Eva in Gefahr (STURM DER LIEBE 78) (German Edition)

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There is much in the Athenaeum that is impudent, much that contemporaries did not like and said so, but nothing that is directly seditious. The whole Jena establishment, Schiller even, received theirs. This is the great triad of modern poetry, the inmost and most sacred circle of the classics of modern poesy. He was not entirely averse to this odorous incense offering, displeased as he was at the otherwise unenthusiastic reception of Wilhelm Meister which the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung had taken no notice of.

For Friedrich was fast learning that running an avant- garde periodical involved not only the high ground of an elite and its intellectual risk-taking. One had to contend with more mundane matters, the tergiversations of a publisher, a diminishing stock of copy, and the hostility of the general public.

Volume Two, once the practical matters were sorted out, was to be more varied, with more poetry and a large section of art criticism. Its message, set out stringently in the introduction and in larger print, for emphasis was mastery of the aesthetic and artistic basics, entering the temple forecourt propylea , before proceeding to the inner sanctum of art, which could only be achieved by a proper study of ancients and moderns alike.

This would, as said, not become evident until late in Moving as they did between the main residence in Dresden and the summer palace at Pillnitz, a few miles upstream, the Ernsts somehow provided a base for their extended family. They knew the same aristocratic circle of friends that Novalis frequented.

Passing through Leipzig, he met the young Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling who was successfully negotiating for a post as professor extrordinarius of philosophy at Jena. As an experienced critic, he encouraged him to send a copy of the novel to Goethe. His main business in Berlin was, however, to negotiate with his fellow-Hanoverian and now famous actor-producer August Wilhelm Iffland. He had renewed his acquaintance with Iffland at a guest performance earlier that year in Weimar. On 25 and 26 August, for just two days, the circle was united in Dresden.

There, as in so many reactions to the Dresden collections, the beholders saw only what seemed essential, what struck the senses, what seized and overpowered the beholder with awe and reverence and the frisson of religious devotion. Again Goethe in made a long list of the Dresden paintings and included almost none that the Schlegel group was impressed by. The lighting could contribute. Inspecting the statuary by torchlight, as the Romantics and also Schiller did, softenedcontours and accentuated forms. The collection assembled by the Electors of Saxony, mainly up to , was an eighteenth-century creation and as such suitably eclectic.

The other convert from the Schlegel family was to be the daughter of the staunchly Protestant Ernsts in Dresden, Auguste von Buttlar. It was in Dresden that Friedrich died in , in the arms of his niece, and it is here that he is buried. In a letter to Novalis, of some considerable frankness, Caroline dropped her guard and took stock of the situation.

The Athenaeum had in her view come to a standstill. It had in any case been a mistake for the brothers to have got involved with a journal, and August Wilhelm should not have become a professor. Ultimately, all this was to cost August Wilhelm his health and his marriage. For all that, university lecturing was not merely a matter of holding forth. When lecturing on aesthetics, he appeared on the lecture lists under philosophy with Fichte and Schelling.

Ast handed his notes over to Karl Christian Friedrich Krause, later a philosopher influential in the Hispanic world, and these are the only full transcripts to survive. The other lectures we must assume to be lost. It is even fair to say that these two pieces of art criticism are what put his personal stamp on the periodical. Whereas academic freedom was something that the nineteenth-century universities had to fight hard to achieve, Fichte in the eighteenth believed it was already his by right.

None of these was an issue to which the Schlegel brothers, one already a professor and the other aspiring to be one, could be indifferent. This was only the beginning. Fichte had seized the opportunity of becoming co-editor of the Philosophisches Journal in In his former colleague Friedrich Karl Forberg sent him a contribution that seemed to postulate a moral and religious existence without the necessity of a belief in God. Alarmed at what seemed to be the reduction of faith to a mere incidental, but reluctant to stifle philosophical debate, Fichte decided to append an essay of his own, setting out the notion of a world order dependent on the idea of God.

Otherwise, Saxon students would be forbidden attendance at Jena. This was the main Saxon ducal house dictating to its Ernestine laterals in Thuringia. In considerable haste, he penned a brochure, extending to pages of print, his Appellation an das Publikum that came out in January , in 2, copies and with a double impress, Jena and Leipzig. As it was, only Hanover followed the example of the Saxon and Thuringian courts.

The ban on Hanoverian students studying in Jena, and the possible silencing of its star professor, would still have serious consequences for the university, the town, and the state at large. In , with his famous Speeches to the German Nation , events would be on his side, but not now. He wrote to the minister Voigt stating that he would rather seek dismissal than accept censure. Carl August, a dislike of intellectual demagoguery deep in his heart, found this a convenient means of being rid of a turbulent professor.

And so, on 1 April , having had students in the previous semester, Fichte found himself dismissed, shunned and humiliated. For a while, until he found suitable quarters for his family, Fichte actually shared lodgings with Dorothea in the Ziegelstrasse, an act of kindness but also of some forbearance, for Fichte held strongly anti-Semitic opinions. Life returned to normal in Jena and Weimar. Other pressing plans, of which part two of the Athenaeum was but one, crowded in.

Schlegel took note of one thing. Under different circumstances, this had also been the pattern of Die Horen. Ein Roman von Friedrich Schlegel. Intellectually, philosophically, the novel belongs in the world that Schleiermacher, Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel himself inhabited, where history, science and nature Novalis , religion and morals Schleiermacher and love Schlegel were elevated to universals and absolutes.

These novels had plots of a sort , whereas Lucinde was episodic and unsequent. The reader might be drawn inexorably to scenes where the newly emancipated flesh and sportive sexual encounters caught the attention, not the philosophical and Intellectual arguments. Dorothea had given up everything for the man whom she adored and worshipped, her civil status, her reputation and her material security. Caught between her religion and his, she did not wish to affront further her family by baptism, the necessary step to marriage.

Moreover her estranged husband demanded custody of both of their sons should she take this step. Both Caroline and Dorothea wished that the novel had never been published, setting out as it did what was intimate and private and beyond articulation. This was the germ of the Jena circle. It was the Berlin fraction that was initially so much in favour of this togetherness, for they were already accepted in the circles that mattered to them and—not insignificantly—they were dealing with publishers there.

Caroline, no doubt speaking for all in Jena, had no intention of removing to a city that she did not know, with her husband a professor in Jena, as was Schelling. They had their own circle of friends and acquaintances, the publisher Frommann and his open hospitality, or the Paulus family. In Jena, one could meet Goethe, usually over from Weimar on visits of two weeks at a time. Friedrich entrusted the Athenaeum to Schleiermacher, and it is in letters to him that we learn the most of events in Jena.

Nearly all of the number was ready by July of that year, and the rest, for the remainder of its short existence, was effectively edited from a distance. Religion was to be the keynote of Jena. Already in May of that year Friedrich had told his brother August Wilhelm that the time had come to found a new religion.

Schiller they did not visit, and they affected indifference to the first performance of his Wallenstein in Weimar, while the whole group fell out of their chairs with laughter at his Lied von der Glocke [Song of the Bell]. Everyone seems to have known except August Wilhelm himself. He maintained excellent outward relations with Schelling, the man who was in reality cuckolding him.

What was one to expect when Friedrich Schlegel in a fragment declared nearly all marriages to be but concubinage? We need however to see all this in perspective. The literary feuds of the years to about —and we are not concerned here with rehearsing all of their tiresome and repetitive details—were just that: They were a Battle of the Books brought up to date. They bore only the most tenuous of links with those seditious political libelles that both scandalized and delighted pre-Revolutionary France or with the hurly-burly of Grub Street in London.

Goethe and Schiller in their Horen had wanted to be above the political fray. The Xenien waged war inside the Republic of Letters, while the Athenaeum steered clear of politics altogether, at most wrapping its historical and social discourse in poetry and myth. This was all to change once the Romantics had dispersed, the Schlegel brothers to France, and especially after , when poetry and art would be invoked to counter the humiliations visited by Napoleon on the German nation.

The hack-writer Garlieb Merkel had spread a rumour that Duke Carl August had reprimanded the editors of the Athenaeum. Already in the Romantics in Jena and Berlin had a foretaste of more scurrilous lampoons when Daniel Jenisch in his Diogenes Laterne , with singular nastiness, caricatured Friedrich and Schleiermacher for their association with Jewish women Dorothea and Henriette Herz, respectively. Kotzebue had a history of calumniations, and to these he now added Friedrich Schlegel.

Friedrich Schlegel should of course never be quoted out of context, and this Kotzebue knew. At its best, it had a wide distribution 2, subscribers and had maintained high standards of writing, as opposed to specialised scholarly discourse; and it had been a major force in the dissemination of Kant. Both he and Fichte came up with ideas, with slightly different emphases, for a so-called Kritisches Institut , a review journal that would reflect a more systematic ordering of knowledge and would accommodate the various encyclopaedic ambitions that the Jena circle entertained.

Its editorial board was to consist of both Schlegel brothers, Schleiermacher, Schelling, Tieck, and August Ferdinand Bernhardi, the Berlin schoolman and husband of Sophie Tieck, who was proving himself useful as an editor and reviewer. The break-up of the Jena circle put paid to the project. It would in any case have been difficult to tie some of its editorial board down, notably Tieck, who had promised contributions for the Athenaeum and had never delivered.

Schlegel, for his part, was to find himself setting out the order and subdivisions of knowledge, not in a review journal, but in his lectures in Jena and Berlin. The last part of the Athenaeum appeared in March of Caroline then fell seriously ill. Dorothea, a shrewd, although hardly objective observer of humanity and its frailties, tried to be even-handed towards her sister-in-law. Despite the differences in their personalities and backgrounds, Caroline had been the first to recognize Dorothea publicly and to ensure her acceptance in Jena circles.

August Wilhelm, she continued, had not been an easy partner to live with, but he loved Caroline after his own fashion and in a way that she never did in return. She had never been open about her relationship with Schelling, who had kept up a front of politeness to August Wilhelm while disliking him in private. Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland, the great Jena doctor and father of macrobiotics, treated her according to his tried and conventional methods, but Schelling, who in addition to the nature philosophy that he professed also had some knowledge of medicine, insisted that Hufeland try the fashionable therapeutics of the Brownian method.

Brownism or Brunonism, named after the Scottish doctor John Brown, saw health as the median state of excitability, based on the fundamental doctrine of life as a state of excitation produced by external agents upon the body, and perceived disease as consisting in excess or deficiency of such stimulants. Novalis was also a Brownian.

An elaborate charade was set up, with Schelling leaving first for Saalfeld, a convenient half-way house. On May 5, Caroline and Auguste left, accompanied as far as Saalfeld by Schlegel, after which they were to proceed independently to Bamberg. Schlegel returned to Jena, taking a detour via Leipzig, while Schelling, of course, was waiting in Saalfeld and saw Caroline and Auguste to quarters in Bamberg.

