of a philosophical system.
And this is still more sadly the case with the brothers Schlegel.

Much is fabled as to the influence of Fichtean Idealism and Schelling's
Philosophy of Nature on the Romantic school, which is even declared to
have sprung from it. But I see here, at the most, only the influence of
certain fragments of thoughts from Fichte and Schelling, and not at all
that of a philosophy. This may be explained on the simple ground that
Fichte's philosophy had lost its hold, and Fichte himself had made it
lose its interest by a mingling of tenets and ideas from Schelling; and
because, on the other hand, Schelling had never set forth a philosophy,
but only a vague philosophizing, an unsteady, vacillating improvisation
of poetical philosophemes. It may be that it was from the Fichtean
Idealism--that deeply ironical system, where the I is opposed to the
not--I and annihilates it--that the Romantic school took the doctrine of
irony which the late Solger especially developed, and which the
Schlegels at first regarded as the soul of art, but which they
subsequently found to be fruitless and exchanged for the more positive
axioms of the Theory of Identity of Schelling. Schelling, who then
taught in Jena, had indeed a great personal influence on the Romantic
school; he is, what is not generally known in France, also a bit of a
poet; and it is said that he was in doubt whether he should not deliver
all his philosophical doctrines in a poetic or even metrical form. This
doubt characterizes the man.

THE RABBI OF BACHARACH[59] (1840)

With kindly greeting, the Legend of the Rabbi of Bacharach is dedicated
to his friend HENRY LAUBE by the AUTHOR

A FRAGMENT

TRANSLATED BY CHARLES GODFREY LELAND

TRANSLATION REVISED BY PAUL BERNARD THOMAS

CHAPTER I

On the Lower Rhine, where its banks begin to lose their smiling aspect,
where the hills and cliffs with their romantic ruined castles rise more
defiantly, and a wilder, sterner majesty prevails, there lies, like a
strange and fearful tale of olden times, the gloomy and ancient town of
Bacharach. But these walls, with their toothless battlements and blind
turrets, in whose nooks and niches the winds whistle and the sparrows
build their nests, were not always so decayed and fallen, and in these
poverty-stricken, repulsive muddy lanes which one sees through the
ruined gate, there did not always reign that dreary silence which only
now and then is broken by th