Allowing for the differences mentioned, the romantic movements in England and Germany offer, as might be expected, many interesting parallels.  Carlyle, writing in 1827,[14] says that the recent change in German literature is only a part of a general change in the whole literature of Europe.  “Among ourselves, for instance, within the last thirty years, who has not lifted up his voice with double vigour in praise of Shakespeare and nature, and vituperation of French taste and French philosophy?  Who has not heard of the glories of old English literature; the wealth of Queen Elizabeth’s age; the penury of Queen Anne’s; and the inquiry whether Pope was a poet?  A similar temper is breaking out in France itself, hermetically sealed as that country seemed to be against all foreign influences; and doubts are beginning to be entertained, and even expressed, about Corneille and the three unities.  It seems to be substantially the same thing which has occurred in Germany, and been attributed to Tieck and his associates; only that the revolution which is here proceeding, and in France commencing, appears in Germany to be completed.”

In Germany, as in England—­in Germany more than in England—­other arts beside literature partook of the new spirit.  The brothers Boisseree agitated for the completion of the “Koelner Dom,” and collected their famous picture gallery to illustrate the German, Dutch, and Flemish art of the fifteenth century; just as Gothic came into fashion in England largely in consequence of the writings of Walpole, Scott, and Ruskin.  Like our own later Pre-Raphaelite group, German art critics began to praise the naive awkwardness of execution and devout spirituality of feeling in the old Florentine painters, and German artists strove to paint like Fra Angelico.  Friedrich Schlegel gave a strong impulse to the study of mediaeval art, and Heine scornfully describes him and his friend Joseph Goerres, rummaging about “among the ancient Rhine cities for the remains of old German pictures and statuary which were superstitiously worshipped as holy relics.”  Tieck and his friend Wackenroder brought back from their pilgrimage to Dresden in 1796 a devotion, a kind of sentimental Mariolatry, to the celebrated Madonnas of Raphael and Holbein in the Dresden gallery; and from their explorations in Nuernberg, that Perle des Mittelalters, an enthusiasm for Albrecht Duerer.  This found expression in Wackenroder’s “Herzensergiessungen eines Kunstliebenden Klosterbruders”; and in Tieck’s novel, “Sternbald’s Wanderungen,” in which he accompanies a pupil of Duerer to Rome.  Wackenroder, like Tieck’s other friend, Novalis, was of a consumptive, emotional, and somewhat womanish constitution of mind and body, and died young.  Tieck edited his remains, including letters on old German art.  The standard editions of their joint writings are illustrated by engravings after Duerer, one of which in particular, the celebrated “Knight, Death, and the Devil,” symbolizes the mysterious