Early in July, all three of them were in Bocklet, the Paulus family from Jena also. There was no secrecy, for on 6 July Schelling wrote to Schlegel that Auguste had taken ill. Schelling apparently used Brownian methods, including the standard stimulant of opium, to try to bring her back to health. It was to no avail. On 12 July, she died, aged She was buried in the churchyard at Bocklet. She returned to Bamberg with Schelling, Schlegel hurrying there as soon as he heard the news.

The accident of this Franconian journey, calamitous for all who took part in it, had brought him to the same South German cultural landscape that Wackenroder and Tieck had already experienced in , both of them Berlin Protestants brought face to face with the aesthetic splendours of the rite. Auguste he had loved as his own daughter and it was to him that the extended Jena circle expressed their condolences. Now was the time for his friends to recollect his genuine paternal affection, not to consider whether this had been on his side only.

Yet this stiff, formal, professorial man loved children and wished to have children of his own. Caroline and Schlegel travelled to Gotha, where her close friend Luise Gotter took her in. From now on they journeyed together, even slept under the same roof. Their letters remained friendly and tolerant, as they had been all along; but the marriage was over. The Jena circle was effectively at an end. The Tiecks had left in June; Schelling continued as a professor, not in any close association with the Schlegel brothers, but not estranged from them either.

But Jena, as a metonymic association of minds as they had known it, was over. Yet it was only as Schlegel shook off these idle polemics, the irksome attendants of the Jena association that he could turn, symbolically as well as in reality, to face the challenges of that new nineteenth century. He announced, also in the same letter, the Ehrenpforte , of which he was to be so inordinately proud and which would go on to take pride of place in his Poetische Werke in In a sense that had its justification, for it showed what he could do, and all in a comic vein: One senses his urge to display versatility and if need be virtuosity.

It was part of a self-image that his autobiographical sketch of around sought to perpetuate.

The Life of August Wilhelm Schlegel

The Athenaeum , which, as we saw, was for August Wilhelm a joint enterprise and only one of several undertakings, contained some short and more ephemeral pieces of comment and criticism by him that had little sense outside of their original context, and these he never re-edited. The lectures that he gave in Jena seemed to have served if anything as drafts for later series in Berlin; but most of this material was never edited in his lifetime. The edition of his poems was, however, different, those Gedichte von August Wilhelm Schlegel , that came out in April of Although the Athenaeum did contain certain of his more important poems, there was evidence that he was also writing poetry for a different audience, one more generally receptive and perhaps less aesthetically discriminating than the readership of an avant-garde periodical.

It may be significant that when his Gedichte first appeared in , copies were immediately sent to Duke Carl August, Goethe, and Schiller. These poets, too, were the names that his Jena lectures were beginning to enshrine and that his Berlin lectures were to canonise. There was even a sonnet called Das Sonett that was both a poetic and also a prosodic demonstration of the Petrarchan form.

The second of these poems they might know if they were also readers of the Athenaeum , but the other one was new. Carl addresses his surviving younger brother, classical-style, from the land of the dead. One may guess at its motivation: Also perhaps the wish to show the world that the Schlegels were not all bookmen, but men of action as well. For the generally elegiac tone of the poem does not exclude a certain expansiveness of detail, the raising of the Hanoverian regiment, the touching farewell scene, with his only mention of both of his parents: Aber vor allem die Mutter, die liebende Mutter!

Wie ich mich innerlich schalt, mir sagte die ahnende Seele: My good pious father gave me his heartfelt blessing, Sisters crowded around, brothers embracing me. But our so loving mother, I broke down in tears on her bosom, Only just tearing myself from her arms in confusion. How I reproached myself later, for a sixth sense foretold me Never again would I answer your dearest greetings. But our mother could not hold back the urge that possessed her Just to see her beloved son this once more. She made her way, her daughters came with her, Looked down on the square from the window, the ranks all assembled, I stood with my brothers in arms, and though I could see her, I never raised an eye, to preserve my composure.

I went through the lines and hurried them on, took orders, Passed them on, immersing myself in military business, Mounted my horse, taking the lead of the marching column, And only looked homeward when we were outside the gate. The fifes and drums drowned out any sad thoughts that I might have And the song of the men who were greeting the morning. All this in verses of elegiac couplets. It is a good poem, almost the only one by him that breathes genuine feeling. Above all it had combined the poetic with the real and autobiographical. Carl Schlegel had died in the symbolic year , and Neoptolemus in the elegy recalled how the political turmoil and chaos of the revolutionary years had brought ever more dead to join him in the realm of the shades.

This, at least, would be a sentiment that could appeal to the Goethe of Hermann und Dorothea. In , in its reissue in his re-named Poetische Werke. Schlegel of course would never have begun an elegy seemingly in mid-sentence, as Euphrosyne does. That was the privilege of genius. Following the Odyssey the Iliad rather less , it was also private and domestic, with characters who displayed a heart-warming sincerity and directness. As a renewal of Homer, it had an unforced epic tone, and its rhythm was unconstrained by any too punctilious adaptation of the ancient hexameter.

They did not however represent the sum of the elegiac tradition, and so Friedrich Schlegel reminded him of the thematic variety of the much less-known and imperfectly edited Greek elegy all in extracts translated by August Wilhelm. These poems were learned and replete with allusions: It was that philological, learned side of the Schlegel brothers that has travelled rather less well. Nevertheless it formed part of their sense of poetic continuities, their ultimately Herderian awareness of the historical rhythms and patterns of rise and fall, efflorescence and decay, that record the Alexandrian desiccations as here as well as the new risings of sap.

Goethe had an explanation. Reflecting over twenty years later, in Campagne in Frankreich , he recalled the general laxity in the writing of hexameters when, as a distraction from the Revolutionary Wars of , he first sat down to retell the story of Reynard the Fox in classical verse, as Reineke Fuchs. It is also certain that they disagreed on the extent to which metre may have priority over sense. Goethe where possible allowed himself to be guided by the natural rhythm of the language rather than its purely metrical patterns.

He himself saw none of these activities in isolation. He never put himself into compartments. All areas of endeavour had their place but were also interdependent: It was a style that he had developed earlier in the decade: They could be expressed as a philosophical principle, referring all art forms to an original ideal or model, from which all else emanated, a neo-platonic or Hemsterhuisian notion of beauty, the outward manifestation seen as but a mirror image of the inner.

These notions informed the staid verses of those didactic or poetological poems, Prometheus or Pygmalion , of which Schlegel was so proud. This, too, would guarantee its autonomy and also the validity and truthfulness of human feelings. Schlegel had formulated these ideas in the lectures that he gave at Jena. His hearers may in any case not have been aware of the extent of his borrowings from existing material. An example was his use of his Horen essay as the source for his notions on language, not substantially altered.

His ideas on euphony and musicality in language drew on his opening contribution to the Athenaeum , Die Sprachen [The Languages]. Sections on Greek poetry had been copied straight from his brother Friedrich. The passage on Shakespeare was little advance on Eschenburg. All contain elements of the others. A didactic poem like Die Kunst der Griechen [The Art of the Greeks] was both a threnody for a lost past and also a statement positing the centrality of Greek culture for a post-classical age.

Friedrich Schlegel, too, while editing the and numbers of the Athenaeum , had privately been catching up on his reading of the sixteenth and seventeenth-century Italian and Spanish classics. That at least was the theory: For August Wilhelm, Dante had seemed preferable, despite his eccentric theology. At least the characters in the Inferno had flesh and blood.

True, much offended the sensitivities Ugolino, for instance , but it was preferable to the exsangious creations of Der Messias and by extension, his model, Milton. Its two major reviewers were, not surprisingly, Schlegel and Voss. There was therefore much that Schlegel did not like: For there were absurdities in Klopstock, not least his imagined link between Greek and German fanciful ideas involving the Thracian Getae. This Schlegel could easily rectify. If one wanted brevity, better examples could be found in Aeschylus rather than in Homer, on whom Klopstock seemed to be fixated.

True, English and French had their limits as poetic languages, but Italian certainly did not. He could now see much in perspective: Klopstock had also lived in an age unfazed by manifest improbabilities, happily linking druids and bards, German and Celt, Greek and Goth as one linguistic community.

This in its turn was an olive branch to the same Grimm whom Schlegel had exquisitely torn to pieces in his massive review of He would now learn that the great mother language, Sanskrit, followed Greek, Gothic perhaps as well had its poetry survived. In , but addressing the specialist audience of his fellow-Sanskritists and linguisticians in his Indische Bibliothek , Schlegel had been yet more even-handed towards Klopstock, to Goethe and Schiller also, knowing that neither Klopstock nor Schiller were alive to appreciate this irenic gesture.

It still had its gaze firmly fixed on the works of art themselves and the things to be observed as one stood in front of them. Only after this necessary analysis did the discourse merge into poetic utterance. But there were also immediate differences between the Romantics and Goethe.

Their remarks reflected existing hierarchies within art discourse or engaged with these. Historical painting ranked as superior to landscape or seascape, genre or still life. Venetian, Bolognese, and French schools stood in that order of esteem. Generally these connoisseurs followed their own dictates and looked or overlooked as they chose.

If that meant more Venetians and almost no Dutch, well and good. The dialogue and the poems he had written, the descriptions of paintings were by the said lady. One can draw inferences from the respective contributions of the three interlocutors in the conversation: Louise, generally accepted as being Caroline herself, Waller, who is August Wilhelm, and Reinhold, a kind of collective figure for the remaining friends. Waller summed up the general consensus—quoting Herder or Hemsterhuis in all but name—that statuary was not a mere question of shape or contour or mass or repose.

The whole conversation was, however, called The Paintings , and so the visitors walked on towards the painting galleries, their real goal. These were in reality scattered, but the essay conveniently assembled them, one Italian Salvator Rosa , one French Claude , one Dutch Ruysdael. Total coverage was not their aim. They were content to dispraise a Claudesque painting by Hackert as being essentially lifeless if it suited them. Instead they attempted a close, sometimes quite technical, analysis of the three paintings.

This could be seen increasingly in the accounts of Correggio, who was beginning here his advance in Romantic esteem to become the equal of Raphael. There were outright condemnations, too, that amounted to blanket rejections of schools or centuries: Louise confessed to tears. Was she in danger of becoming Catholic? But art never lost its autonomy.

It was not so suffused with feeling as to become something vague and indefinable. It did not inhibit further analysis of the supporting figures , but it raised two important issues. The first was the close relationship of the fine arts to poetry. August Wilhelm saw the matter less extravagantly. This was also the uncle of Auguste von Buttlar speaking, displeased at her embrace of Rome.

