us the most delicious bath can, at the most, be transformed into a sledge-road.  Protect yourself against the sea but do not strive to hamper and dam up its movement; if this ever succeeded, the sea would become a swamp, and all of you—­not only the sailors—­would die a miserable death.  To begin with, it is a misfortune that human society requires the form of the State, which cannot be traced back to any primitive foundation; for the individual tendencies and developments that are most full of genius are thus nipped in the bud, and it is an open question whether those that remain, which to be sure are better protected against wind and weather inside the ramparts and walls than elsewhere, can, even when yielding their most abundant profits, make compensation for those that are held back and crushed.  Will you go even further than necessity forces you; will you compel the spirit, even in its most peculiar sphere, to accept a constitution under the lamblike innocent name of esthetics?  Of what advantage will it be to you?  You can then, to be sure, lawfully scold and punish; today you can lock up a sentiment in the guardhouse for drunkenness:  tomorrow you can drag off a thought to imprisonment for offense against your sovereign majesty; and the day after you can send a phantasy to the mad house on account of its all too bold flight.  Life is its own law and its own rule, but you never want to adore the god until after you have crucified him.  As long as the tree is green you cut off its branches, and out of the dried hewn-down one you make, not an axle for your mill-wheel, but an idol.

What Wienbarg says of Uhland, the ballad-writer, is very pretty, but it was refuted before it was even written.  Uhland, the ballad-writer, is not the dramatic poet, “broken into a thousand pieces;” the poems appeared in 1815, the first drama in 1818.  I would not advance this superficial argument if it were not connected with an essential one.  All these full, flowing songs and romances were finished before the nobly calm power that called them into being concentrated itself for the creation of a dramatic work; and in truth they do not bear on their forehead the red fever spot of aspiration groping in the dark, which does not find what it seeks and therefore clasps in its arms the object over which it stumbles; they breathe that smiling, lovely, self-absorbed contentment, without which there may be intoxication, but no joy, no life.  It is true that through the songs as well as through the ballads, the dramatic genius which was later to produce Duke Ernest and Louis the Bavarian already treads softly like a sleep-walker; this it is which gives them the firm form, the deeper meaning which is so scandalously lacking in those good people who now and then innocently versify a legend or some trifling emotion.  But the dramatic element is, strange as this assertion may sound, just as much an essential in poetry—­one without which poetry would crumble away into dust—­as the lyrical; from the former, poetry receives its body; from the latter, its soul, and both are mutually dependent upon one another.  Is not suffering itself, only action turned inward!