ch, and the new literature rallied to the side of
aristocracy and privilege.

A third respect in which the German movement differed from the English is
partly implied in what has been said above. In Germany the romantic
revival was contemporaneous with a great philosophical development which
influenced profoundly even the lighter literature of the time. Hence the
mysticism which is found in the work of many of the romanticists, and
particularly in the writings of Novalis. Novalis was a disciple of
Schelling, and Schelling the continuator of Fichte. Fichte's
"Wissenschaftslehre" (1794) is the philosophical corner-stone of the
German romantic school. The freedom of the fancy from the thraldom of
the actual world; the right of the Ego to assert itself fully; the
principle formulated by Friedrich Schlegel, that "the caprice of the poet
knows no law"; all these literary doctrines were corollaries of Fichte's
objective idealism.[8] It is needless to say that, while romantic art
usually partakes of the mysterious, there is nothing of this
philosophical or transcendental mysticism in the English romanticists.
If we were to expect it anywhere it would be in Coleridge, who became the
mediator between German and English thought. But Coleridge's poetry was
mainly written before he visited Germany and made acquaintance with the
systems of Kant and Schelling; and in proportion as his speculative
activity increased, his creative force declined. There is enough of the
marvellous and the unexplained in "Christabel," and "The Ancient
Mariner"; but the "mystic ruby" and the "blue flower" of the Teutonic
symbolists are not there.

The German romantic school, in the limited and precise sense of the term,
consisted of the brothers August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, Ludwig
Tieck, Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis), Johann Dietrich Gries, Tieck's
friend Wackenroder, and--at a distance--Zacharias Werner, the dramatist;
besides a few others, their associates or disciples, whose names need not
here be mentioned. These were, as has been said, personal friends, they
began to be heard of about 1795; and their quarters were at Jena and
Berlin. A later or younger group (_Spaetromantiker_) gathered in 1808
about the _Zeitung fuer Einsiedler_, published at Heidelberg. These were
Clemens Brentano, Achim von Arnim, Ludwig Uhland, Joseph Goerres, and the
brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Arnim, Brentano, and Goerres were
residing at the ti