There was his Flaxman essay as well. The engravings, first produced by Tommaso Piroli in Rome in , were expensive and copies were initially hard to come by. It was not long in coming: Gone were the reservations that he had expressed but a few years ago. In those sections where Dante went beyond the powers of human expression, Flaxman used geometrical figures circle, triangle , themselves mystical symbols of the godhead, and passed beyond mere representation.

In that sense, this Athenaeum essay was entering regions where Goethe already had reservations and later was to see merely superstition. Their effect was of necessity limited, for students did not flock to Schlegel as they did to Schelling and as they had done to Fichte, and it is only through the initiatives of two promising and intelligent young men, Ast and Savigny, that we have any record at all. Even then they have only handed down to us those lectures now called Philosophische Kunstlehre [Philosophical Art Theory]. These contain sections dealing with German literature, but they are presumably different from the lectures on the history of German poetry now lost that he also announced.

In keeping with other German universities, Jena had been offering lectures on aesthetics not necessarily under this exact title for decades. Schlegel could therefore be seen as a versatile and reliable colleague in both classical and modern literatures and was also the man best suited to inject the central tenets of transcendental idealism into the academic teaching of aesthetics. Aesthetics, as the philosophical study of human awareness of art and beauty, dealt with such absolutes, themselves the absolute aims of humanity.

The Life of August Wilhelm Schlegel

As man becomes aware of his ultimate purpose, so he grows in his awareness of art and beauty. Art is by this definition no mere accessory, has no ancillary function, is no frill or furbelow. These are ideas firmly rooted in Schiller or Fichte. On one level, this meant setting out the history of aesthetics from Plato and Aristotle to Baumgarten, Winckelmann and Kant. We study Homer, he said, because he was closest to this primeval poetry before it became the preserve of a chosen few and was changed into art.

Although climate and physical or phonetic differences lead to disparity, all language is by nature rhythmical, musical or image-laden. Image is the essential of myth, and myth is the product of the powers of human expression. Here Schlegel first developed the basically anthropological ideas human figure, oracle, fate, belief in life after death, the golden age that were to form part of his Romantic mythology but also informed his later Bonn lectures on ancient history.

Again, there were many prefigurations here of his later Berlin and Vienna lectures. It was to be followed by another gap in the Romantic ranks when early in Novalis succumbed to the tuberculosis that had been undermining his frail constitution. Auguste dosed with opium against the diarrhoea that was killing her her mother was to die in identical circumstances nine years later ; Novalis, a Keatsian phthisic, not in Rome but in wintry Weissenfels.

Significantly, they did not include his radical Die Christenheit oder Europa [Christendom or Europe], a vision of history too controversial for readers in the new nineteenth century. Despite differences, personal between Caroline and Dorothea, ideological between Friedrich Schlegel and Schelling, the former Romantic circle was nevertheless able to show a united front when it suited, as in the two volumes called Charakteristiken und Kritiken in During the Athenaeum years one would hardly have known that the map of Europe was being redrawn or that tumultuous events were happening, in the far-off Mediterranean or Egypt, so absorbed had these men and women of letters been with matters of the mind or wars with literary rivals.

We hear much more now of the threats, real or imagined, of armies on the move, of real captures and quarterings imposed on the civil population. In , Caroline experienced the political repercussions of the times at first hand in Harburg, with the cession of the Hanoverian lands to Prussia. Yet the postal service still functioned. During the peace interludes Friedrich and Dorothea travelled unhindered to Paris and set themselves up there, relying on the diligence to get letters, proofs and packets of books from one land to another.

It was in more ways than one a repetition of the journey in the same direction she had once made from Mainz. She was, as then, accompanied by August Wilhelm, now as ever linked by bonds of friendship and respect, devotion even. Their marriage was over. There remained still a strong residue of the affection, solicitude and camaraderie that had once been the mainstay of their relationship. He was still helping her financially. She, as before, could still be relied upon to pass on her critical and practical insights and her encouragement, as Schlegel sought to forge for himself a career as a dramatist and as a public lecturer in Berlin.

It was she who advised him not to break with his publisher Unger over a breach of contract with the Shakespeare edition, shrewdly noting that no-one else would take on this enterprise with a litigious translator. It also represented a leave-taking from Jena and its associations. The Schlegel brothers wrote no novellas, but they knew that Goethe had consciously revived this Renaissance narrative form in , and they were to see its explosive expansion during their own lifetime.

The essay is part of the Romantic discovery and rehabilitation of Italian and Spanish literature as sources of original, vital poetry, that saw Cervantes placed on the same scale of esteem as Dante and Shakespeare.

While going through the requisite rites of mourning he emancipated himself once and for all from mentoring and tutoring. This Johnson did with some nobility. The Germans, it seems, had been less generous to their downtrodden artists. Schlegel clearly did not wish to kick a fallen man, but neither did he wish to write a hagiography. His aim was to be fair, even if fairness involved the occasional severity. Thus his essay should not be read as a direct reply to the points raised by Schiller. The times had not been favourable to him, says Schlegel, in that the period of his greatest influence was the immediate aftermath of the Sturm und Drang, in the s, not the high-pitched turbulence of the s.

He was after all still close to Weimar. In , when reissuing the essay, he marred its generally even-handed tone with querulous and carping comments on Schiller, who was no longer able to answer. He sought for two things that in many ways cancelled each other out: Popularity was fine, but it could have the effect of depressing the level of quality, of being poetically all things to all men. This paradox also contained a fatal contradiction. This service to poetry, says Schlegel the historian of the romance form, cannot be praised too highly.

There had been great poetry nevertheless, such as that ballad Lenore , that Schlegel could not praise enough, that had taken the English by storm. Even if he never himself attempted a translation of this play, he was not willing to compromise the standards of Shakespearean rendition that he himself had established in theory and even more so in practice. One could not apply to him the high standards that the Berlin lectures were to require of great and lasting poetry, but he was accorded a place, more modest but not without its own honour, in the national literature. It was to be his base until A short exception was the brief return visit to Jena in the late summer of After a final journey to Berlin and Dresden where his sister Charlotte Ernst unwisely lent them money , Friedrich and Dorothea left in stages for Paris.

There was, he said, no chance of earning a living in Germany, with them constantly on the move—a wanderlust occasioned by his creditors, one might add. He would be able to use his writings in Paris and work from that base. The much-admired Georg Forster had existed in this fashion, an analogy that even Friedrich must have known to be unfortunate in all of its associations.

Yet the Schlegel brothers, while never agreeing on the subject of their respective partners or spouses, could in many ways not live without each other. A kind of exodus from Jena to Heidelberg did take place. Overtures were made to Tieck; Paulus eventually went there; Schelling at one stage showed interest the Schlegel brothers never. It might instead be fair to say that the content of the Athenaeum had been determined, dictated even, by the arguments of the s, by associations, like those with Fichte, Schleiermacher or Novalis, that no longer held in the new century. Or that Goethe, and the desire to please him, had absorbed a disproportionate amount of its attention.

If one were searching for a manifesto of things new, as opposed to the old order, one would not look to the artificial divide between Jena and Heidelberg, but to the works of the circle itself. This was where the future lay. Yet as other Romantics, his brother Friedrich, Schleiermacher, Ludwig Tieck among them, were removing themselves from Berlin, it seemed as if August Wilhelm was trying to reconstitute the Prusssian capital as a focal point for the movement. In this he also found himself being drawn into the turbulent affairs of the Tieck family, the three siblings, Ludwig, Sophie, and Friedrich.

Friedrich, in his turn, not always through his own fault, was at times reduced to a hand-to-mouth existence. He was no longer in Berlin, having spent himself in polemics and controversies directed at the anti-Romantic clique there. August Wilhelm, now an author with Johann Friedrich Cotta, also publisher to Goethe and Schiller, had negotiated terms: With the death of Novalis in March , a double memorialisation seemed called for. Tieck and both Schlegel brothers were to be the main contributors, but anyone capable of acceptable verse and of the right disposition might also be invited.

As usual, it was Schlegel who saw the little volume through the press. Ballads or religious verse stanzas from different traditions, Catholic and Protestant, were also prominent. Religious the almanac certainly was, with those extraordinary poems by Novalis as its centrepiece, a kind of ecumenical religiosity that took in elements of whatever provenance and reflected the sense, formulated by Schleiermacher, that all facets of intellectual and cultural life were subject to a spiritual dimension.

The Schlegels translated the swooning cadences of the medieval hymn and the devotional verse of the Spanish Baroque. The blessed feast never ends, Love is never sated. Still, it is noticeable, when at the end of Tieck showed all the signs of crisis and nervous collapse, that it was Friedrich Schlegel to whom he wrote a great confessional letter, not August Wilhelm. Whereas the Schlegels did not go in for sibling rivalry, with the Tiecks it assumed textbook dimensions. Those who defend Sophie mostly women point to her invidious position as the middle sibling between two brothers, hemmed in by domesticity, marriage and childbearing, disparaged and exploited by writers in her immediate entourage.

Those who do not defend her largely men find her neurotic, exploitative, rapacious, vampiric even, and these are the terms that one tends to hear in the Schlegel narrative not of course from August Wilhelm himself. Bernhardi, a classicist and schoolmaster at the Friedrichswerder Gymnasium in Berlin, was a friend of her brother Ludwig, and his marriage to Sophie in seemed a natural consequence.

Their first child, Wilhelm, was born in , but the marriage failed. Bernhardi had few friends. He may have had an unpleasant and unattractive personality, but he surely does not deserve the demonisation visited on him by the Tieck-Schlegel circle. Schlegel was to do a long review of his important handbook on language for Europa. He needed no introductions to the world of the theatre: Madame Unzelmann was very glad of his company, more than glad, some alleged.

He commemorated her acting in prose and verse. Through the Bernhardis, Schlegel found a lawyer willing to take the publisher Unger to court unsuccessfully, as it turned out. Perhaps also solicitude when this little mite died the following February. The letters that they exchanged from the period of his absence in Jena, from August until October , are, however, full of passion.

Bernhardi was of course to be kept in the dark. Schlegel still had too much affection for her. In the autumn of Schlegel waxed lyrical in a poem to Sophie with perhaps a veiled reference to a child that she was carrying, and when in November Felix Theodor Bernhardi was born, Schlegel had reason to believe that he was the father. Knorring, a Baltic nobleman, had been taking private Greek lessons with Bernhardi, perhaps a little more than that. Schlegel, it hardly needs to be said, made regular contributions to her exchequer. Friedrich had been absent from Berlin since Tieck also did busts of Goethe commemorated in a distich by Schlegel and of members of the ducal house and court.

Had Tieck possessed the determination of Schadow or Christian Daniel Rauch, his work would be more widely known. These showed the five main characters in different forms of Greek dress, the royal figures, the priestess, the old man, each in a symbolic colour relating to rank and status. Of course it is but one further example of those classicizing adaptations for which in the eighteenth century the English, the Italians, the French—and now the Germans—had such a weakness and in which those Schlegel uncles, Johann Elias and Johann Heinrich, had had a minor part, a footnote in the family chronicle.

