was written by the two brothers, Friedrich furnishing the most aggressive contributions, more notably being responsible for the epigrammatic Fragments, which became, in their, detached brevity and irresponsibility, a very favorite model for the form of Romantic doctrine.  “I can talk daggers,” he had said when younger, and he wrote the greater part of these, though some were contributed by Wilhelm Schlegel, by his admirable wife Caroline, by Schleiermacher, and Novalis.  The root of this form lies in French thinking and expression—­especially the short deliverances of Chamfort, the epigrammatist of the French Revolution.  These Orphic-apocalyptic sentences are a sort of foundation for a new Romantic bible.  They are absolutely disconnected, they show a mixture and interpenetration of different spheres of thought and observation, with an unexpected deference to the appraisals of classic antiquity.  Their range is unlimited:  philosophy and psychology, mathematics and esthetics, philosophy and natural science, sociology and society, literature and the theatre are all largely represented in their scope.

Friedrich Schlegel’s epigrammatic wit is the direct precursor of Heine’s clever conceits in prose:  one is instantly reminded of him by such Athenaeum-fragments as “Kant, the Copernicus of Philosophy;” “Plato’s philosophy is a worthy preface to the religion of the future;” “So-called ‘happy marriages’ are related to love, as a correct poem to an improvised song;” “In genuine prose all words should be printed in italics;” “Catholicism is naive Christianity; Protestantism is sentimental.”  The sheer whimsicality of phrase seems to be at times its own excuse for being, as in an explanation of certain elegiac poems as “the sensation of misery in the contemplation of the silliness of the relations of banality to craziness;” but there are many sentences which go deep below the surface—­none better remembered, perhaps, than the dictum, “The French Revolution, Fichte’s Doctrine of Science, and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister are the greatest symptoms of our age.”

In the Athenaeum both brothers give splendid testimony to their astonishing and epoch-making gift in transferring classical and Romance metrical forms into elegant, idiomatic German; they give affectionate attention to the insinuating beauty of elegiac verse, and secure charming effects in some of the most alien Greek forms, not to mention terza rima, ottava rima, the Spanish gloss, and not a few very notable sonnets.

The literary criticisms of the Athenaeum are characteristically free and aggressive, particularly in the frequent sneers at the flat “homely” poetry of sandy North Germany.  At the end of the second volume, the “faked” Literary Announcements are as daring as any attempts of American newspaper humor.  When the sum of the contents and tendency of the journal is drawn, it is a strange mixture of discriminating philosophy,