can regain for the muse of the drama her temple, the stage; this cannot be done by the muse herself, who, every time she seeks to enter, is, with the politest of bows, shoved into the corner again by her noble priesthood.  Criticism must, in view of the voluntary poverty of our repertory, draw attention to the neglected riches of our dramatic literature; it must, by characterization and analysis, act as mediator between the genius of the poet and the talent of the actor, and it sins heavily against the present when it turns its attention chiefly to the recent past which has not yet been canonized.  It can, as a general rule, never look back often enough.

Wienbarg begins with Uhland.  From the point of view he has chosen he was quite right to leave unnoticed for the present Heinrich von Kleist’s magnificent Hermann’s Battle and Prince of Homburg. Of all our poets Uhland has unearthed in the purest form the treasure of German nationality:  all the dreaming and longing, the hoping and enduring, but also all the courage, all the strength which steps into the first rank only in battle, not on the parade ground.  One cannot blame Uhland without blaming Germany at the same time, but one can praise Uhland without at the same time praising Germany; for all poetry idealizes because it frames as in a mirror, but on account of its limits it compresses scattered details into a seemingly well ordered whole, which, however, does not by any means exist so harmoniously in nature.  Uhland’s poetry is a tear, forced from the flashing dark eye by the intolerable pain which dilates the heart and finds no more room there; but how much more beautiful is the pain than the wound, and how much more beautiful is the tear than the pain!  Such tears are suffocated deeds.  If our supineness and sentimentality only did not so often degrade holy water to the base uses of ablution!

Wienbarg introduces his characterization of Uhland with some excellent remarks.  We cannot take enough to heart what he says on page 17:  “Our literature is a ghost, most of the species of poetry are spectres, and faith or unbelief in them is called esthetics.  Fresh young life is sucked out, architectonic powers are misused in order to spiritualize and propagate lifeless forms and satisfy the vanity of literature by means of so-called works of art.”  If philosophy is destroyed by systematizing how much more so is poetry, which can exist only so long as it is free.  The instinct to make an end of everything, and wilfully and arbitrarily to pen up what is not confined to time and space, is the ugliest trait in human nature.  Life, in whatever phase it may be, always has a form, though sometimes one not to be seized with hands; it is always in fermentation, never in putrefaction; but its form is lost when we try to bring it into harmony with the tyrannical generalities which are bequeathed from grandfather to grandchild; then it congeals, and the stream that might have afforded