Upon the whole it must be concluded that this second invasion of England by German romance, in the twenties and early thirties of the nineteenth century, made a lesser impression than the first irruption in, say, 1795 to 1810, in the days of Buerger and “Goetz,” and “The Robbers,” and Monk Lewis and the youthful Scott.  And the reason is not far to seek.  The newcomers found England in possession of a native romanticism of a very robust type, by the side of which the imported article showed like a delicate exotic.  Carlyle affirms that Madame de Stael’s book was the precursor of whatever acquaintance with German literature exists in England.  He himself worked valiantly to extend that acquaintance by his articles in the Edinburgh and Foreign Review, and by his translations from German romance.  But he found among English readers an invincible prejudice against German mysticism and German sentimentality.  The romantic chiaroscuro, which puzzled Southey even in “The Ancient Mariner,” became dimmest twilight in Tieck’s “Maehrchen” and midnight darkness in the visionary Novalis.  The Weichheit, Wehmuth, and Sehnsucht nach der Unendlichkeit of the German romanticists were moods not altogether unfamiliar in English poetry.  “Now stirs the feeling infinite,” sings Byron.

  “Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
  To cease upon the midnight with no pain,”

cries Keats.  But when Novalis, in his Todessehnsucht, exclaims, “Death is the romance of life,” the sentiment has an alien sound.  There was something mutually repellent between the more typical phases of English and German romanticism.  Tieck and the Schlegels, we know, cared little for Scott.  We are told that Scott read the Zeitung fuer Einsiedler, but we are not told what he thought of it.  Perhaps romanticism, like transcendentalism, found a more congenial soil in New than in Old England.  Longfellow spent the winter of 1835-36 in Heidelberg, calling on A. W. Schlegel at Bonn, on his way thither.  “Hyperion” (1839) is saturated with German romance.  Its hero, Paul Flemming, knew “Des Knaben Wunderhorn” almost by heart.  No other German book had ever exercised such “wild and magic influence upon his imagination.”

[1] Besides the authorities quoted or referred to in the text, the materials used in this chapter are drawn mainly from the standard histories of German literature; especially from Georg Brandes’ “Hauptstroemungen in der Litteratur des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts” (1872-76); Julian Schmidt’s “Geschichte der Deutschen Litteratur” (Berlin, 1890); H. J. T. Hettner’s “Litteraturgeschichte” (Braunschweig, 1872); Wilhelm Scherer’s “History of German Literature” (Conybeare’s translation, New York, 1886); Karl Hillebrand’s “German Thought” (trans., New York, 1880); Vogt und Koch’s “Geschichte der Deutschen Litteratur” (Leipzig and Wien, 1897).  My own reading in the German romantics is by no means extensive.  I