Uhland's name.

Goethe's literary satires and poems for special occasions are a
prelude to the purely literary existence and the belligerent spirit of
men like Platen and Immermann, who both, as it were by accident, found
their way into the open of national poesy. The self-absorption in
_Werther_, the delving after new poetical experiences and mediums of
expression; the method of expression hovering between form and
illusory improvisation--all this we find again in the strongest
individualists, in Heine, in Annette von Droste, in Lenau. The Weimar
period, however, when the poet by means of a great and severe
self-discipline trains himself to the point of rigidity in order to
become the instrument of his art--that period is, with _Tasso_, paving
the way for the school of Grillparzer, while that infinite deepening
of the poetic calling is a preparation for Otto Ludwig, Richard
Wagner, and Friedrich Hebbel. The contemporary novel in the style of
_Wilhelm Meister_ is revived by the Young Germans, above all by
Gutzkow, in the same way that tendencies found in _Nathan_ and in
_Goetz_ are brought out again in Gutzkow's and in Heinrich Laube's
dramas, so rich in allusions. The national spirit of which _Egmont_ is
full also fills the novels of Willibald Alexis and Berthold Auerbach.
Finally those works, besides _Tasso_, which we are wont to consider
the crowning achievements of the Weimar period, above all,
_Iphigenia_, have permanently served as models of the new, and in
their way classical, "antiques"--for the Munich School, for the
Geibels and the Heyses. But we must also remember Moerike and Stifter,
and their absorption in the fullness of the inner life, which none of
them could attain to without somewhat stunting the growth of life's
realities--Hebbel perceived this clearly enough not only in Stifter
but in Goethe himself. Above all, however, this whole epoch of the
"intellectual poets" may, in a certain sense, be called the _Italian
Journey_ of German literature. Like Goethe in the years 1787-1788, the
German muse in this period only feels entirely at home i