In 1818 Schlegel accepted a professorship at the University of Bonn, in which place he exercised an incalculable influence upon one of the rising stars of German literature, young Heinrich Heine, who derived from him (if we may judge from his own testimony at the time; Heine’s later mood is a very different matter) an inspiration amounting to captivation.  The brilliant young student discovered here a stimulating leader whose wit, finish, and elegance responded in full measure to the hitherto unsatisfied cravings of his own nature.  Although Heine had become a very altered person at the time of writing his Romantic School (1836), this book throws a scintillating illumination upon certain sides of Schlegel’s temperament, and offers a vivid impression of his living personality.

In these last decades of his life Schlegel turned, as had his younger brother, to the inviting field of Sanskrit literature and philology, and extracted large and important treasures which may still be reckoned among mankind’s valued resources.  When all discount has been made on the side of a lack of specific gravity in Wilhelm Schlegel’s character, it is only just to assert that throughout his long and prolific life he wrought with incalculable effect upon the civilization of modern Europe as a humanizer of the first importance.

Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853) is reckoned by many students of the Romantic period to be the best and most lasting precipitate which the entire movement has to show.  For full sixty years a most prolific writer, and occupied in the main with purely literary production, it is not strange that he came to be regarded as the poetic mouthpiece of the school.

His birth was in a middle-class family of Berlin.  A full university training at Halle, Goettingen and Erlangen was accorded him, during which he cannot be said to have distinguished himself by any triumph in the field of formal studies, but in the course of which he assimilated at first hand the chief modern languages of culture, without any professional guidance.  At an early stage in his growth he discovered and fed full upon Shakespeare.  As a university student he also fell in love with the homely lore of German folk-poetry.  In 1794 he came back to Berlin, and turned to rather banal hack-writing for the publisher Nicolai, chief of all exponents of rationalism.  Significant was his early rehabilitation of popular folk-tales and chapbooks, as in The Wonderful Love-Story of Beautiful Magelone and Count Peter of Provence (1797).  The stuff was that of one of the prose chivalry-stories of the middle ages, full of marvels, seeking the remote among strange hazards by land and sea.  The tone of Tieck’s narrative is childlike and naive, with rainbow-glows of the bliss of romantic love, glimpses of the poetry and symbolism of Catholic tradition, and a somewhat sugary admixture of the spirit of the Minnelied, with plenty of refined and delicate sensuousness.  With the postulate that song is the true language of life, the story is sprinkled with lyrics at every turn.  The whole adventure is into the realm of dreams and vague sensations.