n reigning methods and habits as well as the surprising
influence exercised by Herder personally. From his twenty-fifth year,
indeed, he was a sovereign. His actual and uncontested sway was not, it
is true, prolonged beyond a period of about sixteen years, albeit his
name figured to a much later time on the list of living potentates. It
is also true that when the seeds thrown by him had grown luxuriantly,
and were bearing fruit, the sower was almost entirely forgotten or
wilfully ignored. The generation, however, of the "_Stuermer und
Draenger_,"[58] or, as they were pleased to denominate themselves, the
"original geniuses," looked up to Herder as their leader and prophet.
Some of them turned from him later on and went back to the exclusive
worship of classical antiquity; but their very manner of doing homage to
it bore witness to Herder's influence. The following generation threw
itself no less exclusively into the Middle Ages; but what, after all,
was it doing if not following Herder's example, when it raked up Dantes
and Calderons out of the dust in order to confront them with and oppose
them to Vergils and Racines? However they might repudiate, nay, even
forget, their teacher, his doctrines already pervaded the whole
intellectual atmosphere of Germany, and men's minds breathed them in
with the very air they inhaled. To-day they belong to Europe.

Herder, I repeat, is certainly neither a classical nor a finished
writer. He has no doubt gone out of fashion, because his style is
pompous and diffuse, his composition loose or fragmentary; because his
reasoning lacks firmness and his erudition solidity. Still, no other
German writer of note exercised the important indirect influence which
was exercised by Herder. In this I do not allude to Schelling and his
philosophy, which received more than one impulse from Herder's ideas;
nor to Hegel, who reduced them to a metaphysical system and defended
them with his wonderful dialectics. But F.A. Wolf, when he points out to
us in Homer the process of epic poetry; Niebuhr, in revealing to us the
growth of Rome, the birth of her religious and national legends, the
slow, gradual formation of her marvellous constitution; Savigny, when
he proves that the Roman civil law, that masterpiece of human ingenuity,
was not the work of a wise legislator, but rather the wisdom of
generations and of centuries; Eichhorn, when he wrote the history of
German law and created thereby a new branch of hi