Byron and Goethe summed up.  Was it a defect in them?  No; it was the law of the times, and yet society at the present day, twenty years after they have ceased to sing, assumes to condemn them for having been born too soon.  Happy indeed are the poets whom God raises up at the commencement of an era, under the rays of the rising sun.  A series of generations will lovingly repeat their verses, and attribute to them the new life which they did but foresee in the germ.

Byron and Goethe summed up.  This is at once the philosophical explanation of their works, and the secret of their popularity.  The spirit of an entire epoch of the European world became incarnate in them ere its decease, even as—­in the political sphere—­the spirit of Greece and Rome became incarnate before death in Caesar and Alexander.  They were the poetic expression of that principle, of which England was the economic, France the political, and Germany the philosophic expression:  the last formula, effort, and result of a society founded on the principle of individuality.  That epoch, the mission of which had been, first through the labors of Greek philosophy, and afterwards through Christianity, to rehabilitate, emancipate, and develop individual man—­appears to have concentrated in them, in Fichte, in Adam Smith, and in the French school des drolls de l’homme, its whole energy and power, in order fully to represent and express all that it had achieved for mankind.  It was much; but it was not the whole; and therefore it was doomed to pass away.  The epoch of individuality was deemed near the goal; when low immense horizons were revealed; vast unknown lands in whose untrodden forests the principle of individuality was an insufficient guide.  By the long and painful labors of that epoch the human unknown quantity had been disengaged from the various quantities of different nature by which it had been surrounded; but only to be left weak, isolated, and recoiling in terror from the solitude in which it stood.  The political schools of the epoch had proclaimed the sole basis of civil organization to be the right to liberty and equality (liberty for all), but they had encountered social anarchy by the way.  The philosophy of the epoch had asserted the sovereignty of the human Ego, and had ended in the mere adoration of fact, in Hegelian immobility.  The Economy of the epoch imagined it had organized free competition, while it had but organized the oppression of the weak by the strong; of labor by capital; of poverty by wealth.  The Poetry of the epoch had represented individuality in its every phase; had translated in sentiment what science had theoretically demonstrated; and it had encountered the void.  But as society at last discovered that the destinies of the race were not contained in a mere problem of liberty, but rather in the harmonization of liberty with association—­so did poetry discover that the life it had hitherto drawn from individuality alone was doomed to perish for want of aliment; and