try drops were pitched here and
there like peopled tents; the ground was inlaid with swarming
nurseries of grasses and little hearts, and one heart detached
itself after another with wings, or fins, or feelers, from the
hot breeding-cell of Nature, and hummed and sucked and smacked
its little lips, and sung: and for every little proboscis some
blossom-cup of; joy was already open. The darling child of the
infinite mother, man, alone stood with bright joyful eyes upon
the market-place of the living city of the sun, full of
brilliance and noise, and gazed, delighted, around him into all
its countless streets; but his eternal mother rested veiled in
immensity, and only by the warmth which went to his heart did he
feel that he was lying upon hers.

For very overflow of thought and imagery and ecstasy of feeling, Jean
Paul never achieved a balanced beauty of expression.

The ideal classic standard which Winckelmann and Lessing had laid
down--simple and plastic, calm because objective, crystal-clear in
thought and expression--and which Goethe and Schiller had sought to
realize and imbue with modern ideas, was too strictly limited for the
Romanticists. Hyperion's words expressed their taste more accurately:
'O, man is a god when he dreams, a beggar when he thinks!' and they
laid stress upon restless movement, fantastic, highly-coloured
effects, a crass subjectivity, a reckless licence of the imagination.

Actual and visible things were disregarded; they did not accord with
this claim for infinity and the nebulous, for exploring the secret
depths of the soul.

It was perhaps a necessary reaction from Goethe's classicism; but it
passed like a bad dream, after tending, thanks to its heterogeneous
elements, now to the mediaeval period, now to that of Storm and
Stress, and now to Goethe, Herder, and Winckelmann. It certainly
contained germs of good, which have grown and flourished in our own
day.

In keeping with its whole character, the Romantic feeling for Nature
was subjective and fantastic to excess, mystically enthusiastic,
often with a dreamy symbolism at once deep and naive; its inmost core
was pantheistic, with a pantheism shading off imperceptibly into
mysticism.

After _Werther_, there is perhaps no work of modern fiction in which
Nature plays so artistic a part as in Holderlin's _Hyperion_.

Embittered by life's failure to realize his ideals, he cries: 'But
thou a