en only beginning to dawn on the
Teutonic mind. The general trend of German thought had inclined
towards the _Everlasting Nay_, until Napoleon flashed across its ken.
For a time he won the admiration of the chief thinkers of Germany by
brushing away the feudal cobwebs from her fair face. He seemed about
to call her sons to a life of public activity; and in the famous
soliloquy of Faust, in which he feels his way from word to thought,
from thought to might, and from might to action, we may discern the
literary projection of the influence exerted by the new Charlemagne on
that nation of dreamers.[237] But the promise was fulfilled only in
the most harshly practical way, namely, by cutting off all supplies of
tobacco and coffee; and when Teufelsdroeckh himself, admirer though he
was of the French Revolution, found that the summons for his favourite
beverage--the "dear melancholy coffee, that begets fancies," of
Lessing--produced only a muddy decoction of acorns, there was the risk
of his tendencies earthwards taking a very practically revolutionary
turn.

In truth, the German universities were the leaders of the national
reaction against the Emperor of the West. Fichte's pleading for a
truly national education had taken effect. Elementary instruction was
now being organized in Prussia; and the divorce of thought from
action, which had so long sterilized German life, was ended by the
foundation of the University of Berlin by Humboldt. Thus, in 1810, the
year of Prussia's deepest woe, when her brave Queen died of a stricken
heart, when French soldiers and _douaniers_ were seizing and burning
colonial wares, her thinkers came into closer touch with her men of
action, with mutually helpful results. Thinkers ceased to be mere
dreamers, and Prussian officials gained a wider outlook on life. The
life of beneficent activity, to which Napoleon might have summoned the
great majority of Germans, dawned on them from Berlin, not from Paris.

His influence was more and more oppressive. The final results of his
commercial decrees on the trade of Hamburg were thus described by
Perthes, a well-known writer and bookseller of that town: "Of the 422
sugar-boiling houses, few now stood open: the printing of cottons had
ceased entirely: the tobacco-dressers were driven away by the
Government. The imposition of innumerable taxes, door and window,
capitation and land taxes, drove the inhabitants to despair." But the
same sagacious thinker was a