Friedrich’s next most important move was to Paris (1802), where he gave lectures on philosophy, and attempted another journal.  Here he began his enthusiastic studies of the Sanskrit language and literature, which proved to have an important influence on the development of modern philology.  This is eminently true of his work On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians (1808).  In 1804 he removed to Cologne, where he entered with great eagerness into the work of re-discovering the medieval Lower Rhenish School of religious art and Gothic architecture.  In 1808 he, with his wife Dorothea (the daughter of Moses Mendelssohn, who years before this time had left her home and family to become his partner for life), entered the Roman Catholic church, the interests of which engaged much of his energies for the remainder of his life.

[Illustration:  #A HERMIT WATERING HORSES# MORITZ VON SCHWIND]

He lived most of the time in Vienna, partly engaged in the literary service of the Austrian government, partly in lecturing on history and literature.  He died in 1829 in Dresden, whither he had gone to deliver a course of lectures.

Friedrich Schlegel’s philosophy of life was based upon the theory of supremacy of the artist, the potency of poetry, with its incidental corollaries of disregard for the Kantian ideal of Duty, and aversion to all Puritanism and Protestantism.  “There is no great world but that of artists,” he declared in the Athenaeum; “artists form a higher caste; they should separate themselves, even in their way of living, from other people.”  Poetry and philosophy formed in his thought an inseparable unit, forever joined, “though seldom together—­like Castor and Pollux.”  His interest is in “Humanity,” that is to say, a superior type of the species, with a corresponding contempt for “commonness,” especially for the common man as a mere machine of “duty.”  On performances he set no great store:  “Those countenances are most interesting to me in which Nature seems to have indicated a great design without taking time to carry it out.”

August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767-1845), more simply known as “Wilhelm,” was the more balanced, dignified, and serene nature, and possessed in a far higher degree than Friedrich the art of steering his course smoothly through life.  Of very great significance in his training were his university years at Goettingen, and his acquaintance there with the poet Buerger, that early apostle of revolt from a formal literature, whose own life had become more and more discredited and was destined to go out in wretchedness and ignominy; the latter’s fecundating activities had never been allowed full scope, but something of his spirit of adventure into new literary fields was doubtless caught by the younger man.  Buerger’s attempts at naturalizing the sonnet, for instance, are interesting in view of the fact that Wilhelm Schlegel became the actual creator of this literary form among the Germans.