The mind can be highly delighted in two ways,—­by perception and conception.  But the former demands a worthy object, which is not always at hand, and a proportionate culture, which one does not immediately attain.  Conception, on the other hand, requires only susceptibility:  it brings its subject-matter with it, and is itself the instrument of culture.  Hence that beam of light was most welcome to us which that most excellent thinker brought down to us through dark clouds.  One must be a young man to render present to one’s self the effect which Lessing’s “Laocooen” produced upon us, by transporting us out of the region of scanty perceptions into the open fields of thought.  The ut pictura poesis, so long misunderstood, was at once laid aside:  the difference between plastic and speaking art [Footnote:  Bildende und Redende Kunst.”  The expression “speaking art” is used to produce a corresponding antithesis, though “belles-lettres would be the ordinary rendering.—­TRANS.] was made clear; the summits of the two now appeared sundered, however near their bases might border on each other.  The plastic artist was to keep himself within the bounds of the beautiful, if the artist of language, who cannot dispense with the significant in any kind, is permitted to ramble abroad beyond them.  The former labors for the outer sense, which is satisfied only by the beautiful; the latter for the imagination, which may even reconcile itself to the ugly.  All the consequences of this splendid thought were illumined to us as by a lightning-flash:  all the criticism which had hitherto guided and judged was thrown away like a worn-out coat.  We considered ourselves freed from all evil, and fancied we might venture to look down with some compassion upon the otherwise so splendid sixteenth century, when, in German sculptures and poems, they knew how to represent life only under the form of a fool hung with bells, death under the misformed shape of a rattling skeleton, and the necessary and accidental evils of the world under the image of the caricatured Devil.

What enchanted us most was the beauty of that thought, that the ancients had recognized death as the brother of sleep, and had represented them similar, even to confusion, as becomes Menaechmi.  Here we could first do high honor to the triumph of the beautiful, and banish the ugly of every kind into the low sphere of the ridiculous within the realm of art, since it could not be utterly driven out of the world.

The splendor of such leading and fundamental conceptions appears only to the mind upon which they exercise their infinite activity,—­appears only to the age in which, after being longed for, they come forth at the right moment.  Then do those at whose disposal such nourishment is placed fondly occupy whole periods of their lives with it, and rejoice in a superabundant growth; while men are not wanting, meanwhile, who resist such an effect on the spot, nor others who afterwards haggle and cavil at its high meaning.