regard to it.


3. ENGLISH PREPOSSESSIONS.

With such wagon-loads of Books and Printed Records as exist
on the subject of Friedrich, it has always seemed possible,
even for a stranger, to acquire some real understanding of him;--
though practically, here and now, I have to own, it proves
difficult beyond conception. Alas, the Books are not cosmic,
they are chaotic; and turn out unexpectedly void of instruction
to us. Small use in a talent of writing, if there be not first
of all the talent of discerning, of loyally recognizing;
of discriminating what is to be written! Books born mostly of
Chaos--which want all things, even an INDEX--are a painful object.
In sorrow and disgust, you wander over those multitudinous Books:
you dwell in endless regions of the superficial, of the nugatory:
to your bewildered sense it is as if no insight into the real
heart of Friedrich and his affairs were anywhere to be had.
Truth is, the Prussian Dryasdust, otherwise an honest fellow,
and not afraid of labor, excels all other Dryasdusts yet known;
I have often sorrowfully felt as if there were not in Nature,
for darkness, dreariness, immethodic platitude, anything
comparable to him. He writes big Books wanting in almost every
quality; and does not even give an INDEX to them. He has made of
Friedrich's History a wide-spread, inorganic, trackless matter;
dismal to your mind, and barren as a continent of Brandenburg
sand!--Enough, he could do no other: I have striven to forgive
him. Let the reader now forgive me; and think sometimes what
probably my raw-material was!--