(_Eclaircissement_, Illumination) was carried away by this new stream of tendency, and saddled his hoppogriff for a ride _ins alte romantische Land_. He availed himself of the new "Library of Romance" which Count Tressan began publishing in France in 1775, studied Hans Sachs and Hartmann von Aue, experiments with Old German meters, and enriched his vocabulary from Old German sources. He poetized popular fairy tales, chivalry stories, and motives from the Arthurian epos, such as "Gandalin" and "Geron der Adeliche" ("Gyron le Courteois"). But his best and best-known work in this temper was "Oberon" (1780) a rich composite of materials from Chaucer, "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and the French romance of "Huon of Bordeaux."[12] From this outline--necessarily very imperfect and largely at second hand--of the course of the German romantic movement in the eighteenth century, it will nevertheless appear that it ran parallel to the English most of the way. In both countries the reaction was against the _Aufklaerung_, _i.e._, against the rationalistic, prosaic, skeptical, common-sense spirit of the age, represented in England by deistical writers like Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Bolingbroke, and Tindal in the department of religious and moral philosophy; and by writers like Addison, Swift, Prior, and Pope in polite letters; and represented most brilliantly in the literatures of Europe by Voltaire. In opposition to this spirit, an effort was now made to hark back to the ages of faith; to recover the point of view which created mythology, fairy lore, and popular superstitions; to _believe_, at all hazards, not only in God and the immortal soul of man, but in the old-time corollaries of these beliefs, in ghosts, elves, demons, and witches.