careful, allegoric
analysis. He had a richer contact with social forces than Heine, yet his
realizations of them were awkward and meagre, his humor wooden, his
imagery derived. He had much greater intellectual force than Platen, yet
he lacked the incisive and controlled critical sense of the latter.
Having no one faculty to a distinguished degree, he constantly had to
substitute the strained labor of one faculty for the spontaneous
production of another. Predominantly rationalistic, he labored at the
symbolistic vision of Romanticism; preeminently a man of prose, he
endeavored all his life to be a great poet. He mistook the responsive
excitement produced by the ideas and visions of others for authentic
inspiration, the vivacity of a sociable and conversational gift for the
creative force of genius, and the immobility of obvious and established
conventional judgments for an extraordinary soundness and incisiveness
of fundamental analysis.

There was in him, as he himself once said, a certain "aftertaste of a
worthy philistinism." The dominant bent of his mind was toward the
immediate actualities, and this bent in the end, as in his antagonism
against the radical students in Halle, always overcame his endeavor to
grasp the more remote realities of a larger vision.

The purposes of his literary works, like the beginning and purpose of
his intimacy with Elisa, are always large, comprehensive, and
idealistic, but they always, even in his most important work, _Merlin_,
dwindle to petty details of actuality. His significance for the present
age does not so much rest on his objective achievement, as on some of
his qualities which prevented achievement. He was perhaps the most
considerable representative of the literary "Epigones" intervening
between the esthetic individualistic humanism of the eighteenth, and the
economic-cooeperative humanism of the nineteenth century. He, more fully
perhaps than any of his contemporaries, represented the peculiar
border-type of literary personality which is both compounded and torn
asunder by all the principal conflicting forces of a period of historic
transition. He was a victim of the manifold division of impulses, the
ill-related patchwork of impressions, and the disconcerting refractions
of vision, which characterized his contemporaries. It is in the fact
that he united in himself the principal factors which made up the
complexion of his age, to an extraordinary degree, that he has his