But if the poetic instinct of Kleist leads him thus far away from the
narrow circle of social relations, in solitude, and among the fruitful
inspirations of nature, the image of social life and of its anguish
pursues him, and also, alas! its chains. What he flees from he carries
in himself, and what he seeks remains entirely outside him: never can he
triumph over the fatal influence of his time. In vain does he find
sufficient flame in his heart and enough energy in his imagination to
animate by painting the cold conceptions of the understanding; cold
thought each time kills the living creations of fancy, and reflection
destroys the secret work of the sensuous nature. His poetry, it must be
admitted, is of as brilliant color and as variegated as the spring he
celebrated in verse; his imagination is vivid and active; but it might be
said that it is more variable than rich, that it sports rather than
creates, that it always goes forward with a changeful gait, rather than
stops to accumulate and mould things into shape. Traits succeed each
other rapidly, with exuberance, but without concentrating to form an
individual, without completing each other to make a living whole, without
rounding to a form, a figure. Whilst he remains in purely lyrical
poetry, and pauses amidst his landscapes of country life, on the one hand
the greater freedom of the lyrical form, and on the other the more
arbitrary nature of the subject, prevent us from being struck with this
defect; in these sorts of works it is in general rather the feelings of
the poet, than the object in itself, of which we expect the portraiture.
But this defect becomes too apparent when he undertakes, as in Cisseis
and Paches, or in his Seneca, to represent men and human actions; because
here the imagination sees itself kept in within certain fixed and
necessary limits, and because here the effect can only be derived from
the object itself. Kleist becomes poor, tiresome, jejune, and
insupportably frigid; an example full of lessons for those who, without
having an inner vocation, aspire to issue from musical poetry, to rise to
the regions of plastic poetry. A spirit of this family, Thomson, has
paid the same penalty to human infirmity.

In the sentimental kind, and especially in that part of the sentimental
kind which we name elegiac, there are but few modern poets, and still
fewer ancient ones, who can be compared to our Klopstock. Musical poetry
has produced in this po