r level
of utility. Modern German literature began with Martin Opitz (1597-1639)
and the Silesian School, who were in their essence rhetorical and
educational, and who gave their tone to German verse. Albrecht von
Haller (1708-1777) brought a very considerable intellectual force to
bear on his huge poems, _The Origin of Evil_, which was theological, and
_The Alps_ (1729), botanical and topographical. Johann Peter Uz
(1720-1796) wrote a _Theodicee_, which was very popular, and not without
dignity. Johann Jacob Dusch (1725-1787) undertook to put _The Sciences_
into the eight books of a great didactic poem. Tiedge (1752-1840) was
the last of the school; in a once-famous _Urania_, he sang of God and
Immortality and Liberty. These German pieces were the most unswervingly
didactic that any modern European literature has produced. There was
hardly the pretence of introducing into them descriptions of natural
beauty, as the English poets did, or of grace and wit like the French.
The German poets simply poured into a lumbering mould of verse as much
solid information and direct instruction as the form would hold.

Didactic poetry has, in modern times, been antipathetic to the spirit of
the Latin peoples, and neither Italian nor Spanish literature has
produced a really notable work in this class. An examination of the
poems, ancient and modern, which have been mentioned above, will show
that from primitive times there have been two classes of poetic work to
which the epithet didactic has been given. It is desirable to
distinguish these a little more exactly. One is the pure instrument of
teaching, the poetry which desires to impart all that it knows about the
growing of cabbages or the prevention of disasters at sea, the
revolution of the planets or the blessings of inoculation. This is
didactic poetry proper, and this, it is almost certain, became
irrevocably obsolete at the close of the 18th century. No future Virgil
will give the world a second _Georgics_. But there is another species
which it is very improbable that criticism has entirely dislodged; that
is the poetry which combines, with philosophical instruction, an impetus
of imaginative movement, and a certain definite cultivation of fire and
beauty. In hands so noble as those of Lucretius and Goethe this species
of didactic poetry has enriched the world with durable masterpieces,
and, although the circle of readers which will endure scientific
disquisition in the bonds o