and unkind daughters.  He wedded a lady who had fallen in love with his poetry, or perhaps his poetical reputation:  an union founded, as it appears, in vanity, ended in vexation of spirit:  and as Death, which had deprived him of two wives, did not release him from a third, he obtained his freedom, at the end of little more than three years, from a court of justice.  Why did Klopstock undervalue, by preference of such a poet, the lofty-minded Schiller—­the dearest to England of all German bards; perhaps because the author of Wallenstein was a philosopher, and had many things in his philosophy which the author of The Messiah could not find in his heaven and earth.  S.C.

He spoke very slightingly of Kotzebue, as an immoral author in the first place, and next, as deficient in power.  At Vienna, said he, they are transported with him; but we do not reckon the people of Vienna either the wisest or the wittiest people of Germany.  He said Wieland was a charming author, and a sovereign master of his own language:  that in this respect Goethe could not be compared to him, nor indeed could any body else.  He said that his fault was to be fertile to exuberance.  I told him the OBERON had just been translated into English.  He asked me if I was not delighted with the poem.  I answered, that I thought the story began to flag about the seventh or eighth book; and observed, that it was unworthy of a man of genius to make the interest of a long poem turn entirely upon animal gratification.  He seemed at first disposed to excuse this by saying, that there are different subjects for poetry, and that poets are not willing to be restricted in their choice.  I answered, that I thought the passion of love as well suited to the purposes of poetry as any other passion; but that it was a cheap way of pleasing to fix the attention of the reader through a long poem on the mere appetite.  Well! but, said he, you see, that such poems please every body.  I answered, that it was the province of a great poet to raise people up to his own level, not to descend to theirs.  He agreed, and confessed, that on no account whatsoever would he have written a work like the OBERON.  He spoke in raptures of Wieland’s style, and pointed out the passage where Retzia is delivered of her child, as exquisitely beautiful.[234]

[234] Oberon, Canto viii. stanzas 69-80.  The little touch about the new born babe’s returning its mother’s kiss is very romantic:  though put modestly in the form of a query: 

         —­Und scheint nicht jeden Kuss
     Sein kleiner mund dem ihren zu entsaugen?

The word entsaugen (suck off) is expressive—­it very naturally characterises the kiss of an infant five minutes of age.  Wieland had great nursery experience.  ‘My sweetest hours,’ says he, in a letter quoted in the Survey,’ are those in which I see about me, in all their glee of childhood, my whole posse of little half-way things between apes and angels.’