if they once
lift their steel beaver and unbuckle their rich armor, are wonderfully
like ourselves. Let us read the poetry which they either wrote themselves,
or to which they liked to listen in their castles on the Rhine or under
their tents in Palestine, and we find it is poetry which a Tennyson or a
Moore, a Goethe or Heine, might have written. Neither Julius Caesar nor
Themistocles would know what was meant by such poetry. It is modern
poetry,--poetry unknown to the ancient world,--and who invented it nobody
can tell. It is sometimes called Romantic, but this is a strange misnomer.
Neither the Romans, nor the lineal descendants of the Romans, the
Italians, the Provencals, the Spaniards, can claim that poetry as their
own. It is Teutonic poetry,--purely Teutonic in its heart and soul, though
its utterance, its rhyme and metre, its grace and imagery, show the marks
of a warmer clime. It is called sentimental poetry, the poetry of the
heart rather than of the head, the picture of the inward rather than of
the outward world. It is subjective, as distinguished from objective
poetry, as the German critics, in their scholastic language, are fond of
expressing it. It is Gothic, as contrasted with classical poetry. The one,
it is said, sublimizes nature, the other bodies forth spirit; the one
deifies the human, the other humanizes the divine; the one is ethnic, the
other Christian. But all these are but names, and their true meaning must
be discovered in the works of art themselves, and in the history of the
times which produced the artists, the poets, and their ideals. We shall
perceive the difference between these two hemispheres of the Beautiful
better if we think of Homer's "Helena" and Dante's "Beatrice," if we look
at the "Venus of Milo" and a "Madonna" of Francia, than in reading the
profoundest systems of aesthetics.

The work which has caused these reflections is a volume of German poetry,
just published by Lachmann and Haupt. It is called "Des Minnesangs
Fruehling,"--"the Spring of the Songs of Love;" and it contains a collection
of the poems of twenty German poets, all of whom lived during the period
of the Crusades, under the Hohenstaufen Emperors, from about 1170 to 1230.
This period may well be called the spring of German poetry, though the
summer that followed was but of short duration, and the autumn was cheated
of the rich harvest which the spring had promised. Tieck, one of the first
who gathered the flowers