uctor:
it is a caution which applies to the German language exclusively, or
to that more than to any other, because the embarrassment which it is
meant to meet, grows out of a defect of taste characteristic of the
German mind. It is this: elsewhere, you would naturally, as a
beginner, resort to _prose_ authors, since the license and audacity of
poetic thinking, and the large freedom of a poetic treatment, cannot
fail to superadd difficulties of individual creation to the general
difficulties of a strange dialect. But this rule, good for every other
case, is _not_ good for the literature of Germany. Difficulties there
certainly are, and perhaps in more than the usual proportion, from the
German peculiarities of poetic treatment; but even these are
overbalanced in the result, by the single advantage of being limited
in the extent by the metre, or (as it may happen) by the particular
stanza. To German poetry there is a known, fixed, calculable limit.
Infinity, absolute infinity, is impracticable in any German metre.
Not so with German prose. Style, in any sense, is an inconceivable
idea to a German intellect. Take the word in the limited sense of what
the Greeks called [Greek: Synthesis onomaton]--_i. e._ the
construction of sentences--I affirm that a German (unless it were here
and there a Lessing) cannot admit such an idea. Books there are in
German, and, in other respects, very good books too, which consist of
one or two enormous sentences. A German sentence describes an arch
between the rising and the setting sun. Take Kant for illustration: he
has actually been complimented by the cloud-spinner, Frederic
Schlegel, who is now in Hades, as a most original artist in the matter
of style. 'Original' Heaven knows he was! His idea of a sentence was
as follows:--We have all seen, or read of, an old family coach, and
the process of packing it for a journey to London some seventy or
eighty years ago. Night and day, for a week at least, sate the
housekeeper, the lady's maid, the butler, the gentleman's gentleman,
&c., packing the huge ark in all its recesses, its 'imperials,' its
'wills,' its 'Salisbury boots,' its 'sword-cases,' its front pockets,
side pockets, rear pockets, its 'hammer-cloth cellars' (which a lady
explains to me as a corruption from _hamper-cloth_, as originally a
cloth for hiding a hamper, stored with _viaticum_), until all the uses
and needs of man, and of human life, savage or civilised, were met
with separ