realities--Hebbel perceived this clearly enough not only in Stifter
but in Goethe himself. Above all, however, this whole epoch of the
"intellectual poets" may, in a certain sense, be called the _Italian
Journey_ of German literature. Like Goethe in the years 1787-1788, the
German muse in this period only feels entirely at home in Italy, or at
least in the South; in her own country she feels misnamed.

Now let us consider Goethe after he had settled down in Weimar for the
second time. Scientific work seems for a while to have entirely
replaced poetic activity, as for a moment the scientific prose of
Ranke and Helmholtz came near to being of more consequence for the
German language than most of what was produced at the same time by
so-called poetry. Then the _Campaign in Champagne_ (1792), and the new
employment of his time with political problems, constitutes for Goethe
a temporary phase that may be compared with that recapturing of
history by political-historical writers like Freytag and Treitschke,
in the same way that _Hermann and Dorothea_ (1796), in which an old
historical anecdote of the time of the expulsion of the Protestants
from Salzburg is transplanted to the time of the French Revolution,
may be compared with the historical "Novellen" of Riehl, Scheffel, and
C.F. Meyer. Goethe's ballads (1797-1798) maintain the tradition that
was to be given new life by Fontane, Strachwitz, and C.F. Meyer.
Goethe's later novels with their didactic tendencies, and the
inclination to interpolate "Novellen" and diaries, lead up to
Gottfried Keller, Wilhelm Raabe and again to Fontane. The table-songs
and other convivial poetry of Goethe's old age are taken up again by
Scheffel; Goethe's "Novellen" themselves were continued by all those
eminent writers whom we have already named. The _Divan_, with its bent
toward immutable relations, prepares the way for the new lyric, until
finally, with the second part of _Faust_, mythical world-poetry and