Here, he began
to see that it could be in no other way than by action of informing
thought upon the vast accumulated material of which Germany was in
possession: art, poetry, fiction, an entire imaginative world,
following reasonably upon a deeper understanding of the past, of
nature, of one's self--an understanding of all beside through the
knowledge of one's self. To understand, would be the indispensable
first step towards the enlargement of the great past, of one's little
present, by criticism, by imagination. Then, the imprisoned souls of
nature would speak as of old. The Middle Age, in Germany, where the
past has had such generous reprisals, never far from us, would reassert
its mystic spell, for the better understanding of our Raffaelle. The
spirits of distant Hellas would reawake in the men and women of little
German towns. Distant times, the most alien thoughts, would come near
together, as elements in a great historic symphony. A kind of ardent,
new patriotism awoke in him, sensitive for the first time at the words
NATIONAL poesy, NATIONAL art and literature, GERMAN philosophy. To the
resources of the past, of himself, of what was possible for German
mind, more and more his mind opens as he goes on his way. A free, open
space had been determined, which something now to be created, created
by him, must occupy. "Only," he thought, "if I had coadjutors! If these
thoughts would awake in but one other mind?"

At Strasbourg, with its mountainous goblin houses, nine stories high,
grouped snugly, in the midst of that inclement plain, like a great
stork's nest around the romantic red steeple of its cathedral, Duke
Carl became fairly captive to the Middle Age. Tarrying there week after
week he worked hard, but (without a ray of light from others) in one
long mistake, at the chronology and history of the coloured windows.
Antiquity's very self seemed expressed there, on the visionary images
of king or patriarch, in the deeply incised marks of character, the
hoary hair, the massive proportions, telling of a length of years
beyond what is lived now. Surely, past ages, could one get at the
historic soul of them, were not dead but living, rich in company, for
the entertainment, the expansion, of the present; and Duke Carl was
still without suspicion of the cynic afterthought that such historic
soul was but an arbitrary substitution, a generous loan of one's self.

The mystic soul of Nature laid hold on him next, saying, "C