translated into French and Italian and widely
circulated among the faithful.

As adherents of the romantic school who were born and bred Protestants,
but became converts to the Catholic faith, Heine enumerates Friedrich
Schlegel, Tieck, Novalis, Werner, Schuetz, Carove, Adam Mueller, and Count
Stolberg. This list, he says, includes only authors, "the number of
painters who in swarms simultaneously abjured Protestantism and reason
was much larger." But Tieck and Novalis never formally abjured
Protestantism. They detested the Reformation and loved the mediaeval
Church, but looked upon modern Catholicism as a degenerate system. Their
position here was something like that of the English Tractarians in the
earlier stages of the Oxford movement. Novalis composed "Marienlieder."
Tieck complained of the dryness of Protestant ritual and theology, and
said that in the Middle Ages there was a unity (_Einheit_) which ought to
be again recovered. All Europe was then one fatherland with a single
faith. The period of the Arthursage was the blossoming time of romance,
the vernal season of love, religion, chivalry, and--sorcery! He pleaded
for the creation of a new Christian, Catholic mythology.

In 1808 Friedrich Schlegel became a Roman Catholic--or, as Heine puts
it--"went to Vienna, where he attended mass daily and ate broiled fowl."
His wife, a daughter of Moses Mendelssohn, a Jewess by race, followed her
husband into the Catholic Church. Zacharias Werner, author of a number
of romantic melodramas, the heroes of which are described as monkish
ascetics, religious mystics, and "spirits who wander on earth in the
guise of harp-players"--Zacharias Werner also went to Vienna and joined
the order of Ligorians. This conversion made a prodigious noise in
Germany. It occurred at Rome in 1811, and the convert afterwards
witnessed the liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius at Naples, that
annual miracle in which Newman expresses so firm a belief. Werner then
spent two years in the study of theology, visited Our Lady's Chapel at
Loretto in 1813; was ordained priest at Aschaffenburg in 1814; and
preached at St. Stephen's Church, Vienna, on the vanity of worldly
pleasures, with fastings many, with castigations and mortifications of
the flesh. The younger Voss declared that Werner's religion was nothing
but a poetic coquetting with God, Mary, the wounds of Christ, and the
holy carbuncle (_Karfunkelstein_). He had been a man of di