call the Lake school in England.
Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey, are contemporaries of Tieck, Novalis,
and the Schlegels. Their political contemporaries are Napoleon and
Wellington. The event which gave a direction to their literary
development, no less decidedly than it did to the political history of
Europe, was the French Revolution. Accordingly, we find that all these
great European characters--for so they all are more or less--made the
all-important passage from youth into manhood during the ferment of the
years that followed that ominous date, 1789. This coincidence explains the
celebrity of the famous biographical year 1769--Walter Scott was born in
that year, Wellington and Napoleon, as every body knows--and the elder
Aristarchus of the Romantic school, _the_ translator of Shakspeare,
Augustus William Von Schlegel was born in 1767. At Hanover, five years
later, was born his brother Frederick, that is to say, in May 1772, and
our Coleridge in the same year--and to carry on the parallel for another
year, Ludwig Tieck, Henry Steffens, and Novalis, were all born in 1773.
These dates are curious; when taken along with the great fact of the
age--the French Revolution--they may serve to that family likeness which
we have noted in characterizing the Romanticists in Germany and the Lake
school in England. When Coleridge here was dreaming of America and
Pantisocracy, Frederick Schlegel was studying Plato, and scheming
republics there.[K] In the first years of his literary career Schlegel
devoted himself chiefly to classical literature; and between 1794 and
1797 published several works on Greek and Roman poetry and philosophy,
the substance of which was afterwards concentrated into the four first
lectures on the history of literature. About this time he appears to have
lived chiefly by his literary exertions--a method of obtaining a
livelihood very precarious, (as those know best who have tried it,) and
to men of a turn of mind more philosophical than popular, even in
philosophical Germany, exceedingly irksome. Schlegel felt this as deeply
as poor Coleridge--"to live by literature," says he, in one of those
letters to Rahel from which we have just quoted--"is to me _je laenger je
unertraeglicher_--the longer I try it the more intolerable." Happily, to
keep him from absolute starvation, he married the daughter of Moses
Mendelsohn, the Jewish philosopher, who, it appears, had a few pence in
her pocket, but not many;[L] and