had for above a century been almost extinct.  Of late, however, the Ramlers, Rabeners, Gellerts, had attained to no inconsiderable polish of style; Klopstock’s Messias had called forth the admiration, and perhaps still more the pride, of the country, as a piece of art; a high enthusiasm was abroad; Lessing had roused the minds of men to a deeper and truer interest in Literature, had even decidedly begun to introduce a heartier, warmer and more expressive style.  The Germans were on the alert; in expectation, or at least in full readiness for some far bolder impulse; waiting for the Poet that might speak to them from the heart to the heart.  It was in Goethe that such a Poet was to be given them.

Nay, the Literature of other countries, placid, self-satisfied as they might seem, was in an equally expectant condition.  Everywhere, as in Germany, there was polish and languor, external glitter and internal vacuity; it was not fire, but a picture of fire, at which no soul could be warmed.  Literature had sunk from its former vocation:  it no longer held the mirror up to Nature; no longer reflected, in many-coloured expressive symbols, the actual passions, the hopes, sorrows, joys of living men; but dwelt in a remote conventional world in Castles of Otranto, in Epigoniads and Leonidases, among clear, metallic heroes, and white, high, stainless beauties, in whom the drapery and elocution were nowise the least important qualities.  Men thought it right that the heart should swell into magnanimity with Caractacus and Cato, and melt into sorrow with many an Eliza and Adelaide; but the heart was in no haste either to swell or to melt.  Some pulses of heroical sentiment, a few unnatural tears might, with conscientious readers, be actually squeezed forth on such occasions:  but they came only from the surface of the mind; nay, had the conscientious man considered the matter, he would have found that they ought not to have come at all.  Our only English poet of the period was Goldsmith; a pure, clear, genuine spirit, had he been of depth or strength sufficient; his Vicar of Wakefield remains the best of all modern Idyls; but it is and was nothing more.  And consider our leading writers; consider the poetry of Gray, and the prose of Johnson.  The first a laborious mosaic, through the hard stiff lineaments of which little life or true grace could be expected to look:  real feeling, and all freedom of expressing it, are sacrificed to pomp, to cold splendour; for vigour we have a certain mouthing vehemence, too elegant indeed to be tumid, yet essentially foreign to the heart, and seen to extend no deeper than the mere voice and gestures.  Were it not for his Letters, which are full of warm exuberant power, we might almost doubt whether Gray was a man of genius; nay, was a living man at all, and not rather some thousand-times more cunningly devised poetical turning-loom, than that of Swift’s Philosophers in Laputa.