This bare outline recalls the personality and career of the best single embodiment of the spirit of Young Germany.  His humble birth, unusual grasp of intellect, and ambition to secure an adequate education brought him into early touch with alert representatives of the educated middle classes, who were the keenest and most consistent critics of the political, social, and ecclesiastical reaction which gripped German life at that time.  Menzel’s student connection with the Jena Burschenschaft, his early published protest against the emptiness of recent German literature, and his polemic, entitled German Literature, and aimed at the imitators of Goethe and at Goethe’s own lack of interest in German unification, attracted young Gutzkow, who had also been a member of the Burschenschaft, and prompted him to write and publish in his student paper a defense of Menzel against his critics.  This led Menzel to invite Gutzkow to Stuttgart and to propose a cooeperation which could be but short-lived; for Menzel was timid and vacillating, whereas Gutzkow was sincere, courageous, and consistent.  This steadfastness and singleness of purpose, combined with a remarkable power to appreciate, adopt, and express the leading thoughts and aspirations of his own time, make Gutzkow the most efficient leader of the whole group.  Heine was, as already noted, too much of a Romanticist to be a thorough-going Young German.  Besides, he lacked the sincerity and the enthusiastic conviction which dedicated practically every work of Karl Gutzkow to the task of restoring the proper balance between German literature and German life.  Gutzkow felt that literature had, in the hands of the Romanticists, abandoned life to gain a fool’s paradise.  After a brief apprenticeship to Jean Paul and to the romantic ideal, never whole-hearted, because of the disintegrating influence of his simultaneous acquaintance with Boerne and Heine, Gutzkow utterly renounced the earlier movement and became the champion of a definite reform.  He aimed henceforth to enrich German literature by abundant contact with the large, new thoughts of modern life in its relation to the individual and to the community.  He was no less sincere in his determination to make literature introduce the German people to a larger, richer, freer, and truer human life for the individual and for the state.  In his eyes statecraft, religion, philosophy, science, and industry teemed with raw material of surpassing interest and importance for the literary artist.  He accordingly set himself the task in one way and another to make his own generation share this conviction.  It is quite true that he was not the man to transform with his own hands this raw material into works of art of consummate beauty and perfection.  He was conscious of his own artistic limitations and would have confessed them in the best years of his life with the frankness of a Lessing in similar circumstances.  We may agree that he lacked