g comparisons
in which our poet excels,--would they not exchange them for the pages
breathing tenderness, the "Elegy to Ebert" for example, or that admirable
poem entitled "Bardalus," or again, the "Tombs Opened before the Hour,"
the "Summer's Night," the "Lake of Zurich," and many other pieces of this
kind? In the same way the "Messiah" is dear to me as a treasure of
elegiac feelings and of ideal paintings, though I am not much satisfied
with it as the recital of an action and as an epic.

I ought, perhaps, before quitting this department, to recall the merits
in this style of Uz, Denis, Gessner in the "Death of Abel"--Jacobi,
Gerstenberg, Hoelty, De Goeckingk, and several others, who all knew how
to touch by ideas, and whose poems belong to the sentimental kind in the
sense in which we have agreed to understand the word. But my object is
not here to write a history of German poetry; I only wished to clear up
what I said further back by some examples from our literature. I wished
to show that the ancient and the modern poets, the authors of simple
poetry and of sentimental poetry, follow essentially different paths to
arrive at the same end: that the former move by nature, individuality, a
very vivid sensuous element; while the latter do it by means of ideas and
a high spirituality, exercising over our minds an equally powerful though
less extensive influence.

It has been seen, by the examples which precede, how sentimental poetry
conceives and treats subjects taken from nature; perhaps the reader may
be curious to know how also simple poetry treats a subject of the
sentimental order. This is, as it seems, an entirely new question, and
one of special difficulty; for, in the first place, has a subject of the
sentimental order ever been presented in primitive and simple periods?
And in modern times, where is the simple poet with whom we could make
this experiment? This has not, however, prevented genius from setting
this problem, and solving it in a wonderfully happy way. A poet in whose
mind nature works with a purer and more faithful activity than in any
other, and who is perhaps of all modern poets the one who departs the
least from the sensuous truth of things, has proposed this problem to
himself in his conception of a mind, and of the dangerous extreme of the
sentimental character. This mind and this character have been portrayed
by the modern poet we speak of, a character which with a burning
sensuousness embrac