with castigations and mortifications of the flesh.  The younger Voss declared that Werner’s religion was nothing but a poetic coquetting with God, Mary, the wounds of Christ, and the holy carbuncle (Karfunkelstein).  He had been a man of dissolute life and had been divorced from three wives.  “His enthusiasm for the restoration of the Middle Ages,” says Heine, “was one-sided; it applied only to the hierarchical, Catholic phase of mediaevalism; feudalism did not so strongly appeal to his fancy. . . .  Pater Zacharias died in 1823, after sojourning for fifty-four years in this wicked, wicked world.”  Carlyle contributed to the Foreign Review in 1828 an essay on “Werner’s Life and Writings,” with translations of passages from his drama, “The Templars in Cyprus.”

But the conversion which caused the greatest scandal was that of Count Friedrich Stolberg, whose apostasy was denounced by his early friend Voss, the translator of Homer, in a booklet entitled “Wie ward Fritz Stolberg ein Unfreier?” Voss showed, says Heine, that “Stolberg had secretly joined an association of the nobility which had for its purpose to counteract the French ideas of liberty; that these nobles entered into a league with the Jesuits; that they sought, through the re-establishment of Catholicism, to advance also the interests of the nobility.” [13]

The German literary historians agree that the fresh outbreak of romanticism in the last decade of the eighteenth century was the resumption of an earlier movement which had been interrupted; that it was furthered by the new feeling of German nationality aroused by the Bonapartist tyranny; and finally that it was a protest against the flat mediocrity which ruled in the ultra-evangelical circle headed by Nicolai, the Berlin bookseller and editor.  Into this mere Philistinism had narrowed itself the nobler rationalism of Lessing, with its distrust of Traeumerei and Schwaermerei—­of superstition and fanaticism.  “Dry light is best,” says Bacon, but the eye is hungry for colour, that has looked too steadily on the lumen siccum of the reason; and then imagination becomes the prism which breaks the invisible sunbeam into beauty.  Hence the somewhat extravagant romantic love of colour, and the determination to believe, at all hazards and even in the teeth of reason.  Hence the imperfectly successful attempt to force back the modern mind into a posture of child-like assent to the marvellous.  Tieck’s “Maehrchen” and the Grimm brothers’ nursery tales belong to this “renascence of wonder,” like Lewis’ “Tales of Terror,” Scott’s “Demonology,” and Coleridge’s “Christabel” in England.  “The tendencies of 1770 to 1780,” says Scherer, “which had now quite disappeared, asserted themselves with new and increased force.  The nations which were groaning under Napoleon’s oppression sought comfort in the contemplation of a fairer and grander past.  Patriotism and mediaevalism became for a long time the watchwords and the dominating fashion of the day.”