acts, the murder of Kotzebue, he revenged--with
penetrating insight and enthusiastic short-sightedness--his one and only
Schiller, prematurely consumed by the opposition of the stupid world:
Schiller, who could have been his leader, master, and organiser, and
whose loss he now bewailed with such heartfelt resentment.

"For that was the doom of those promising students: they did not find
the leaders they wanted. They gradually became uncertain,
discontented, and at variance among themselves; unlucky indiscretions
showed only too soon that the one indispensability of powerful minds
was lacking in the midst of them: and, while that mysterious murder
gave evidence of astonishing strength, it gave no less evidence of the
grave danger arising from the want of a leader. They were
leaderless--therefore they perished.

"For I repeat it, my friends! All culture begins with the very
opposite of that which is now so highly esteemed as 'academical
freedom': with obedience, with subordination, with discipline, with
subjection. And as leaders must have followers so also must the
followers have a leader--here a certain reciprocal predisposition
prevails in the hierarchy of spirits: yea, a kind of pre-established
harmony. This eternal hierarchy, towards which all things naturally
tend, is always threatened by that pseudo-culture which now sits on
the throne of the present. It endeavours either to bring the leaders
down to the level of its own servitude or else to cast them out
altogether. It seduces the followers when they are seeking their
predestined leader, and overcomes them by the fumes of its narcotics.
When, however, in spite of all this, leader and followers have at last
met, wounded and sore, there is an impassioned feeling of rapture,
like the echo of an ever-sounding lyre, a feeling which I can let you
divine only by means of a simile.

"Have you ever, at a musical rehearsal, looked at the strange,
shrivelled-up, good-natured species of men who usually form the German
orchestra? What changes and fluctuations we see in that capricious
goddess 'form'! What noses and ears, what clumsy, _danse macabre_
movements! Just imagine for a moment that you were deaf, and had never
dreamed of the existence of sound or music, and that you were looking
upon the orchestra as a company of actors, and trying to enjoy their
performance as a drama and nothing more. Undisturbed by the idealising
effect of the sound, you could never see enough