much
to be desired. Perhaps in this poem the figures are sufficiently
determined, but they are not so with intuition in view. It is
abstraction alone that created them, and abstraction alone can discern
them. They are excellent types to express ideas, but they are not
individuals nor living figures. With regard to the imagination, which
the poet ought to address, and which he ought to command by putting
before it always perfectly determinate forms, it is left here much too
free to represent as it wishes these men and these angels, these
divinities and demons, this paradise and this hell. We see quite well
the vague outlines in which the understanding must be kept to conceive
these personages; but we do not find the limit clearly traced in which
the imagination must be enclosed to represent them. And what I say here
of characters must apply to all that in this poem is, or ought to be,
action and life, and not only in this epopoeia, but also in the dramatic
poetry of Klopstock. For the understanding all is perfectly determined
and bounded in them--I need only here recall his Judas, his Pilate, his
Philo, his Solomon in the tragedy that bears that name--but for the
imagination all this wants form too much, and I must readily confess I do
not find that our poet is at all in his sphere here. His sphere is
always the realm of ideas; and he knows how to raise all he touches to
the infinite. It might be said that he strips away their bodily
envelope, to spiritualize them from all the objects with which he is
occupied, in the same way that other poets clothe all that is spiritual
with a body. The pleasure occasioned by his poems must almost always be
obtained by an exercise of the faculty of reflection; the feelings he
awakens in us, and that so deeply and energetically, flow always from
super-sensuous sources. Hence the earnestness, the strength, the
elasticity, the depth, that characterize all that comes from him; but
from that also issues that perpetual tension of mind in which we are kept
when reading him. No poet--except perhaps Young, who in this respect
exacts even more than Klopstock, without giving us so much compensation
--no poet could be less adapted than Klopstock to play the part of
favorite author and guide in life, because he never does anything else
than lead us out of life, because he never calls to arms anything save
spirit, without giving recreation and refreshment to sensuous nature by
the calm presence of an