Papacy. But in doing so, Johannes Müller was only following in Herder's
steps. Herder . . . had written against the self-conceit of his age, its
pride in its enlightenment and achievements. He found in the Middle Ages
the realization of his aesthetic ideas, namely, strong emotion, stirring
life and action, everything guided by feeling and instinct, not by morbid
thought: religious ardor and chivalrous honor, boldness in love and
strong patriotic feeling."[2]

When the founders of a truly national literature in Germany cut loose
from French moorings, they had an English pilot aboard; and in the
translations from German romances, dramas, and ballads that were made by
Scott, Coleridge, Taylor, Lewis, and others, English literature was
merely taking back with usury what it had lent its younger sister.
Mention has already been made of Bürger's and Herder's renderings from
Percy's "Reliques,"[3] an edition of which was published at Göttingen in
1767; as well as of the strong excitement aroused in Germany by
MacPherson's "Ossian."[4] This last found--besides the Viennese
Denis--another translator in Fritz Stolberg, who carried his medievalism
so far as to join the Roman Catholic Church in 1800. Klopstock's
"Kriegslied," written as early as 1749, was in the meter of "Chevy
Chase," which Klopstock knew through Addison's _Spectator_ papers.
Through Mallet, the Eddaic literature made an impression in Germany as in
England; and Gerstenberg's "Gedicht eines Skalden" (1766), one of the
first-fruits of the German translation of the "Historire de Dannemarc,"
preceded by two years the publication--though not the composition--of
Gray's poems from the Norse.

But the spirit which wrought most mightily upon the new German literature
was Shakspere's. During the period of French culture there had been
practically no knowledge of Shakspere in Germany. In 1741 Christian von