As for neo-classical dramas, the Romantic generation felt no inhibitions: He could hardly conceal his dismay that Goethe had translated Voltaire and was having him staged in Weimar, in order to train his actors in proper declamation and harmonious unity of movement, the kind of thing that Schlegel himself so admired in Friederike Unzelmann in Berlin. Schlegel did not wish to come over as a mere professor passing on insights, a kind of Euripides at the lectern, if one will. The two forums of public performance, the stage and the rostrum, therefore complemented each other. Like Goethe, Schlegel has no chorus, but Ion sings a song the music by Johann Friedrich Reichardt to be accompanied by that most un-Greek of instruments, the pianoforte.

The style was uniformly elevated, reinforced by the use of masks. He was therefore not present when it was duly performed on 2 January Even Schiller attended, despite his perennial illness. True, the great Weimar actress Karoline Jagemann was praised in the title role. There were however elements in the audience inimical to both Goethe and Schlegel. These centred on Kotzebue, and they planned mischief. There were titters and whisperings, then jeers. So strong was the anti-Goethe and anti-Romantic faction in both Weimar and Berlin that Schlegel wished to preserve his anonymity, at least until the play was performed in Berlin.

Friedrich Schlegel unwisely told Dorothea, and then the secret was out. Hearing of this, Goethe confronted Bertuch, threatening to go to the duke with his resignation as director of the court theatre if he proceeded. It was remarkable what one could achieve if one was the major name in a minor ducal residence. Iffland had shown far less enthusiasm for the play than Goethe. He did nevertheless have it performed twice in May, taking himself the role of Xuthus, with the celebrated Friederike Unzelmann in the title role. Nor could the book edition of rescue its reputation; printing the play in his poetic works in did not help either.

Ion remained a dismal flop. It is fair to say that in this intervening period those Romantics still actively involved were subjected to a barrage of polemics—lampoons, parodies, caricatures—that threatened to consume their energies. Ludwig Tieck had actually withdrawn from Berlin to Dresden and then to remotest Ziebingen partially to escape from this tiresome business. Friedrich Schlegel had not helped matters by persuading Goethe to have his tragedy Alarcos performed in Weimar in April, There were scenes similar to the Ion fiasco, Goethe as then prompted to Olympian pronouncements.

There are those who defend Alarcos in preference to Ion , but the choice is essentially one between two evils. The Weimar audience took itself less seriously than its authors. The duke had had a good laugh. Were one even to list the titles of all the anti-Romantic ephemera and squibs many of them damp from to one would fill several pages. His links with the English literary scene enabled him to achieve an even wider circle of dissemination.

The artists involved were no Gillrays or Rowlandsons, nor would German censorship have permitted such excesses. On Parnassus itself Kotzebue, modishly dressed in the new pantalon , is wielding a flail in defence. But Die neuere Aesthetik [The New Aesthetics] is altogether more entertaining, not least for having affinities with a French carnival print.

These engravings have maintained their wit, which cannot be said for the other polemical ephemera of the period. The Romantics could not respond in kind. Courtesy of Wallstein Verlag, image in the public domain. Herausgegeben von Friedrich Schlegel Frankfurt am Main, , Frontispiece and title page.

As said, by late , Friedrich and Dorothea were in Paris. It was in some measure a parting of the ways for the two brothers. Of course there were enough protestations of solidarity: Im Herbst [To Friedrich Schlegel. In the Autumn of ], but not published until when the brothers were together for a brief time in Vienna, seemed to suggest a common purpose, a conjoint effort, but with a division of labour.

The poetic images speak of one brother Friedrich putting down roots, steering the course, delving in the innermost parts of the earth, the other August Wilhelm as rising sap, trimming the sails, tending the products of the soil. Both, in the terms of the poem, would return to their homeland to enjoy the fruits of their labours. It was not to be. Does this poem not confirm what so many have since maintained: These are ultimately sterile debates, and above all they do not reflect what the brothers thought.

In an image reminiscent of Goethe, he saw himself as the unruly element, the wild stream, his brother the broad reflecting surface of the lake into which it flows. Needing money and seeing publishers somewhat grandly as mere commodity suppliers, he harried Wilmans for cash on the nail. Alexander Hamilton, a Scotsman formerly in the employ of the East India Company and caught by the accident of war in Paris, was teaching him Sanskrit.

Would August Wilhelm not join them? Of course money was the problem. Were someone to give him a thousand francs per annum for two or three years, all would be well. These three young gentlemen were receiving private lectures from Schlegel on the history of literature and art and paying well , balancing in some respect the public lecture course that August Wilhelm was delivering in Berlin.

There was of course nothing new in Germans coming to terms with themselves and their culture in a great foreign city, be it Rome or London or Paris. Already a cohort loosely associated with the Romantic circle had been to Paris: Berlin, where his brother was lecturing, was, despite being a major city, only A capital, not THE capital. First, there was the theme of loss that formed the immediate historical background to Europa. France, with Paris as its centre, was a nation forged by the French Revolution. Germany by contrast, lay in ruin: The emphasis was therefore on Europe, but on the Europe that once was.

In the important introductory section, Friedrich recorded his real and symbolic journey from Berlin to Paris. The subsequent interruptions and losses of continuity, whether caused by the downfall of the old Holy Roman Empire or by the Reformation, or the much-hated Enlightenment and its child, the French Revolution, had left the Germans with a past and its poetry and painting, an uncertain present, and an even more dubious future.

The tone was also aggressive, adversarial and triumphant. The one-sided deference to Goethe was now a thing of the past, and there was much in Europa that Goethe would find unappealing Schiller, predictably, was mentioned just once. Europa was nevertheless also a prophetic text: Cultural and artistic manifestations—in France or Germany—that did not measure up to these standards were to be exposed and identified.

It was to him that Friedrich wrote, urging the widest possible distribution of Europa: There, his discussion of the theories of the origin of language was intended to merge into an account of the human urge for rhythm and poetry and the different manifestations, historical and cultural, that these may take. In the ancient world prosody, metre, and verse were kept severely distinct: Whereas the first part of the periodical had contained a generally upbeat account by Friedrich, simply called Literatur , essentially setting out the achievements in poetry, philosophy and science of the Romantic school not forgetting Goethe or even Schiller , August Wilhelm offered a tabula rasa of the century that had so recently ended.

Apart from a few notable exceptions—and they, Winckelmann, Lessing, Hemsterhuis and Goethe, were very few indeed—Schlegel found no modern literature to speak of and—not surprisingly—no satisfactory national traditions of poetry or criticism. But like Friedrich, August Wilhelm also perceived signs of regenerating processes, mostly among the like-minded Romantic poets to whom he belonged.

The context was important: Spain had what many other literatures French and German among them no longer had: But it is also true to say that no other single work by Schlegel went through so many later editions but with different publishers , including three different Viennese pirates. Not for long, as the story of their slightly stormy relationship was to show. It did not sell well although Schlegel received over talers for it , and the whole enterprise ended in acrimony. This was almost the last area in which their interests fully coincided before irreconcilable differences obtruded.

Goethe was delighted, amazed; Schiller, despite his dislike of Schlegel, similarly. Goethe, the Weimar theatre director, immediately saw possibilities here: There were even fragments of a religious drama in the Calderonian style. There were to be later recantations notably by Tieck himself. The genie was however well and truly out of the bottle, and the mode for Calderonian drama in the nineteenth century stems from this generation.

For Schlegel, the chance of showing his mastery of rhyming verse was too good to be missed: Public lectures were a source of emolument, and an independent writer and scholar had to be both astute and versatile. With Berlin still without a university, and with few German universities situated in large towns, there was a need for this form of public discourse. There was an international aspect to this desire for public lectures. They coincided with his last burst of poetic writing, up to , when he was still seeking to demonstrate an undiminished belief in his own poetic powers or his powers of versification , whether in original form or in translation.

When they heard the section on sculpture in the first series, the audience might know that the lecturer had also reviewed the latest art exhibition in Berlin and had discussed the respective merits of Schadow and Friedrich Tieck. All this is by way of saying that the Berlin Lectures should ideally be read as a continuum with Die Horen , the Athenaeum and, to some extent, the Jena lectures, for these are often the spoken or unspoken authorities to which he refers.

They stand for attitudes that he presupposed even as the audience changed from students in Jena, who were supposed to be learning something, to a Berlin monde , generally receptive to literature and culture, but who wanted their instruction admixed with a little pleasure. From the Berlin cycle he selected only relatively small extracts for publication, proof that they were in his eyes not yet ready for wider distribution.

Their inner relationship with the later series in Vienna is complex and will occupy us in due course. In some cases—the fine arts are one—he went on to frame things more systematically in a different context. In others—Dante for instance—different and more pressing needs crowded in and caused a project to be left effectively in an abandoned state.

Yet we also see him moving away from this eurocentric view and seeking increasingly to accommodate Sanskrit into his general scheme of things. These readings—we unfortunately no longer have all of his versions — were a concession to a more popular, non-academic style. Unlike the Vienna cycle of , which were followed almost immediately by publication and translation into French and English , the Berlin Lectures had their greatest effect on those who were actually there.

This could apply even to seminal sections, like his remarks on the Middle Ages: Antiquarian endeavours by others, too, played their part in evoking and rediscovering this past poetic age, its magic and charm and its occasional barbarities. Then there are nearly two decades of silence on the subject until he starts corresponding with Wilhelm von Humboldt in the s. Sometimes the emphasis in Berlin is different from what went before. His successive remarks on Dante in the s had been a semi-biographical account, then translations in extract mainly from Inferno , with his remarks in the Athenaeum tending more towards the religious content.

Aristophanes, deftly characterised in the Parny review in the Athenaeum , but perfunctorily dealt with in Berlin, would similarly have to wait until Vienna for a fuller treatment. With his accustomed meticulousness, Schlegel planned his four lecture cycles, three in public and one in private, well in advance.

These were not idle considerations, for Schlegel went to considerable pains to make his offerings rather better than those of some professor or other from a Gymnasium or academy. Caroline said in jest that the queen herself might have come had the price expensive enough been double! We hear of two Polish counts. The publisher Reimer attended. Schlegel sent a transcript of his first lecture cycle to Schelling in Jena, who used it for his own lectures on the philosophy of art in No-one would have expected absolute originality from his remarks his section on music is largely taken from Rousseau, for instance.

Still, it is not too fanciful to imagine some of those present having implanted in them the first germ of their later avocations and professions of political faith: Two young men may even have been confirmed in their later literary careers: The more academically inclined were also catered for.

Readers of the writings of the Romantics would be aware that Fichte, Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, Schelling were aiming at an encyclopaedic encompassment of knowledge. There were of course differences.

