been able to offer. Schlegel also furnished elaborated poems, somewhat
in Schiller's grand style, for the latter's _Almanac of the Muses_.
During the years of his residence at Jena (which continued until 1801)
Schlegel, with the incalculable assistance of his wife, published the
first eight volumes of those renderings of Shakespeare's plays into
German which doubtless stand at the very summit of the art of
transferring a poet to an alien region, and which have, in actual
fact, served to make the Bard of Avon as truly a fellow-citizen of the
Germans as of the Britons. Wilhelm's brother Friedrich had remained
but a year with him in Jena, before his removal to Berlin and his
establishment of the _Athenæum_. Although separated from his brother,
Wilhelm's part in the conduct of the journal was almost as important
as Friedrich's, and, in effect, they conducted the whole significant
enterprise out of their own resources. The opening essay, _The
Languages_, is Wilhelm's, and properly, for at this time he was by far
the better versed in philological and literary matters. His cultural
acquisitions, his tremendous spoils of reading, were greater, and his
judgment more trustworthy. In all his work in the _Athenæum_ he
presents a seasoned, many-sided sense of all poetical, phonetic and
musical values: rhythm, color, tone, the lightest breath and aroma of
an elusive work of art. One feels that Wilhelm overhauls the whole
business of criticism, and clears the field for coming literary
ideals. Especially telling is his demolition of Klopstock's violent
"Northernism," to which he opposes a far wider philosophy of grammar
and style. The universality of poetry, as contrasted with a narrow
"German" clumsiness, is blandly defended, and a joyous abandon is
urged as something better than the meticulous anxiety of chauvinistic
partisanism. In all his many criticisms of literature there are charm,
wit, and elegance, an individuality and freedom in the reviewer, who,
if less penetrating than his brother, displays a far more genial