e by his
articles in the _Edinburgh_ and _Foreign Review_, and by his translations
from German romance. But he found among English readers an invincible
prejudice against German mysticism and German sentimentality. The
romantic _chiaroscuro_, which puzzled Southey even in "The Ancient
Mariner," became dimmest twilight in Tieck's "Maehrchen" and midnight
darkness in the visionary Novalis. The _Weichheit_, _Wehmuth_, and
_Sehnsucht nach der Unendlichkeit_ of the German romanticists were moods
not altogether unfamiliar in English poetry. "Now stirs the feeling
infinite," sings Byron.

"Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,"

cries Keats. But when Novalis, in his _Todessehnsucht_, exclaims, "Death
is the romance of life," the sentiment has an alien sound. There was
something mutually repellent between the more typical phases of English
and German romanticism. Tieck and the Schlegels, we know, cared little
for Scott. We are told that Scott read the _Zeitung fuer Einsiedler_, but
we are not told what he thought of it. Perhaps romanticism, like
transcendentalism, found a more congenial soil in New than in Old
England. Longfellow spent the winter of 1835-36 in Heidelberg, calling
on A. W. Schlegel at Bonn, on his way thither. "Hyperion" (1839) is
saturated with German romance. Its hero, Paul Flemming, knew "Des Knaben
Wunderhorn" almost by heart. No other German book had ever exercised
such "wild and magic influence upon his imagination."

[1] Besides the authorities quoted or referred to in the text, the
materials used in this chapter are drawn mainly from the standard
histories of German literature; especially from Georg Brandes'
"Hauptstroemungen in der Litteratur des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts"
(1872-76); Julian Schmidt's "Geschichte der Deutschen Litteratur"
(Berlin, 1890); H. J. T. Hettner's "Litteraturgeschichte" (Braunschweig,
1872); Wilhelm Scherer's "History of German Literature" (Conybeare's
translation, New York, 1886); Karl Hillebrand's "German Thought" (trans.,
New York, 1880); Vogt und Koch's "Geschichte der Deutschen Litteratur"
(Leipzig and Wien, 1897). My own reading in the German romantics is by
no means extensive. I have read, however, a number of Tieck's "Maerchen"
and of Fouque's romances; Novalis' "Hymns to the Night" and "Heinrich von
Ofterdingen"; A. W. Schlegel's "Lectures on Dramatic Literature" and F.
Schlegel's "Lucinde"; all of Uhlan