Browse by Subjects (Propylaeum)

Schlegel is concerned that theory what should be is always linked with history what was. It is history that imposes a system on the chaos of individual manifestations. Above all, poetry—the real subject of these lectures—cannot exist unless language and imagination come together in mythology, that state where reality is suspended and human intuition recreates a new unity of nature and mind, a sense of the essential and ultimate truths of human existence.

Without mythology—and each lecture cycle states this categorically—there can be no poetry. The Greeks had it, the Middle Ages knew it, we must recapture it through the creative imagination in poetry. For poetry in its true sense brings together in a synthesis philosophy, moral awareness and religion. There were clear examples to be cited and distinctions to be made.

When he spoke of the pure and ultimate forms of art, unattainable in imitation, he invoked the ancient world of the Greeks, their language showing the highest development, their mythology predicated on the noblest ideals of humanity. Their art forms had each a distinct purpose, without admixture or contamination. It is the statement that comes near the end of the first cycle, before it abruptly ends, and it is one that Schlegel develops into a principle in his Vienna Lectures. All was not lost: Here Schlegel breaks off and launches into that philippic on modern German literature, a version of which was to feature so prominently in Europa.

One can only guess at the motives behind the scission of his lecture course into two disjunct sections. It was time to tell some home truths, to set out positions, to distinguish the excellent from the mediocre. But Schlegel also reminded his hearers that there were, and always had been, higher universal principles of renewal, the phoenix arising from the ashes, ebb and flow, expansion and contraction, and that is why he could end this section with the names of Winckelmann, Lessing, Hemsterhuis, and Goethe. It should not be forgotten that he was also reading out extracts in translation to his audience, not all of whom would be conversant with Greek.

Thus his relatively short section on Aeschylus presupposes his quoting aloud of a passage from the Eumenides. When explicating Greek metres, he could read his own examples. He had of course already stated unequivocally in the previous cycle that the Greeks were unsurpassable, so that when he went through their achievement, genre by genre, and compared it with what had come since, no further elucidation was necessary. By excluding oratory, rhetoric and historiography, he may have been unfair to the Romans. Only Horace and Propertius emerge really unscathed.

By contrast, he had praise for their didactic poetry, but of course he was himself a practitioner of the genre. There was little hope for Virgil, not to speak of later aberrations like Milton or Der Messias. Tragedy is based on the conflict of these principles, but—here again the recreator of Ion speaks—it need not end in unhappiness. The essentials were, however, there. Greek mythology expressed the force of higher necessity; it involved human sacrifice; its beginnings were darkly orgiastic.

It was this mythology that informed Greek tragedy, in conflict with human striving. The section on Sophocles makes it clear where his preferences in tragedy lie. The renewer of Ion does not see only starkness and bleakness. The brief survey of modern comedy that follows mentions the Spaniards briefly, without a word on Shakespeare: The things that he was doing as a sideline to the lectures now found their way into his general definition of Romanticism in the preamble of Romantic poetry arose out of the fusion of the Romance and the Germanic, the interaction of the North and South pagan and Christian, if one will.

It reflected his interest in both the Nordic and Germanic and the southern Romance. His correspondence with Tieck in these Berlin years speaks of studies of the Nibelungenlied —Tieck was preparing an edition—and the need to procure copies of Icelandic sagas for comparison and collation, or of the Latin Waltharius epic. His remarks on the Nibelungenlied , kept accessible to the needs of the audience, were to be backed up privately by a battery of notes and collations towards the establishment of a definitive text.

It was yet another project that was destined eventually to fall by the wayside. Rather it is disjunct and often repetitive, overlapping with earlier sections. Romantic poetry did not emerge as some gathered, phalanx-like entity, somemasswith but a few national divergences. Its terms of reference were still very wide. It encompassed the Middle Ages. That was itself a period of time that extended from the migrations and Late Latin until in Germany at least the late sixteenth century.

It was subject to all manner of incursions and influences and coincidences. Genres, like the romance and the chap book, extended beyond any linguistic barriers. The Middle Ages, as Schlegel conceived them, were the synthesis of many disparate forces. They were Christian, chivalrous, monastic. The Crusades brought in the Orient. Hin nach Hellas schaue das Volk, und weinend und dankend Sanftige sich in Erinnerungen der stolze Triimiphtag.

Aber bliihet indess, bis unsre Friichte beginnen, Bliiht, ihr Garten Joniens! Aber du, unsterblich, wenn auch der Grie- chengesang schon Dich nicht feiert, wie sonst, aus deinen Woogen, o Meergott! Tone mir in die Seele noch oft, dass iiber den Wassem Furchtlosrege der Geist, dem Schwimmer gleich, in der Starken Frischem Gliike sich iib', und die Gottersprache, das Wechseln Und das Werden versteh', und wenn die reissende Zeit mir Zu gewaltig das Haupt ergreifft und die Noth und das Irrsaal Unter Sterblichen mir mein sterblich Leben erschiittert, Lass der Stille mich dann in deiner Tiefe gedenken.

Cold the Walls stand And wordless, in the wind The weathercocks are rattling. And all around, from sanctum to sanctum. Runs the refreshing, the now-melodious stream, Till the house and its cold blue shadows. And a marveling seized The souls of the smitten and night Was over the eyes of the best. For man can do much; he compels with his art The flood and the rock and the fury of fire; Man is puffed up and heeds not The sword, but many a mighty one Lies there struck down by the gods, and almost Resembles the hunted— which, Urged by sweet youth.

Roams unrestingly over the mountains and feels Its strength in the noonday heat. But when holy Twilight descends with the dancing zephyrs, and. With the cooler ray, the spirit of joy Comes to the soulful earth, then it succumbs. Unaccustomed to beauty, and slimibers in wakeful sleep Before the approach of the stars. For with many The hght faded out of their eyes at the sight of the friendly, The god-sent gifts from Ionia, From burning Arabia; but never Once did the soul of those sleepers Rejoice at the lovable teaching, the lordly psalms, though a few Watched.

And often they journeyed Contented among you, you dwellers in beautiful cities. Sat at the contests, the games where the hero invisibly. Secretly sat as of old with the poets. Watching the wrestlers and smilingly praising, Himself full of praise, the gravely indolent children. O what a ceaseless loving it was and still is! For we still, though divided, think of each other. Dwellers upon the glorious isthmus.

But if you And this must be said , if you ancients Spoke not the Word, whence should it come? So we name you in all your Holy necessity, Naturel from whom, as though stepping Fresh from the bath. The limbs of the god-bom appear. Yet almost we live like the orphans. All is as it was, perhaps— only that tenderness Comes not again, though young lovers, Wistful of childhood, are strangers no more in the house.

Threefold they live like the first Sons of the morning. And faith was not given Vainly into our hearts; Not us, but you also it safeguards, you Children of destiny, truly, and there Where the sanctities are, the arms of the Word Which you left for us fumblers and gropers at your de- parture. There we shall find you, good spirits; and often. When the holy vapor swirls round us, We marvel and know not how to unriddle it. You spice our breath with your nectar And then we exult or more often we fall Darkly to brooding— for he whom you love overmuch Rnoweth no rest until he be one of you.

Therefore, good spirits, encircle me hghtly, Let me remain, for much still remains to be sung. Thus, too, with all things. Denn manchen erlosch Das Augenlicht schon vor den gottlichgesendeten Gaben, Den freundlichen, die aus lonien uns, Auch aus Arabia kamen, und froh ward Der teuern Lehr und auch der holden Gesange I Die Seele jemer Entschlafenen nie, Doch einige wachten.

Und sie wandelten oft Zufrieden unter euch, ihr Biirger schoner Stadte, I Beim Kampfspiel, wo sonst unsichtbar der Heros Ge- heim bei Dichtern sass, die Ringer schaut' und lachelnd Pries, der gepriesene, die miissigernsten Kinder. Ein unaufhorlich Lie- ben wars und ists. Aber wenn ihr, Und dies ist zu sagen, Ihr Alten all, nicht sagtet, woher Wir nennen dich: Zwar gehn wir fast, wie die Waisen; Wohl ists, wie sonst, nur jene Pf lege nicht wieder; Doch Jiinglinge, der Kindheit gedenk, Im Hause sind auch diese nicht fremde.

Sie leben dreifach, eben wie auch Die ersten Sohne des Himmels. Und nicht umsonst ward uns In die Seele die Treue gegeben. Nicht uns, auch Eures bewahrt sie, [ Und bei den Heiligtiimern, den Waffen des Worts, I Die scheidend ihr den Ungeschickteren uns, Ihr Schicksals- sohne, zuriickgelassen, Ihr guten Geister, da seid ihr auch, Oftmals, wenn einen dann die heilige Wolk umschwebt, Da staunen wir und wissens nioht zu deuten.

Ihr aber wiirzt mit Nektar uns den Othem Und dann frohlocken wir oft oder es bef aUt uns Ein Sinnen, wenn ihr aber einen zu sehr liebt, Er ruht nicht, bis er euer einer geworden. Darum, ihr Giitigenl umgebet mich leicht, Damit ich bleiben moge, denn noch ist manches zu singen, Jetzt aber endiget, selig- weinend, Wie eine Sage der Liebe, Mir der Gesang, und so auch ist er Mir, mit Erroten, Erblassen, Von Anfang her ge- gangen.

Doch Alles geht so. There it is that on feast days go The swarthy women Upon silken ground, At the time of March When night is equal with day. And over slow passes. Heavy with golden dreams, Drift wild airs bringing sleep. But let one hand me, Full of the dark hght. That I might rest; for sweet Sleep would be, under shadows. It is not good Soulless to be, with mortal Thoughts.

Yet good Is converse, and to say The heart's meaning, to hear much Of days of love, And events, the doing of deeds. But where are the friends? Bellarmin With the companion? Many a one Bears shyness, timid to go to the source; The beginning of riches is truly In the sea. They, the seafarers, Like painters, assemble The beautiful of the earth, and do not disdain Winged war, and suffer To live alone, yearlong, under The leafless mast, where the night is not lit up With the glow-lamps of the town's feast days.

Nor the playing of strings nor innate dancing. The river goes out. The sea, though, Takes and gives recollection, And love, too, fixes the eyes intently. What endures, however, poets create. Nicht ist es gut Seellos von sterb- lichen Gedanken zu seyn. Wo aber sind die Freunde? Bellarmin Mit dem Gefahrten?

Was bleibet aber, stiften die Dichter. But where danger is, there Arises salvation also. In darkness dwell The eagles, and fearless across the abyss Go the sons of the Alps On hghtly built bridges. Therefore, since all round are upheaped The summits of time. And those that dwell nearest in love Must languish on uttermost mountains, Give us then innocent water, pinions give us, to pass Over with constant minds and again return.

