f the movement that disgusted Heine.
He says that just as Christianity was a reaction against Roman
materialism; and the Renaissance a reaction against the extravagances of
Christian spiritualism; and romanticism in turn a reaction against the
vapid imitations of antique classic art, "so also do we now behold a
reaction against the re-introduction of that Catholic, feudal mode of
thought, of that knight-errantry and priestdom, which were being
inculcated through literature and the pictorial arts. . . . For when the
artists of the Middle Ages were recommended as models . . . the only
explanation of their superiority that could be given was that these men
believed in that which they depicted. . . . Hence the artists who were
honest in their devotion to art, and who sought to imitate the pious
distortions of those miraculous pictures, the sacred uncouthness of those
marvel-abounding poems, and the inexplicable mysticisms of those olden
works . . . made a pilgrimage to Rome, where the vicegerent of Christ was
to re-invigorate consumptive German art with asses' milk."

A number of the romanticists were Catholic by birth. There was Joseph
von Eichendorff, _e.g._, who had a strong admiration for the Middle Ages,
wrote sacred poetry, and published in 1815 a novel entitled "Ahnung und
Gegenwart," the hero of which ends by retiring to a monastery. And
Joseph Goerres, who published a work on German _Volksbuecher_[12] (1807); a
follower of Schelling and editor of _Der Rheinische Merkur_, a violent
anti-Gallican journal during the war of liberation. Goerres, according to
Heine, "threw himself into the arms of the Jesuits," and became the
"chief support of the Catholic propaganda at Munich"; lecturing there on
universal history to an audience consisting chiefly of pupils from the
Romish seminaries. Another _Spaetromantiker_, born Catholic, was Clemens
Brentano, whom Heine describes in 1833 as having lived at Frankfort for
the last fifteen years in hermit-like seclusion, as a corresponding
member of the propaganda. For six years (1818-24) Brentano was
constantly at the bedside of the invalid nun, Anna Katharina Emmerich, at
Duelmen. She was a "stigmatic," afflicted, _i.e._, with a mysterious
disease which impressed upon her body marks thought to be miraculous
counterfeits of the wounds of Christ. She had trances and visions, and
uttered revelations which Brentano recorded and afterwards published in
several volumes, that were