sades, and the triumph of Teutonic and Romantic chivalry, and
the literature of that period is of a strictly correspondent tone. After
the Crusades, and during the political anarchy that followed, the sole
principle of order and progress is found in the towns, and in the towns
the poetry of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries finds its new home.
At last, at the time of the Reformation, when the political life of the
country assumed for a time a national character, German literature also is
for a short time national. The hopes, however, which had been raised of a
national policy and of a national literature were soon blighted, and, from
the Thirty Years' War to the present day, the inheritance of the nation
has been divided between princes and professors. There have been moments
when the princes had to appeal to the nation at large, and to forget for a
while their royal pretensions; and these times of national enthusiasm, as
during the wars of Frederick the Great, and during the wars against
Napoleon, have not failed to tell on the literature of Germany. They
produced a national spirit, free from professorial narrowness, such as we
find in the writings of Lessing and Fichte. But with the exception of
these short lucid intervals, Germany has always been under the absolute
despotism of a number of small sovereigns and great professors, and her
literature has been throughout in the hands of court poets and academic
critics. Klopstock, Lessing, and Schiller are most free from either
influence, and most impressed with the duties which a poet owes, before
all, to the nation to which he belongs. Klopstock's national enthusiasm
borders sometimes on the fantastic; for, as his own times could not
inspire him, he borrowed the themes of his national panegyrics from the
distant past of Arminius and the German bards. Lessing looked more to his
own age, but he looked in vain for national heroes. "Pity the
extraordinary man," says Goethe, "who had to live in such miserable times,
which offered him no better subjects than those which he takes for his
works. Pity him, that in his 'Minna von Barnhelm,' he had to take part in
the quarrel between the Saxons and the Prussians, because he found nothing
better. It was owing to the rottenness of his time that he always took,
and was forced to take, a polemical position. In his 'Emilia Galotti,' he
shows his _pique_ against the princes; in 'Nathan,' against the priests."
But, although the subject