So I spoke, when swifter Than I had fancied, and far. Whither I never had thought to come, A Genius bore me away From my house. In the twilight The shadowy woods darkened as I went And the yearning brooks of my home; No more did I know these lands. Yet soon in fresh radiance. Mysterious In the golden smoke. Swiftly sprung up With the tread of the sun, Asia bloomed out before me.

But high in the light Blossoms the silver snow, And, witness to life everlasting. On attainless walls The immemorial ivy grows, and upborne Upon living columns of cedars and laurels Are the solemn, The divinely built palaces. But about Asia's portals. Running hither and thither In hazardous wastes of sea Ripple shadowless ways enough, Yet the seaman knoweth the isles. Yet bountiful In the needier house Is she nonetheless. And when out of shipwreck or in Lament for his home Or the departed friend.

One of the strangers Draws near to her, she hears it with joy, And her children. The voices of the warm glade And the rock-dwelling breezes And the rocks too, they hear him, and lovingly The echo rings out to the lament of the man. And the watchful man viewed well The face of the god As, at the mystery of the vine. They sat together, at the hour of the banquet, And quietly prescient in his great soul The Lord spake death and the last love; For never enough Had he of words for telling of kindness At that time, and gladdening.

When he saw it, the wrath of the world. For all things are good. Of that There were much to be said. And the friends saw How he gazed forth victorious, The most joyful of all, at the last. Yet they mourned, as now It was grown evening, astounded, For in their souls the men weighed A mighty decision, but they loved Life under the sun, and they would not leave The face of the Lord and their homeland. Inwrought was that As fire in the iron, and at their side Went the shadow of the Beloved. Therefore he sent them The Spirit, and the house trembled. And the storm of God Rolled far-thundering over their fateful heads.

Where brooding Were gathered the heroes of death Now as he, in departure, Once more appeared before them. No good Had it been later, cleaving abruptly And truthless, the work of man, and it was joy From now on To dwell in loving night and maintain Steadfast in simple eyes Abysses of wisdom. And deep On the mountains too Living images flourish. Yet it is dreadful how far and wide God endlessly scatters the living. Dreadful it is to leave The face of dear friends and to wander Far over the mountains alone.

When the Heavenly Spirit, Known before in communion, Was single in meaning; and though it was never foretold them, Yet by their very Hair did it seize them. As, hastening away into the distance, God of a sudden looked back, and conjuring Him to remain, naming the evil, Bounden henceforth as with golden cords.

They gave one another their hands. It is the cast of the Sower, as he seizes The wheat with his spade And flings across to the clear grain. Driving it over the threshing floor. The husks fall at his feet, But in the end cometh the com. And no evil it is if something Is lost and the living sound Fades from our speech, For heavenly labor is like to our own. The Highest would not have AH at one time.

So long as the pit bear iron. And Etna ghttering resin, So I have riches To fashion an image and see in the semblance Christ as he had been.

But when one spurred himself on, And sadly speaking on the way where I was weaponless. Overpowered me, so that I marveled and an impostor Would be moulding an image of God- Visible in anger did I once See the sovereigns of heaven. Not that I were To become anything, but to learn. Kindly they are, but most Hateful to them as long as they reign Is falsehood, as there dwells Himianity then no more among men. For they do not reign, rather Fate Reigns more immortally. And when ascends higher The heavenly pageant of triumph. The exulting Son of the Most High, Like to the sun itself, is named by the mighty An emblem, and here is the staff Of song signaling down.

For nothing is common. It wakens the dead Who are not yet caught by the rawness of death. But many shy eyes Wait to behold the Hght. They would not Blossom forth in the sharp radiance. Though the golden bridle guideth their courage. But when, As from swelHng eyebrows Forgetful of the world. Quietly shining strength falls From the Holy Scriptures, Rejoicing in grace They yield themselves to calm vision. Quiet is his sign In the thimderous sky.

And One stands beneath it His life long. For Christ Hves yet. But the heroes, his sons. All are come and the Holy Scriptures From him, and the deeds of the earth Have illumined the hghtning till now, A contest unwaning. But he is there.

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For his works Are known to him from everlasting. Too long, too long already Has the glory of the Blessed been viewless. For each of the Blessed demand sacrifice. Yet if one were passed over Ne'er did it bring about good. We have served the earth our mother And of late we have served The light of the sim Unwittingly, but the Father who rules over all Loves best that the constant Letter be fostered, And enduring existence Interpreted well.

With this is accordant The song of my people. Wo aber Gefahr ist, wachst I Das Rettende auch. So sprach ich, da entfiihrte Mich schneller, denn ich vermutet I Und weit, wohin ich nimmer Zu kommen gedacht, ein Genius mich Vom eigenen Haus.

»For Birds‘ Sake«

Denn alles ist gut. Vieles ware Zu sagen davon. Und es griinen Tief an den Bergen auch lebendige Bilder. Doch furchtbar ist, wie da und dort Unendlich hin zerstreut das Lebende Gott. Nicht alles will der Hochste zumal. Zwar Eisen traget der Schacht, Und glii- hende Harze der Atna, So hatt ich Reichtum, Ein Bild zu bil- den, und ahnlich Zu schaun, wie er gewesen, den Christ, Wenn aber einer spornte sich selbst, Und traurig redend, un- terweges, da ich wehrlos ware, Mich iiberfiele, dass ich staunt und von dem Gotte Das Bild nachahmen mocht ein Knecht— Im Zome sichtbar sah' ich einmal Des Himmels Herm, nicht, dass ich sein soUt etwas, sondern Zu lernen.

Giitig sind sie, ihr Verhasstestes aber ist, Solange sie herrschen, das Falsche, und es gilt I Dann Menschliches unter Menschen nicht mehr. Denn sie nicht walten, es waltet aber Unsterblicher Schicksal und es wandelt ihr Werk Von selbst und eilend geht es zu Ende. Die Toten wecket Er auf, die noch getangen nicht Vom Rohen sind. Es warten aber Der scheuen Augen viele Zu schauen das Licht. Still ist sein Zei- chen I Am donnernden Himmel. Und Einer stehet daninter Sein Leben lang. Denn noch lebt Christus. Er ist aber dabei. Denn seine Werke sind Ihm alle bewusst von jeher.

Zu lang, zu lang schon ist Die Ehre der Himmlischen unsicht- bar. Dem f olgt deutscher Gesang. Ripened the fruit, in fire cast, baked And tried on the earth, and it is the law That all go back into it, like snakes, Prophetic, dreaming on The hills of the heavens. And there is so much Like a burden Of logs on the shoulders That has to be borne. Though the roads Are not right. For discrepant, As horses, go the tethered Elements and the immemorial Laws of the earth.

And ever A longing strains after the fetterless. But there is so much That has to be borne. And one must be true. Let us look not before, though, Nor after. May we be rocked, rather, as A boat is cradled at sea. Aber bos sind Die Pfade. Und immer Ins Ungebundene gehet eine Sehnsucht. Vieles aber ist Zu behalten. Und Noth die Treue. Vorwarts aber und riikwarts woUen wir [ Nicht sehn. Uns wiegen lassen, wie Auf schwankem Kahne der See. Voices calmly wending filled And aired is the ancient Bliss-wont hall; fragrant above green carpets floats The happy cloud, stand gleaming wide, Of ripest fruit abundant, and of golden-wreathed bowls.

Well meted out, resplendent rows Uprising here and there aside of the Smoothed ground, the tables. For, coming from afar Hither, at eventide, Loving guests have bid themselves. Dawn fills my eyes. Well-nigh I deem This celebration's prince. Him, to behold That smiles upon a day's great labor: Although you will deny your strangeness And, wearied by your glorious course, Cast down your eyes, forgotten, softly shaded. And will take on a friendly shape, O Widely Known, Yet bends the knees your awe.

Nothing outstrips you; But this I know: Wisdom may show me many a thing, but Where a god enters as well A more luminous day wiU break. Yet not xmheralded he comes: And he whom neither flame nor flood deterred Need not be vainly startled by this stillness, now That neither man nor spirit yields to order. Downstream to sleep, at the sounding of peace. But, days endeared of innocence, you also bring Today, O loved ones, the celebration, and The spirit blossoms in this quiet round; And hasten forth I must, although, O friends, my locks are gray, an eternal youth Preparing the wreaths for the feast.

And many a one I would gladly ask; but you. Concerned, stem but friendly, for mankind, who Far off beneath Syrian palms, Close by that city, would sit by the well: The com fields mstled, quietly the cool Air breathed in the shade of the sacred mountains. So did loving friends shade you, Like faithful clouds tempering Your rays cast toward man. A mortal doom, amidst your words, was to fold A darker shade around you, dreadful fate. So transient Is what Heaven proffers; but not in vain therefore, For but lightly a god will touch, knowing What are our limits, the human abode.

Nor can we reckon the moment. Then, too, Hcense may walk unleashed, Blasphemers shall reach the holy spot From distant parts, exercising their frenzy To strike at a fate; yet gratitude Does not come straight in the wake of divine gifts: It must be won through ordeal. Had not the giver been thrifty always, Surely the sacred treasures of our hearth Would have turned all to destruction. Even so, much was granted us from above. And the shores, and the floods of the sea. Before your eyes the stars Teach you, who shall never become their equal.

Of the eternally living, however. Whence joy flows, and song, One came, a son, valiantly calm. And now we behold him. Knowing his father, now That, to hold his celebration. The high Spirit of the World Has descended toward us. Too great he was to be the lord of ages; Too far his realm to be ever exhausted. Even so, one day a god may choose labor To be like the mortals, sharing their fate.

For it is decreed that all shall recognize each other. And language hold sway once silence has returned. Yet where the Spirit liveth we venture forth. Contending for the best. Thus I judge it best —When the painter has at last achieved his likeness And stepped, masterful, from his workshop, lord of love only— That equity reign All the way from earth to heaven. Man has experienced much since the dawn. Ever since speech began, and mutual notice; But song follows apace.

And the vision of time, divinely unfolding. Sign of the Spirit, lies before us, bonds of aUiance Fastening his might to the powers of nature. Not him alone, but the unborn generations This token proves: Yet as a final token, O holy powers, This very day of celebration testifies For you, a mark of love.

You, unforgettable one, at time's decline, Our celebration's youthful prince. No sooner wiU This race lie down imtil You, promised ones, each single one Of you, immortal beings, to pronounce Your heaven's bounties, have arrived In our house. Fragrant breezes Are your herald. The steaming downs announce you And the ground, still resounding with tempests. Now the cheek is refreshed with hope And in front of the opened bouse The mother sits with her child. Regarding this utter peace. And fewer seem the agonies. A harbinger has caught the soul, A promise sent, of golden light. Keeping the aged from dying.

