r disciple Ludwig Tieck, who made the "Maehrchen," or popular
traditionary tale, his peculiar province. It was Wackenroder who first
drew his attention to "those old, poorly printed _Volksbuecher_, with
their coarse wood-cuts which had for centuries been circulating among the
peasantry, and which may still be picked up at the book-stalls of the
Leipzig fairs." [22] Tieck's volume of "Volksmaehrchen" (1797) gave
reproductions of a number of these old tales, such as the
"Haimonskinder," the "Schoene Magelone," "Tannhaeuser," and the
"Schildbuerger." His "Phantasus" (1812) contained original tales
conceived in the same spirit. Scherer says that Tieck uttered the
manifesto of German romanticism in the following lines from the overture
of his "Kaiser Octavianus":

"Mondbeglaenzte Zaubernacht,
Die den Sinn gefangen haelt,
Wundervolle Maehrchenwelt,
Steig auf in der alten Pracht!"

"Forest solitude" [_Waldeinsamkeit_], says Boyesen,[23] "churchyards at
midnight, ruins of convents and baronial castles; in fact, all the things
which we are now apt to call romantic, are the favourite haunts of
Tieck's muse. . . . Tieck was excessively fond of moonlight and
literally flooded his tales with its soft, dim splendour; therefore
moonlight is now romantic. . . . He never allows a hero to make a
declaration of love without a near or distant accompaniment of a bugle
(_Schalmei_ or _Waldhorn_); accordingly the bugle is called a romantic
instrument."

"The true tone of that ancient time," says Carlyle,[24] "when man was in
his childhood, when the universe within was divided by no wall of adamant
from the universe without, and the forms of the Spirit mingled and dwelt
in trustful sisterhood with the forms of the Sense, was not easy to seize
and adapt with any fitness of application to the feelings of modern
minds. It was to penetrate into the inmost shrines of Imagination, where
human passion and action are reflected in dim and fitful, but deeply
significant resemblances, and to copy these with the guileless, humble
graces which alone can become them. . . . The ordinary lovers of witch
and fairy matter will remark a deficiency of spectres and enchantments,
and complain that the whole is rather dull. Cultivated free-thinkers,
again, well knowing that no ghosts or elves exist in this country, will
smile at the crack-brained dreamer, with his spelling-book prose and
doggerel verse, and dismiss him good-naturedly as a German