His birth was in a middle-class family of Berlin. A full university
training at Halle, Göttingen and Erlangen was accorded him, during
which he cannot be said to have distinguished himself by any triumph
in the field of formal studies, but in the course of which he
assimilated at first hand the chief modern languages of culture,
without any professional guidance. At an early stage in his growth he
discovered and fed full upon Shakespeare. As a university student he
also fell in love with the homely lore of German folk-poetry. In 1794
he came back to Berlin, and turned to rather banal hack-writing for
the publisher Nicolai, chief of all exponents of rationalism.
Significant was his early rehabilitation of popular folk-tales and
chapbooks, as in _The Wonderful Love-Story of Beautiful Magelone and
Count Peter of Provence_ (1797). The stuff was that of one of the
prose chivalry-stories of the middle ages, full of marvels, seeking
the remote among strange hazards by land and sea. The tone of Tieck's
narrative is childlike and naïve, with rainbow-glows of the bliss of
romantic love, glimpses of the poetry and symbolism of Catholic
tradition, and a somewhat sugary admixture of the spirit of the
_Minnelied_, with plenty of refined and delicate sensuousness. With
the postulate that song is the true language of life, the story is
sprinkled with lyrics at every turn. The whole adventure is into the
realm of dreams and vague sensations.

Tieck must have been liberally baptized with Spree-water, for the
instantaneous, corrosive Berlin wit was a large part of his endowment.
His cool irony associated him more closely to the Schlegels than to
Novalis, with his life-and-death consecrations. His absurd
play-within-a-play, _Puss in Boots_ (1797), is delicious in its
bizarre ragout of satirical extravaganzas, where the naïve and the