Well wrought from above are The savors of life. For all is pleasing now, But most of all Simphcity: This, nothing else, is the shape of gods. You grieved, O Mother, like The Honess when. Nature, You lost your children. Too eagerly loving, you suffered their loss. When robbed of them by a foe Whom you almost took for your own son, A satyr mingling with gods. Thus you did much of your building And buried many a thing.

For you are hated by those whom You, powerful beyond time. Had drawn forth into hght. Now you know and, knowing, relax: For gladly rests down below. So it may ripen, the anxiously caring world. Denn feme kommend haben Hieher, zur Abendstunde, Sich liebende Gaste beschieden. Nichts vor dir, [ Nur Fines weiss ich, Sterbliches bist du nicht. Ein Weiser mag mir manches erhellen; wo aber Ein Gott auch noch erscheint, Da ist doch andere Klarheit. Das ist, sie horen das Werk, Langst vorbereitend, von Morgen nach Abend, jetzt erst, Denn un- ermesslich brausst, in der Tief e verhallend, Des Donnerers Echo, das tausendjahrige Wetter, Zu schlaf en, iibertont von Friedens- lauten, hinunter.

Und manchen mocht' ich laden, aber o du, Der freundlichemst den Menschen zugethan, Dort unter syrischer Pahne, Wo nahe lag die Stadt, am Brunnen geme war; Das Komf eld rauschte rings, still athmete die Kiihlung Vom Schatten des geweihetenGebirges; I Und die lieben Freunde, das treue Gewolk, Umschatteten dich auch, damit der heiligkiihne Durch Wildniss mild dein Straal zu Menschen kam, o JiinglingI Ach' aber dunkler umschattete, mit- ten im Wort, dich I Furchtbarentscheidend ein todtlich Verhang- nis. So ist schnell Verganglich alles Himmlische; aber umsonst nicht; Denn schonend riihrt des Maases allzeit kundig Nur einen Augenblick die Wohnimgen der Menschen Ein Gott an, imver- selm, und keiner weiss es, wenn?

Auch dart alsdann das Freche driiber gehn Und kommen muss zum heilgen Ort das Wilde Von Enden fern, iibt rauhbetastend den Wahn, Und trif t daran ein Schicksal, aber Dank, Nie folgt der gleich hemach dem gott- gegebenen Geschenke; I Tiefpriif end ist es zu f assen. Des Gottlichen aber empfiengen wir Doch viel. Und es lehret Gestim dich, das Vor Augen dir ist, doch nimnier kannst du ihm gleichen.

Denn langst war der zum Herm der Zeit zu gross Und weit aus reichte sein Feld; wann hats ihn aber erschopfet? Einmal mag aber ein Gott auch Tagewerk erwahlen, Gleich sterblichen und theilen alles Schicksal. Schicksalgesetz ist diss, dass alle sich erfahren, Dass, wenn die Stille kehrt, auch eine Sprache sei. I Wo aber wirkt der Geist, sind auch wir mit, und streiten, Was wohl das Beste sei. So diinkt mir jezt das Beste, Wenn nun vollendet sein Bild und fertig ist der Meister, Und selbst ver- klart davon aus seiner Werkstatt tritt, Der stille Gott der Zeit und nur der Liebe Gesez Das schonausgleichende gilt von hier an bis zum Himmel.

Und das Zeitbild, das der grosse Geist entfaltet, Ein Zeichen liegts vor uns, das zwischen ihm und andem Ein Biindnis zwi- schen ihm und andem Machten ist. Nicht er allein, die Uner- zeugten, Ew'gen Sind kennbar alle daran, gleichwie auch an den Pflanzen Zulezt ist aber doch, ihr heiligen Machte, fiir euch Das Liebeszeichen, das Zeugnis Dass ihrs noch seiet, der Festtag.

So hast du manches gebaut, Und manches begraben, Denn es hasst dich, was Du, vor der Zeit Allkraftige, zum Lichte gezogen. Nun kennest, nun lassest du diss; I Denn gerne fiihllos ruht, Bis dass es reift, furchtsam- geschaftiges drunten. What here we are, far oflF a god amends With harmonies, everlasting recompense, and peace. For a while, especially during his sojourn in Jena, he was subjected to Schiller's influence. In Leipzig he met Friedrich Schlegel and became deeply attached to him and his new ideas.

After his graduation from the Wit- tenberg law school , he moved to Tennstedt, in Thuringia, to train for a pubHc post and met there in the thirteen-year-old Sophie von Kiihn with whom he fell in love. At her death the poet was imconsolable, and out of his grief sprang his Hymns to the Night in which he expressed a mystical death wish, granted soon there- after: In addition to the Hymns, considered a land- mark in the history of German poetry, Novahs wrote two lyrical novels— The Novices of Sais and Henry of Ofter- dingen, wherein the symboHc 'l lue flower" of the Roman- tics first blossomed— an essay, "Christianity or Europe," in which he glorified the medieval spirit, and finally his Spir- itual SongSy inspired by the rituals and festivals of the church and praising the Virgin Mary as the great symbol of the Infinite.

When numbers, figures, no more hold the key To solve the living creatures' mystery, When those who kiss and sing have knowledge more Than all the deeply learned scholars' store. And when in poesy and faerie Men read the world's eternal story, Then will a secret word obhge to flee All of this mad perversity. Gifted with feehng, Bestows not his love On the all-joyful light? As life's inmost soul It is breathed By the giant world Of restless stars Who swim in its blue ocean. By the sparkling stone, The peaceful plant.

By the creatures' Many-fashioned Ever-moving Hfe. It is breathed by the clouds Many-hued, by the zephyrs. And, above all, By the glorious strangers, With the thoughtful eyes. The swinging gait, And the sounding lips. As a king It summons each power Of terrestrial nature To numberless changes, And alone doth its presence Reveal the full splendor Of earth. Sunk in deep vault; How dreary, forlorn her abode! Deep melancholy Stirs in the chords of the breast.

Far oflF lies the world With its motley of pleasures. Elsewhere doth the Hght Pitch its airy encampment. What if it never returned To its faithful children, To its gardens In its glorious house? Yet what flows so cool. So refreshing, So full of hid tidings To our hearts, And absorbs the soft air Of melancholy? Hast thou too A human heart, O dark Night?

What boldest thou Under thy mantle Which steals unseen Upon my soul, Giving it strength? Thou seemest but fearful- Precious balm Drops from thy hand. From the bundle of poppies. In sweet intoxication Thou unfoldest the soul's heavy wings, And givest us joys Dark, inexpressible. Secret as thou, Joys which are promise of heaven. How joyful and bless'd The departure of day. It is but because Night withdraws those who serve thee That thou sowest In the wide realms of space Shining spheres. To proclaim in the times of thine absence Thine omnipotence, Thy returning again.

More heavenly than those flashing stars In those wide spaces, Seem to us the infinite eyes Which the Night In us opens. Farther see they Than the palest Of that numberless host. They look through the depths Of a love-enfiUed heart Which fills with unspeakable joy A loftier space.

Praise to the world's Queen! To the lofty proclaimer Of holy world, To the nurturer Of blissful love. The Night is here- Rapt away is my soul- Finished the earthly way. Once more art thou mine. I gaze into the depths of thy dark eyes. See naught but love and bhssfulness therein; We sink upon Night's altar. Must ever the morning return? Endeth never the thraldom of earth? Unhallowed aflFairs swallow up The heavenly coming of Night? Will never love's offering bum Eternal and hid? To the light was appointed its time, A time to its watching— But timeless the rule of the Night; Without end the duration of sleep.

Holy Sleepl Bless not too seldom Night's consecrated ones— In this earth's daily round. Only the foolish mistake thee And know of no sleep But the shadows, Which thou in compassion Castest upon us In that twilight Of the true Night. They feel thee not In the golden flood of the grape, In the almond tree's Magic oil, In the brown juice of the poppy. They know not It is thou That hoverest over the breast Of the tender maiden, And makest her bosom a heaven— They guess not That out of old histories Thou comest to meet us.

And bearest the key To the dwellings of the bless'd: A silent messenger Of infinite mysteries. Melancholy flowed into a new unfathomable world; thou, O inspiration of night, slumber of heaven, camest o'er me. All that lay round me softly arose, and above it hovered my unbound, newly bom spirit.

As a dust cloud became the mound; through the cloud I beheld the glorified features of the Be- loved. In her eyes rested eternity. I grasped her hands and my tears became a sparkling indestructible cord. Thousands of years drew away down into the distance as a thunder- storm. On her neck I wept enchanted tears for the new life. That was the first dream in thee. It passed, but its image remained— the eternal, imshakable behef in the heaven of night, and its sim, the Beloved. IV Now know I when the last morning will be— when the Hght will no longer scare away love and the night, when slumber will be eternal and only one inexhaustible dream.

Heavenly weariness deserts me now no more. Long and toilsome was the way to the Holy Sepulchre, and the Cross was heavy. He whose lips have once been moistened by the NOVALIS 61 crystal wave which, unseen by common sight, has its source in the dark womb of the mound at whose foot breaks the earthly tide, he who has stood above upon this boundary of the world, and has looked across into the new land, into the dwelling place of the night— he, of a truth, turns not back to the aflFairs of the world in the land where light holds sway, and eternal unrest makes its home.

Up above he builds himself tabernacles, dwellings of peace, he longs and loves, gazes across, until the most welcome of all hours draws him down into the wells of the foimt. All that is earthly floats on the surface, and is washed down from the heights; but what has become holy through contact of love runs released into hidden ways in yonder realm, where cloudlike it mingles with the slumber-wrapped loved ones.

Still thou awakest The weary to work, O cheerful Light— Thou inspirest me with joyful life. But thou allurest me not From remembering That moss-grown monument. Canst thou show me An ever-true heart? Has thy sun Friendly eyes Which know me? Do thy stars grasp My longing hand And give me in turn A tender pressure? Hast thou bedecked her With color And Hght outhne? Or was it she Who gave to thine adornment Higher and loveher meaning? What delight And what pleasures Offers thy life Which outweigh The enchantments of death?

Doth not all that inspires us Bear the color of night? She beareth thee as a mother. And to her thou dost owe All of thy splendor. Thou wouldst vanish Into thyself, Thou wouldst dissolve Into endless space Did she not hold thee— Not bind thee, So that thou grewest warm. And flaming Begottest the world. Verily I was, ere thou wert. Not yet have they ripened, Those thoughts of the gods. As yet are the traces but few In our age. One day thy clock will depict The ending of time. When thou wilt become As one of us, And full of longing.

Melt away and die. I discern thy removal In wild grief From our home. Thy resistance To the glorious Ancient heaven. In vain is thy fury. Indestructible Stands the Cross, Triumphant banner Of our race. I wander across And every pain Will turn to a pricking Of joy again. Unending life Comes over me, And I look from above Down below upon thee.

