frivolity; but this seriousness also does not allow him to rise to poetic
play. Sometimes absorbed by passion, at others by abstractions, he
seldom if ever reaches aesthetic freedom, which the poet ought to
maintain in spite of his material before his object, and in which he
ought to make the reader share. Either he is governed by his sickly
sensibility and his impressions become a torture, or the force of thought
chains down his imagination and destroys by its strictness of reasoning
all the grace of his pictures. These two faculties, whose reciprocal
influence and intimate union are what properly make the poet, are found
in this writer in an uncommon degree, and he only lacks one thing--it is
that the two qualities should manifest themselves actually united; it is
that the proper activity of thought should show itself mixed more with
feeling, and the sensuous more with thought. Accordingly, even in the
ideal which he has made of human nature, he is too much taken up with the
limits of this nature, and not enough with its capabilities; he always
betrays a want of physical repose rather than want of moral harmony. His
passionate sensuousness must be blamed when, to finish as quickly as
possible that struggle in humanity which offends him, he prefers to carry
man back to the unintelligent uniformity of his primitive condition,
rather than see that struggle carried out in the intellectual harmony of
perfect cultivation, when, rather than await the fulfilment of art he
prefers not to let it begin; in short, when he prefers to place the aim
nearer the earth, and to lower the ideal in order to reach it the sooner
and the safer.

Among the poets of Germany who belong to this class, I shall only mention
here Haller, Kleist, and Klopstock. The character of their poetry is
sentimental; it is by the ideal that they touch us, not by sensuous
reality; and that not so much because they are themselves nature, as
because they know how to fill us with enthusiasm for nature. However,
what is true in general, as well of these three poets as of every
sentimental poet, does not evidently exclude the faculty of moving us, in
particular, by beauties of the simple genus; without this they would not
be poets. I only mean that it is not their proper and dominant
characteristic to receive the impression of objects with a calm feeling,
simple, easy, and to give forth in like manner the impression received.
Involuntarily the imagination in them a