intellectual stature, Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller. But there the
movement was checked for a time by counter-currents, or lost in broader
tides of literary life. English romanticism was but one among many
contemporary tendencies: sentimentalism, naturalism, realism. German
romanticism was simply an incident of the _sturm- und Drangperiode_,
which was itself but a temporary phase of the swift and many-sided
unfolding of the German mind in the latter half of the last century; one
element in the great intellectual ferment which threw off, among other
products, the Kantian philosophy, the "Laocoön," "Faust," and "Wilhelm
Meister"; Winckelmann's "Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums" and
Schiller's "Wallenstein" and "Wilhelm Tell." Men like Goethe and
Schiller were too broad in their culture, too versatile in their talents,
too multifarious in their mental activities and sympathies to be
classified with a school. The temper which engendered "Götz" and "Die
Räuber" was only a moment in the history of their _Entwickelung_; they
passed on presently into other regions of thought and art.

In Goethe especially there ensued, after the time of his _Italienische
Reise_, a reversion to the classic; not the exploded pseudo-classic of
the eighteenth-century brand, but the true Hellenic spirit which
expressed itself in such work as "Iphigenie auf Tauris," "Hermann und
Dorothea," and the "Schöne Helena" and "Classische Walpurgis-Nacht"
episodes in the second part of "Faust." "In his youth," says Scherer, "a
love for the historical past of Germany had seized on the minds of many.
Imaginative writers filled the old Teutonic forests with Bards and Druids
and cherished an enthusiastic admiration for Gothic cathedrals and for
the knights of the Middle Ages and of the sixteenth century. . . In
Goethe's mature years, on the contrary, the interest in classical
antiquity dwarfed all other aesthetic interests, and Germany and Europe
were flooded by the classical fashion for which Winckelmann had given the