Thy brightness fades On that httle hill, A shade is bringing The chaplet cool. Beloved, Of me drink deep. That soon I be wrapped In eternal sleep. I feel death's encroaching. Youth-giving wave, And wait through life's stresses Full stalwart and brave. Over the widespread race Of man There formerly ruled An iron destiny. A dark and heavy band Lay round their Anxious souls. Infinite was the earth, Abode of the gods And their home. Rich in treasures And glorious wonders. Since eternity Stood her mysterious frame.

An ancient giant Supported the blissful world. And the befriended Joyful mankind. The dark blue depths Of the sea Was the womb of a goddess. Heavenly hosts Dwelt in joyful delight In the grottoes of crystal- Trees and brooks, Blossoms and beasts Had human sense; Sweeter tasted the wine. For a god in youthful bloom Gave it to man. The full sheaves Of golden com Were divinely bestowed; The rapturous joys of love A sacred service To heavenly beauty.

Thus was life An eternal festival Of gods and men. Only there was one thought Which frightful to the festive tables trod, And in wild panic fear all hearts enveiled. Here words of counsel even failed each god. Which with sweet comfort could their hearts have filled; Mysterious was this monster's dreadful road, Whose rage no gift, no anxious prayer availed— For it was Death, who this gay banquet scene Broke up in pain and tears and anguish keen.

Forever now from all things separated Which here do stir the heart in sweet delight— From loved ones parted, whom, down here, belated. Vain longings and an endless grief incite— Dull dream the lot to which the dead seemed fated, Unconscious struggling deemed their dreary plight. Broken and shattered was the wave of pleasure Upon the rock of misery without measure. With daring mind, and lofty feeling's zest, Did man embellish that grim mask unkind, A pale wan youth puts out the light to rest, Soft is the end, as harp strings touched by wind, And memory melts in shadow-flood at last: Thus poets eased the need of troubled mind.

Yet still unfathomed stayed eternal night. The solemn symbol of a far-off might. To its end inclined The ancient world. The happy garden Of the youthful race Withered away; Out into freer spaces Strove the full-grown, Unchildhke mankind. Laws arose, And in ideas As in dust and air Fell to pieces The measureless prime Of the thousandfold life. Fled away Were all-powerful faith And fantasy. All-transforming, AU-imiting, Heavenly comrade. Unfriendly blew A cold north wind Over the frozen plains, And the wonderland home Passed away in the ether.

The infinite distance Of heaven Was filled with shining worlds. Into a deeper sanctuary. Into the mind's higher realms. Drew the soul of the world With her powers. There to reign Till the new day Should break. No longer was Hght The abode of the gods. And a heavenly token- Around them they drew The curtain of night. In the midst of mankind.

In a folk Despised above all. Too soon grown ripe, And proudly estranged From the blessed innocence Of youth. Before all others Did the eastern wisdom, Rich flowering, full of foreseeing. Know the approach Of the new age. A star pointed the way To the King's humble cradle. In the name of the far future They paid him homage. With the splendor and perfumes Of the highest wonders of nature. Unfolded the heavenly heart In sohtude To a glowing bosom of love, Turned toward The Father's lofty countenance, And resting on the holy foreboding breast Of the gracious earnest Mother.

With worshiping ardor The prophetic eye Of the blossoming child Looked into future times. Soon the most childhke natures, Wondrously gripped By the almighty love. A strange new life Flowered forth In his presence- Inexhaustible words. Most joyful of tidings. Fell hke sparks Of divine spirit From his gracious lips. Thou art that youthful form our tombs display Standing above them, deep in contemplation, ConsoHng emblem in our darkest day Of higher manhood's joyful new foundation.

What once had sunk us down, to grief a prey. Now draws us thence with longing's sweet elation. In Death was germ of hfe eternal found, Thyself art Death, and first doth make us sound. So that a thousand hearts Inchned themselves to him. And the glad gospel Upward waxed Branching a thousandfold. But yet short time After the singer passed, The precious life Became a sacrifice For the deep fall of man- Young in years he died, Tom away From the loved world, From the weeping Mother, From his friends. The holy mouth Emptied the dark cup Of untold sorrow. In dreadful anguish Drew nigh to him the birth hour Of the new world.

Hard wrestled he with the horrors Of ancient death. Heavy upon him lay The weight of the old world. Once more he gently looked upon the Mother- Then came the loosening hand Of eternal love— And he fell asleep. Few were the days Hung a deep veil Over the roaring sea, over the dark heaving land. Uncounted tears Wept the beloved ones.

Awaked to new godlike glory He ascended to the heights Of the rejuvenated, new-bom world. And the old world Which with him had died. With his own hand he bm'ied In the forsaken cave. And with almighty strength he laid above The stone which thence no power should ever move. Still weep thy loved ones Tears of joy, Tears of emotion. And unending thanks Before thy grave— And ever still With shock of joy See thee ascend. Themselves with thee— See thee with ardor sweet Weep on the Mother's bosom And on the friends' true hearts.

Hasten, filled with longing, Into the Father s arms, Bringing the young Childlike humanity And the inexhaustible draft Of the golden future. The Mother followed thee soon In heavenly tTiim: She was the first In the new home At thy side. Long ages Have flowed by since then. Thousands from pain and grief Draw nigh to thee Full of faith, longing, And fidehty, And rule with thee And the heavenly Virgin In the kingdom of love. And serve in the temple Of the heavenly death. Uplifted is the stone. Mankind is now arisen, We chng to thee alone, And feel no bond of prison. Death to the marriage calls, The lamps are shining steady.

The virgins all are ready, No lack of oil befalls. Far distances are ringing With tidings of thy train! And stars the summons singing With human tongue and strain! To thee, Maria, lifteth Of thousand hearts the plea. Whose hfe in shadow drifteth They long to come to thee. Consumed with bitter pain, This dreary earth-world spuming.

Have turned to thee again. Their aid to us was given When pain and want befell. We join them now in heaven And ever with them dwell. For none with faith who careth On grave need sorely grieve, The treasure that he loveth From him will none bereave. For angels true of heaven His heart in safety keep. His longing grief to leaven Inspireth night his sleep.

Our life with courage ending Eternal life draws near, With inner glow expanding Transfigured sense grows clear. The star-world now is flowing As living golden wine, Its joys on us bestowing, Ourselves as stars shall shine. For love is freely given And partings ne'er may be. The flood of life is driven Like an unbounded sea- Unending night delights us. And all the sim that lights us Is God's own countenance. Within a narrow boat we come And hasten to the heavenly home.

All hail, then, to eternal night, All hail, eternal sleeping, Warmed have we been by daily light. Withered by grief's long weeping. Strange lands no longer joys arouse. We want to reach our Father s house. In this world's hfe what shall we do With love and faith devoted? What should we care about the new? The old is no more noted. Ohl lonely stands he, deeply sore. Whose love reveres the days of yore. The days of yore when, himian sense High flaming, brightly burning. The Father's hand and countenance Mankind was still discerning.

Many of higher senses ripe Resembled still their prototype. The days of yore, when ancient stem Bore many youthful flowers. And children craved the heavenly home Beyond life's anguished hours. And e'en when hfe and pleasure spake Love caused full many a heart to break. The days of yore, when God revealed Himself, young, ardent, glowing; To early death his life he sealed.

Deep love and courage showing. Sparing himself no painful smart, He grew still dearer to our heart. We must repair to heavenly place If we would see those sacred days. What then doth hinder our return? The loved ones long have slumbered, Their grave enfolds our life's concern, With anxious grief we're cumbered.

We have no more to seek down here. The heart wants naught, the world is bare. Eternal and from hidden spring A sweet shower through us streameth; An echo of our grief did ring From distance far, meseemeth; The loved ones have the same desire. And with their longing us inspire. O downward then to Bride so sweetl To Jesus, the Beloved!

A dream doth break our bonds apart. And sinks us on the Father's heart. Abwarts wend ich mich Zu der heiligen, unaussprechlichen Geheimnis- vollen Nacht— Fernab liegt die Welt, Wie versenkt in eine tiefe Gruft, Wie wiist und einsam ihre Stelle! Tiefe Wehmut Weht in den Saiten der Bnist.

I Fernab liegt die Welt Mit ihren bunten Geniissen. Muss immer der Morgen wieder kommen? Endet nie deS Irdi- schen Gewalt? Zusam- men floss die Wehmut in eine neue unergriindUche Welt— du Nachtbegeisterung, Schliunmer des Himmels, kamst iiber mich. Die Gegend hob sich sacht empor— iiber der Gegend schwebte mein entbundner, neugebomer Geist. In ihren Augen ruhte die Ewigkeit— ich fasste ihre Hande, und die Tranen wurden ein funkelndes, unzerreissliches Band. Jahrtausende zogen abwarts in die Feme, wie Ungewitter.

An ihrem Halse weint'ich dem neuen Leben entziickende Tranen— das war der erste Traum in dir. Er zog voriiber, aber sein Abglanz blieb, der ewige, unerschiitterliche Glauben an den Nachthimmel und seine Sonne, die Geliebte. IV Nun weiss ich, wenn der letzte Morgen sein wird— wenn das Licht nicht mehr die Nacht und die Liebe scheucht, wenn der Schlummer ewig, und ein unerschopflicher Traum sein wird. Himmlische Miidigkeit verlasst mich nun nicht wieder. Wessen Mund einmal die kristallene Woge netzte, die, gemeinen Sinnen unsichtbar, quillt in des Hiigels dunkelm Schoos, an dessen Fuss die irdische Flut bricht, wer oben stand auf diesem Grenzgebirge der Welt und hiniibersah in das neue Land, in der Nacht Wohnsitz; wahrlich, der kehrt nicht in das Treiben der Welt 2: Oben baut er sich Hiitten, Hiitten des Frie- dens, sehnt sich und liebt, schaut hiniiber, bis die willkommenste aller Stunden hinunter ihn— in den Brunnen der Quelle zieht.

AUes Irdische schwimmt obenauf und wird von der Hohe hinab- gespiilt, aber was heilig ward durch der Liebe Beriihrung, rinnt aufgelost in verborgnen Gangen auf das jenseitige Gebiet, wo es, wie Wolken, sich mit entschlummerten Lieben mischt. Aber du lockst mich Von der Erinnerung Moosigem Denkmal nicht. Kannst du mir zeigen Ein ewig treues Herz? Hat deine Sonne Freund- liche Augen, Die mich erkennen? Fassen deine Sterne Meine verlangende Hand? Geben mir wieder Den zartlichen Druck?

Oder war sie es, Die deinem Schmuck Hohere, liebere Be- deutung gab? Zu geben Menschlichen Sinn Deinen Schopfungen. Noch reiften sie nicht, Diese gottlichen Gedanken. Noch sind der Spuren Unsrer Gegenwart Wenig. Umsonst ist deine Wut, Dein Toben. Reich an Kleinoden Und herrlichen Wundern.

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