To take part in the contagion of these ideas, there settled in Jena in 1796 the two phenomenal Schlegel brothers.  It is not easy or necessary to separate, at this period, the activities of their agile minds.  From their early days, as sons in a most respectable Lutheran parsonage in North Germany, both had shown enormous hunger for cultural information, both had been voracious in exploiting the great libraries within their reach.  It is generally asserted that they were lacking in essential virility and stamina; as to the brilliancy of their acquisitions, their fineness of appreciation, and their wit, there can be no question whatever.  Madame de Stael called them “the fathers of modern criticism,” a title which has not been challenged by the best authorities of our time.

Friedrich von Schlegel (1772-1829), the younger of the two, is counted to be the keener and more original mind.  He had a restless and unsettled youth, mostly spent in studies; after various disappointments, he determined to make classical antiquity his life-work; while mastering the body of ancient literature, he was assimilating, with much the same sort of eagerness, the philosophical systems of Kant and Fichte.  His first notable publication was an esthetic-philosophic essay, in the ample style of Schiller’s later discourses, Concerning the Study of Greek Poetry.  He found in the Greeks of the age of Sophocles the ideal of a fully developed humanity, and exhibited throughout the discussion a remarkable mastery of the whole field of classical literature.  Just at this time he removed to Jena to join his older brother, Wilhelm, who was connected with Schiller’s monthly The Hours and his annual Almanac of the Muses.  By a strange condition of things Friedrich was actively engaged at the moment in writing polemic reviews for the organs of Reichardt, one of Schiller’s most annoying rivals in literary journalism; these reviews became at once noticeable for their depth and vigorous originality, particularly that one which gave a new and vital characterization of Lessing.  In 1797 he moved to Berlin, where he gathered a group about him, including Tieck, and in this way established the external and visible body of the Romantic School, which the brilliant intellectual atmosphere of the Berlin salons, with their wealth of gifted and cultured women, did much to promote.  In 1799 both he and Tieck joined the Romantic circle at Jena.

In Berlin he published in 1798 the first volume of the Athenaeum, that journal which in a unique way represents the pure Romantic ideal at its actual fountain-head.  It survived for three years, the last volume appearing in 1800.  Its aim was to “collect all rays of human culture into one focus,” and, more particularly, to confute the claim of the party of “enlightenment” that the earlier ages of human development were poor and unworthy of respect on the part of the closing eighteenth century.  A very large part of the journal