und Drangperiode, which was itself but a temporary phase of the swift and many-sided unfolding of the German mind in the latter half of the last century; one element in the great intellectual ferment which threw off, among other products, the Kantian philosophy, the “Laocooen,” “Faust,” and “Wilhelm Meister”; Winckelmann’s “Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums” and Schiller’s “Wallenstein” and “Wilhelm Tell.”  Men like Goethe and Schiller were too broad in their culture, too versatile in their talents, too multifarious in their mental activities and sympathies to be classified with a school.  The temper which engendered “Goetz” and “Die Raeuber” was only a moment in the history of their Entwickelung; they passed on presently into other regions of thought and art.

In Goethe especially there ensued, after the time of his Italienische Reise, a reversion to the classic; not the exploded pseudo-classic of the eighteenth-century brand, but the true Hellenic spirit which expressed itself in such work as “Iphigenie auf Tauris,” “Hermann und Dorothea,” and the “Schoene Helena” and “Classische Walpurgis-Nacht” episodes in the second part of “Faust.”  “In his youth,” says Scherer, “a love for the historical past of Germany had seized on the minds of many.  Imaginative writers filled the old Teutonic forests with Bards and Druids and cherished an enthusiastic admiration for Gothic cathedrals and for the knights of the Middle Ages and of the sixteenth century. . .  In Goethe’s mature years, on the contrary, the interest in classical antiquity dwarfed all other aesthetic interests, and Germany and Europe were flooded by the classical fashion for which Winckelmann had given the first strong impulse.  The churches became ancient temples, the mechanical arts strove after classical forms, and ladies affected the dress and manners of Greek women.  The leaders of German poetry, Goethe and Schiller, both attained the summit of their art in the imitation of classical models."[14] Still the ground recovered from the Middle Age was never again entirely lost; and in spite of this classical prepossession, Goethe and Schiller, even in the last years of the century, vied with one another in the composition of romantic ballads, like the former’s “Der Erlkonig,” “Der Fischer,” “Der Todtentanz,” and “Der Zauberlehrling,” and the latter’s “Ritter Toggenburg,” “Der Kampf mit dem Drachen,” and “Der Gang nach dem Eisenhammer.”

On comparing the works of a romantic temper produced in England and in Germany during the last century, one soon becomes aware that, though the original impulse was communicated from England, the continental movement had greater momentum.  The Gruendlichkeit, the depth and thoroughness of the German mind, impels it to base itself in the fine arts, as in politics and religion, on foundation principles; to construct for its practice a theoria, an aesthetik.  In the later history of German romanticism, the medieval